This book has taken me back repeatedly to a conversation several years ago with the then Director of Shelter, the UK Homelessness charity that runs a housing helpline, has a network of housing aid centres, and works with a range of other agencies to respond to the needs of the homeless. He spoke of his increasing consciousness of, and consequent unease with, the lack of the voice and the presence of a homeless person at the table of the board of Trustees, where decisions affecting homeless people were made. This was not merely in order to have a better understanding of their needs, but to be informed and corrected by the perspective of reality only to be found from the viewpoint of the hostel or the street.
‘He has sent me to bring good news to the poor’. So begins the Gospel of Jesus. But if this is the case then why is it that the Church, in which the Gospel is to be embodied, seems so little to engage the faith and imagination of many of the urban poor and the itinerant homeless?
In this book, David Nixon, drawing on his own experience of urban ministry, has set out to construct a framework in which this question might be answered, and at the same time to bring the religious reflections and spiritual insights of those whom he has met to the table of theology and mission.
Much that follows in these pages is verbatim narrative from the lips of the homeless themselves. Their stories are then placed alongside, and allowed to interact with, the narrative of the Gospel in a dialogue of mutual illumination and critique.
In this way, listening to the voices of homeless men and women is to be pointed towards an exploration and understanding of a larger paradigm which provides a frame of reference for listening to the experience of a wide range of people in many different contexts who increasingly have a sense of their lives being shaped by a space, or spaces, which they have to occupy, but to which they do not belong. In this way the issues of homelessness come to be set in a wider societal context, with a theological critique of globalisation (characterised by privatisation, the freedom of the market, and deregulation) and its impact on individual lives, especially those who are vulnerable and inhabit what society regards as its margins. One result of this process is that individuals become inappropriately perceived as a homogenous, and distanced, mass – invisible as persons and even dehumanised.
In this book an attempt is made to respect personhood and individuality and provide a vehicle through which the voice of homeless people is allowed to be heard not, as so often, as part of a transaction to secure the meeting of needs – whether of food or shelter, attention or concern. In such transactions the imbalance of power inevitably shapes how a story is told and a voice is heard. But freed from such transactional pressures, there is an authenticity in the voice of those who know that they have little to lose.
In that authenticity there are profound questions raised about what shapes perceptions of God, Church and World, not just for homeless people but for us all.
Michael Langrish,
Bishop of Exeter