Bread and Honey: Social Flourishing, Mutuality, and Economics

Introduction

Mutuality, charity, and a concern for economic justice marked out the very first Christian communities. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, was a deacon with special responsibility for the daily distribution of alms to widows and orphans (Acts 6: 1–3), reflecting the commitment of the church to charity and service advocated in the gospels. In character, the first churches, although diverse in practice and belief, appear nevertheless to have exhibited a radical openness to mutuality, parity, and inclusion. Indeed, the term for ‘church’ is the simple Greek word ekklesia, meaning the ‘assembly of the people’ who belong to but are called out of their community. All over the Mediterranean world, assemblies determined the politics, polity, and civic ordering of communities and cities. But they were usually only open to citizens, and the power to speak and vote was normally confined to men.

The assemblies of the New Testament church—the deliberate adoption of the more internationalist term which must have caused confusion to some potential converts, as well as making a point—were, in contrast, inclusive bodies and models of mutuality. In these ekklesia, women were admitted, as were slaves (c.f. Paul’s Letter to Philemon), children, foreigners, and other visitors. In other words, the character of the New Testament ekklesia represented and embodied a different kind of spiritual and social ordering that eschewed discrimination on grounds of race, gender, and other criteria.

The very term ‘economics’ is rooted in the Greek word oikos—the concept of a well-managed, stewarded household. Oikos was one of the early terms for ‘church’—literally, the ‘household of faith’. In terms of etymology, the management of the household was linked to the budget. It is no accident that Jesus told so many parables about stewardship and money, linked to the church. The oikos known in the first-century world of Jesus was different from our modern focus on the nuclear family: it was a household comprising servants, slaves, distant relatives, perhaps a tutor for the children, and other workers. The oikos was, in other words, a small social unit that transcended biological-family relations. The oikos had a care for the poor, and for the destitute; it cared for its members. As did the church later.

The Power of Latency

Linked to this, therefore, we often find that churches foster and focus distinctive values that are derived from the process of training (often through hidden curricula rooted in shaping virtues and character) that then go on to provide leaven in complex contexts. Here, faith communities often find themselves promoting forms of goodness that secular and utilitarian organizations might miss. In this respect, Bruce Reed explains how mutuality and ministry partly functions by drawing on an analogy from nature:

If bees could talk, and we came across them busy in a flower garden and enquired what they were doing, their reply might be: ‘Gathering nectar to make honey.’ But if we asked the gardener, he would most certainly answer: ‘They are cross pollinating my flowers.’ In carrying out their manifest function to make food, the bees were performing a latent function of fertilizing flowers. The mutual dependence of bees and flowers is an analogue of churches and society.1

Here, Reed offers us a vivid picture of mission and ministry that we might recognize. Through a simple ministry of ‘deep hanging out’ with the people we serve, attentiveness, hospitality, care and celebration, celebration, ministers often do more good for the parishes, communities, and institutions they serve than they can ever know. This may simply be through the offering of regular lunches, simple visiting, or open house for tea and coffee at any time. These are manifest intentions. But the potency of the gesture and practice lies more in their latency, and is significant for ministry. Much as Jesus set an example in this respect, simply by walking from place to place, and developing his ministry through seemingly casual encounters, rather than through overt planning.

The practice of being engaged in an occupation of this kind says something about the possibilities for different kinds of spaces in communities—social, pastoral, intellectual, spiritual, to name but a few. They open up a different side of the humanity of a community or institution to those individuals within it. In being there with programmes and events, as well as in being purposefully hospitable, churches actually begin to enable that work of becoming the social transcendent communities they are called to be.

Economic intentionality can be highly focused and immensely productive. But sometimes, values and ‘soft’ forms of valuable social capital come out of time and space that might at first sight seem ‘unproductive’. This is a subtle concept to grasp. According to John Kay, the concept of obliquity describes a simple process: that of achieving complex objectives indirectly.2 One thinks of Polonius’s speech in Hamlet, suggesting we reach our wisdom and goals through indirect means:

And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,
With windlasses and with assays of bias
By indirections find directions out.

Kay discusses the verdict of Charles Jencks, the architectural commentator, who opined that modernism ended at 3.32 pm on 15 July 1972. That is the date when contractors detonated fuses that blew up a housing development in St Louis. Only two decades earlier, such housing—high rise tower blocks, most notably—had been feted by Le Corbusier, who famously claimed such buildings were the supreme expression of modernism, and that a house was (merely) ‘a machine for living in’.

