The impact gap of the UK Church
The Social Justice communication gap of the UK Church Last year, a Barna report revealed…
Last year, a Barna report revealed the severity of the UK Church’s image problem. According to the report, 40 per cent of British non-Christians are unsure whether the Church makes a positive difference in the world, while 41 per cent believe that it does not. Even Christians are unsure, with 31 per cent claiming that they do not know whether UK Church has a positive global impact.
At the same time, however, the UK Church is over-performing in most of the areas in which non-Christians express a desire for Church involvement.
Consider the case of services for the elderly. About 30 per cent of British adults hope that UK churches will provide services for elderly adults – and yet 76 per cent of British churches are already providing events for this age group. Similarly, 28 per cent of British adults see a role for the UK Church in caring for the homeless – but more than 40 per cent of British churches are already providing these services. Across a range of social services, including addressing local and global poverty, organizing community events, and providing debt relief and financial advice, the UK Church is actually exceeding the expectations of non-Christian adults.
“40 per cent of British non-Christians are unsure whether the Church makes a positive difference in the world, while 41 per cent believe that it does not… at the same time, however, the UK Church is over-performing in most of the areas in which non-Christians express a desire for Church involvement. ”
Understanding Views of the Church
Why, then, do most British non-Christians have no knowledge of the Church’s impact or actively negative perceptions of it?
First, younger British adults are increasingly unlikely to personally know a Christian. While 67 per cent of UK adults over age 65 are Christian, this is true of only 26 per cent of British adults between the ages of 18 and 34. And, as a recent Barna study suggests, knowing individual Christians is crucial to forming positive impressions of Christianity: two-thirds of non-Christians associated their Christian peers with positive traits such as being friendly or caring. These individual encounters are vital and increasingly rare in a time when non-Christians view the Church as judgmental (34 per cent), hypocritical (33 per cent), and not compatible with science (30 per cent).
Moreover, many Christian leaders misidentify both the activities in which non-Christians would most welcome Church involvement and the extent to which non-Christians have positive impressions of the Church’s role in the community. As the report stresses, 86 per cent of church leaders believe that non-Christians celebrate the Church’s local impact, while, in reality, just one in five non-Christians (20 per cent) claim that they do. Furthermore, many church leaders (27 per cent) still see a role for Church in advocacy, as compared to just 6 per cent of British adults as a whole. Church leaders may therefore wish to be mindful of this lack of receptivity when considering involving themselves in advocacy activities.
Finally, although UK churches are over-performing on a variety of social issues, they often do not address the most visible issues of the day. Many non-Christians, for example, would welcome church involvement in environmental issues, racial reconciliation, and gender equality – and yet relatively few churches are involved in these areas. There is an opportunity for churches to commit themselves to non-traditional ministries – or in some cases, such as racial reconciliation, highly traditional ministries that have been allowed to lapse – that may be most appreciated by the communities around them.
“Although UK churches are over-performing on a variety of social issues, they often do not address the most visible issues of the day.”
How should the Church respond?
The results of the Barna study are impressive, and – despite low levels of public confidence in the Church – encouraging for the Church’s future involvement in justice and public image. Churches in the UK are quietly working for a variety of justice issues, and the challenge now is communicating and targeting that work so that it will be well received by the communities it is designed to benefit.
The first step in this process is understanding communities’ priorities. Although the Barna study presents a UK-wide survey of what services British adults hope the Church will provide, it is also vital to listen to these priorities on a local level. Eido refers to this process as a “needs assessment”. Needs assessments allow churches to target their programs to the felt needs of their communities, and also constitute an important means of relationship-building. By listening to the community’s priorities, churches demonstrate that they care about what community members think and value. Furthermore, this listening process provides an opportunity for the type of interactions between individual Christians and non-Christians that the Barna report cites as crucial for countering unfavourable perceptions of the Church.
Paying close attention to needs and priorities is just as essential within the Church as it is outside it. One of the principal conclusions of the Barna report is that ministry priorities differ between older and younger members of the Church, as well as between church leaders and ordinary Christians. Listening to these priorities will allow churches to promote programs that draw on their congregations’ strengths and enjoy their full backing.
In addition to understanding their communities, churches may also benefit from evidencing and celebrating the work they are doing. This may be evaluated through “output analysis”: a tool designed to measure the amount and type of services provided by an organization. For example, if a church is looking to help homeless individuals in its community, an output analysis might document variable such as the hours of volunteer time that went into homeless outreach or the number of meals served to homeless individuals. Output analysis can also be conducted on a regional basis. When Eido conducted an output analysis for faith-based leaders in London, for instance, we were able to show that there were a total of 430 projects serving over 70,000 beneficiaries. This was the equivalent of 160 full time staff members, and contributed a projected total value of £3 million in volunteer time towards social issues in the community.
However, there is a real difference between counting the number of social programmes in which the Church is involved, and evaluating the effectiveness of those programs. It is not enough to merely state that the Church is involved in social justice: instead, it is crucial to understand the impact of those activities so that UK churches can be seeking to improve how they serve those in their local communities and around the world. Impact evaluation is ultimately not primarily a means of securing donor funding, or of ensuring that resources are used efficiently; rather, it is a way of honouring the people these programmes are meant to serve. Consequently, future analyses should focus not just on the Church’s involvement in social justice, but also on the good that that involvement is accomplishing. Rigorous analysis of the Church’s effectiveness is just as much a means of advancing the good of the community as are the homeless and elderly programmes celebrated by this study.
Finally, the Church should face the tension between improving its efforts on behalf of the community and being seen to improve these efforts. There is nothing wrong with wanting to improve the Church’s image; for evangelistically-minded Christians, this is a crucial part of the Church’s witness to the world. However, when varnishing this image takes precedence over actually advancing the good of the communities for whom the Church claims to care, social justice programs may be considered further evidence of the Church’s hypocrisy. Ultimately, drawing attention to the Church is only effective when it is consciously subordinated to the good of those the Church is trying to serve, and is done with a healthy awareness of the fact that, for Christians, the primary object of attention is not the Church, but Christ. With that caveat in place, the Barna study provides compelling evidence that the Church is accomplishing real social good in the UK, as well as practical suggestions for how that good might be communicated to a public which is increasingly sceptical of – or uninformed about – the Church’s involvement in the world.
“It is not enough to merely state that the Church is involved in social justice: instead, it is crucial to understand the impact of those activities so that UK churches can be seeking to improve how they serve those in their local communities and around the world.”
REFERENCES
1 Barna Group, The UK Church in Action: Perceptions of Social Justice and Mission in a Changing World (Ventura, CA: Barna Group, 2018), https://shop.barna.com/products/the-uk-church-in-action. Unless otherwise stated, all following citations are from this study.
2 Barna Group, Talking about Jesus: Perceptions of Jesus, Christians and Evangelism in England (Ventura, CA: Barna Group, 2015), https://talkingjesus.org/2015-research/.
