Introduction

Background 

The 1960s and ‘70s were years of great change in the United Kingdom.  They followed in the aftermath of the war years where not only were much needed new changes coming in affecting all aspects of everyday life, but the whole mood of society was refocusing.  

The nation was open to new ways of dealing with social issues and a deeper understanding of society. In the 1960s, following a successful ministry in North London, where our three children were born and at a time when church attendance was still vibrant in some suburbs, but suffering severe decline in the more undesirable and often forgotten and neglected inner-city areas where many churches were rapidly closing, we had stood against the expected traditions and moved into the East End of London where the church needed help in sharing the gospel.  It was a period when Christianity was rapidly losing its status as one of the main accepted, and basic, pillars of society.  

Change was taking place in many other areas, too. Sociology and an understanding of the structure of society and community development were beginning to be taken seriously. The trend was away from buildings and towards rather more ‘detached’ working with youth and especially with those from different ethnic and social communities.  

NCRP is Born

We gathered the remnants of the church leadership with their small congregations in Newham to work together to find new ways of ‘community-based evangelism’ and by 1972 the Newham Community Renewal Programme had been born.  

We worked with Christians and about 40 willing churches and their leaders, with their denominational links, including from both the more traditional denominations, Salvation Army, Church Army, and those still seeking acceptance such as Pentecostal and charismatic strands, as well as Reformed churches, and an increasing number of other new and independent groups.  These were all attempting to be pro-active in vision and were becoming the leaders of change and not just continuing to maintain the ‘status quo’, and we even launched a local Christian Community newssheet called ‘HamStir’.  The number of such churches who linked with the NCRP rapidly increased to around 70 - all cooperating where they could.  Although they practically all had a paid leadership of some kind, some with residential accommodation and under-used buildings, they had an understanding of commitment, pastoral care and voluntary service, although they were not always very effective.

The NCRP had been working in, and with, the changing resident community on a number of different fronts and it very soon had five strong departments each finding new ways of sharing the gospel and involving the local people.  It had strong sections for Children, Youth and Senior Citizens, joined by a rapidly growing ‘West Indian’1 department drawn from the Windrush Generation (all of whom came from a Christian background).  There was also a smaller burgeoning Asian Department, who did not have this background.  This had been dramatically swelled in 1972 following Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians from Uganda, for whom we then employed a full-time worker.  These departments all worked with local churches if they needed to use any actual buildings.  

The NCRP gathered much support for action from government, local borough council and others, with some churches outside the area also wanting to share in developing and outworking their own understanding of these principles, which included an emphasis upon ‘enabling’ rather than doing.  This was moving away from the local community being historically served by professionals to a new phase of sharing in meeting their own needs. These principles were being developed through our young interns and within two or three years a full TCW (trainee community worker) programme was developed to work alongside local Christians and operate all over the Newham Borough.  Initially this attracted young people from outside the Borough who needed us to provide them with accommodation but, by 1977, preference was being given to engaging more local young people and encouraging long term residency – the opposite of ‘Redemption and Lift’2 a relic of the Victorian era. 

The vast majority of local residents were renting accommodation, but churches did own their own property and many of these churches were closing at this time, although there was still a supply of residential accommodation and a willingness from local businesses to cooperate.  As the number of young people from outside the area wanting to participate had increased, first 3 Winter Ave, and then No 5, became their self-supporting base. These houses were close to Wakefield Street Congregational Church, which had been hosting a limited admin base from the start of the Renewal Programme. St Barts Fellowship Centre and Ascension Vicarage in Canning Town also provided residential accommodation in those early years which was easily converted for other uses when needed.  

Additionally, educational institutions throughout the land began to call on us for the occasional lecture and even for courses, as this new subject of ‘urban mission’ started to be added to their curriculum.  Eventually this led to placements.  A wider inner city study group with a similar mindset was taking shape in Sheffield with John Vincent and the Urban Theology Unit and in Liverpool with Neville Black as well as in other areas of London.  We began to develop a creative consortium to discuss common issues and produced a concept paper  on a Centre for Urban Mission in 1975 - this was a useful sounding board for new concepts, although we also published our own manuals to help. A concept paper on a Centre for for Urban Mission can be viewed. 

Trinity Comes into Being 

There had been an initial resistance in the team to taking any responsibility at all for redundant church buildings - especially if we could not use them for Christian worship!  Although our existing mode of work felt there was no specific need for buildings, we were aware that there were a number of newly formed West Indian Congregations meeting in homes but desperate for a larger meeting place.  Also looking forward to the future, we could see that once Christianity lost its presence in an area, decline in other ways very soon followed through the loss of the community facilities they had provided in the area.  But we had not anticipated the possible need we might have to actually purchase premises ourselves!  Our emphasis had always been a concentration on seeing the potential in people rather than the potential in buildings – but buildings are there and often necessary to serve the people – but they should also ‘belong’ to the people.

Cliff was the overall Director of the Renewal Programme, but he shared with Rowland Joiner the oversight of the united Congregational / Methodist Church in Wakefield Street. He also held a Senior Lecturer post in London University to support the family.  Initially, I was doing part-time secondary teaching in a neighbouring borough, but I had also entered the tertiary educational field when I was asked to give two evening classes a week and was responding to need by the Polytechnic for evening class lecturing for the male-dominated Institute of Bankers.  I then became unexpectedly involved in experimenting with, and  successfully recreating, community using community development ‘enabling’ principles in Trinity Community Centre in the former Presbyterian Church, East Avenue, East Ham. This was between 1971 and 1974.  

