challenge

John Root offers this review of Jonathan Macy Sowing Seeds with Songs of Joy: Growing God’s Garden in Forgotten Places.

Jonathan Macy’s book began as a 13,000 position paper for the Church of England Evangelical Council on Privilege, Class and Poverty, which he has extended into the present book looking at the response to class and poverty by, very largely, the Church of England. It is written both from his own experience as a minister on the Thamesmead estate in south-east London, but also from interviews and discussion with a wide group of clergy in a variety of contexts. To this he also brings a shrewd and creative awareness of social dynamics, a very thorough biblical understanding, and great discernment of the processes by which class and wealth differentials play out across the church.

It some ways it still has the rough-hewn characteristics of a privately circulated position paper. An editor in a major publisher would have noted the occasional repetitions and of the text jumbled by having been re-processed, but the informality of style effectively expresses the creativity and informality of the church context that it comes from.

My own primary interest is in issues of church and race—but this book’s relevance is that race and class are intimately entwined, with the bulk of Britain’s minority ethnic population sharing the issues facing all poor or working class communities, and noting the observation of Sunder Katwala included in the Sewell Report that ‘Britain is doing better on race than on class’. Macy’s sub-title on the book’s commitment to ‘growing God’s garden in forgotten places’ is, proportionately, more relevant to the ethnic minority population than to the white English population. (His shrewd comment that ‘it can be more expensive to be poor’ (p 24) is paralleled by the title of Bashy’s rap cd on Afro-Caribbean experience ‘Being Poor is Expensive’, the focus of an illuminating inter-disciplinary project organised by Robert Beckford).