The congregation there had dropped to low numbers and the building had been closed as being uneconomic.  News that the central denominational authority wanted to sell the property so that the proceeds could be used elsewhere in the suburbs ‘where the people were’ reached us by the grapevine.  Remonstrating that this was NOT an unpopulated desolate area, we were allowed to use the building (although not permitted to worship there on Sundays) while the sale arrangements were made. 

We had to build up a living vital community from the local population and because of the restriction on worship, we tended initially to concentrate on the adjoining hall facilities.  The waiting time stretched on-and-on due to central administrational changes, and this gave us the opportunity to demonstrate the potential of our community development methods.  After one year, we were able to show that the buildings were being well used, our books were balancing, and we could express our Christian presence in practical service.  We still needed to buy the buildings - and the provision of the funds for this was quite miraculous. Our first year’s work had brought results that demonstrated the viability of the project. Members of the local community were now becoming active, and we were involving them in management as well as social activities.  This resulted in a rapid creative expansion of the work that had become practically self-supporting within two years.

More Doors Open up 

This success opened an increasing number of doors that we had not anticipated as news travelled fast.  Not only were we now being called upon to share these methods and principles more widely in advising, speaking, and writing, but other denominational leaders began to approach us, looking for ways of dealing with their declining, failing and redundant churches and to give their buildings a fresh lease of life, as well as giving fresh and new vision to the remnant 

The Methodist Home Mission Department had been financially supporting our work with the Asian community from the earliest days, and in 1974 their Poplar Circuit also soon wanted to enter into negotiations for us to get involved in their large empty premises in Harold Road, Upton Park where their church building had been unusable for a number of years.  Central support had been withdrawn for the dwindling Methodist congregation which had, 12 years earlier, retreated to the more modern church hall alongside. Even the official merging of their membership with the Moravians who  had lost their building in Plashet Grove had not succeeded for long. And this was to be my next project. 

With the merger and the formation of the URC3 which had delayed our purchase of Trinity, the once Congregational Sebert Road Church in Forest Gate, which had no remaining viable remnant, was also put up for sale and then withdrawn.  When, seeing how Christian witness with new Christians in the area could continue, in 1975 it was offered to the Renewal Programme. I was involved in the negotiations so that the Miracle Ministry Church, one of the new West Indian churches operating from Pastor McWhinney’s home at that time, took this over as their base with the support of the Renewal Programme.  

Further Experimentation

This is a story of the three or four years we were able to be involved in restoring community – and buildings – at Harold Road in the Upton Park area of the borough and this was to figure largely in the future of the Renewal Programme and in other ways too. 

It had been only two years since we had set up Trinity, so the first thing we had needed to do was to ensure that the right foundational principles had been established there, in East Avenue, for that particular project.  These were now operating well so our first new community centre was able to stand on its own feet with a measure of independence.  The Renewal Programme appointed a warden to oversee the work of volunteers and we made it known that we would not be going far away, and we would still be available to oversee and advise on all that was happening there for some time.  

Also, during the next two years, the NCRP were to find themselves immersed in their own continuing internal restructuring and were becoming involved in other similar local based community development projects. These were not always with churches, but with anywhere that could be an asset to the growing of Christian community throughout the Borough.  A Neighbourhood Children’s Centre was set up in a disused shop in the centre of docklands, one of the most needy and run-down areas at that time. This was served by a group of volunteers from the dilapidated Baptist tin tabernacle and two of our young interns. John and Tesni, were assigned to assist there.   

Although we were keeping copious records, we were unaware at that stage that our own time in the area would be limited, and we personally would be laying foundations in the East End for others to build on.  We were in fact, nearing the end of the 1970s, invited by the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Donald Coggan and other church leaders, to establish and lead a new national ministry along these lines.  By the summer of 1978, we had moved into a more central location in the country - but that story is told elsewhere4.

Many of our saved materials, from a pre-digital era, have now seen the light of day as we consult our records and try to preserve anything which might be of value to the next generation.  This research has raised its own problems – reading faded handwriting often using shorthand and adding year dates to undated documents which at that time would have been meaningful, scanning in hard copy on foolscap sheets of paper or as trifold leaflets, to name but two or three. 

We are very conscious that we now live in a very different digital age and our task is to interpret the documents and recordings of an earlier era, and to present them in a meaningful form for today's readers.  It is our hope that our experience and the values and principles we embraced will not only have some relevance today but will also be an encouragement to those who are following in our footsteps. Even this attempt with this book size manuscript we are trying to use the internet in an acceptable and more creative way for records to be available for the use of others in the future.

Throughout our four decades of service in the inner-city areas of London – the 1950s to the 1980s – we saw many changes in the socio-cultural life of the city. We had the privilege of developing and experimenting with new concepts of ‘Community Development’ based upon principles that we developed over the years: that included adapting our lifestyle through indigenisation in order to reach across social class gaps, ‘serving’ rather than ‘servicing’, ‘enabling’ rather than ‘doing’, seeing the potential in others, and adapting resources in order to maximise opportunities for others to develop their potential abilities and maximise their life chances.

• 1. The terminology was very much from its era. I think we soon changed it to Afro-Caribbean.
• 2. This term described a movement wherein new Christians in inner-city areas marked their new faith by leaving working-class communities and moving into middle class areas in the suburbs.
• 3. In April 1972 the Congregational Church in England and Wales merged with the Presbyterian Church of England to form a new denomination, The United Reformed Church, (URC).
• 4. Some of these records can be found in  Clifford Hill, The Reshaping of Britain, Church and State since the 1960s: A Personal Reflection. Wilberforce Publications, London, 2018.