But as Kay points out, the modernists knew less than they thought. A house is not simply a machine to live in. Indeed, there is a difference between a house and a home. The utility of property and its actual functionality is only one element in design. The spaces that we inhabit are formational. They say things about individuals and groups. They arrange social living. Buildings have aesthetics that can promote subtle qualities and values. Some prompt alienation and individualism. Others, in contrast, can foster civic sociability, generosity, and mutual flourishing.

Kay’s concept of obliquity is more fertile than it may at first appear, to take intentional church growth as an example: is this best achieved by clear aims and objectives, and with clarity on programmes and activities? Or, is growth better achieved through oblique means? To some extent, the answer will depend on what is meant by ‘growth’. If measurable numerical growth is the primary goal, and is rooted in a concept of member-based organization, then yes, straight, direct and forthright programmes will be cherished and valued. The missional activity will have manifest intent, and a clarity to its aims, objectives, and outcomes that is often ‘measurable’. And then there is that question: what do the bees think they are doing? And what are they actually doing?

So much for the honey mentioned earlier, but what about the bread? It is worth looking at Abby Day’s prescient study of ‘Generation A’ women who, born in the 1920s and 1930s, have provided the backbone to organizations such as the Mother’s Union.3 Day’s analysis picks up on the function of these laywomen in churches who are often found providing support through ‘soft’ forms of pastoral care and, in particular, through their catering. Specifically, she writes about them baking together.

Day shows how through activities such as communal baking—which are technically uneconomic—nonetheless provide an environment that promotes mutual care, flourishing, prayer, and pastoral well-being. It is obviously cheaper to buy the cakes and buns at any supermarket. But the communal baking fosters something else. The obliquity lies in the gap between the manifest and latent function of the activities Day so richly describes. The manifest intention of the communal baking is to provide a supportive catering service to the church and community. The latent intent that emerges is the thick pastoral care that the gatherings engender, which also produce deeper and richer spiritual lives. It makes no economic sense, please note, to bake buns like this. The value lies in the actual and apparent inefficiency—which leads to deeper, unintended rewards; and goals no-one aimed at.

The Early Church and Mutuality

The early church had form on this count. It is a little-known fact that part of the Edict of Milan (313), which was an agreement between the emperors Licinius and Constantine to recognize the legal personality of churches, treat all religions equally, and to restore lands and property confiscated under persecution, also made provision for donkeys. According to the agreement, Christians, calling on all others of good will, were to see that beasts of burden were not abused in transporting heavy loads uphill. Such concerns may seem trivial to modern readers, but the Edict provided an early piece of evidence to support the view that the Christian faith had extensive interests in contributing to mutuality and social order—even in the minutiae of everyday life. Generations of Christians would follow suit on other issues where prevailing standards and social constructions of reality had to be undermined and cast aside if justice was to be done. The emancipation of slaves (Samuel Wilberforce), equality for those sweltering under the yoke of oppression in America’s deep south (Martin Luther King), or the alleviation of poverty in Victorian London (William Booth) are but a few examples.

The Edict of Milan is widely regarded as the point at which the foundation for established Christianity was first laid, although the Edict did not establish Christianity in the formal sense. The emerging Constantinian settlement did, however, provide a paradigm that was to influence much of Europe as it embraced Christianity. This was to link civic governance, religion, and the economy in the interests of providing sustainable patterns of social ordering that were of benefit to communities (e.g. such as the prohibition on usury). In England, for example, the relationship between a parish and its church was intrinsic to the identity of a place. Communities that were economically and socially viable were able to sustain a church and the ministry that issued from it, which in turn guaranteed a certain level of moral welfare, social improvement, and pastoral provision (including the availability of the sacraments). Or, put another way, the very existence of a parish church within a community confirmed the identity of the place, conferring it with recognizable significance that invited a form of social ordering in which (amongst other things) the needs of the poor and other matters of moral concern could be addressed on behalf of the community.4 Churches were early agents of mutuality.

Similarly, the genesis of many hospitals, schools, hospices, and other agencies for welfare (e.g. adoption, fostering, etc.) began their life as an extension of the pastoral provision of the churches, intended for the common good. Throughout Christian history, there have been many movements and individuals whose faith has spawned something particular that has directly contributed to the re-ordering of society. Christianity has been especially prominent in healthcare, welfare, and education, but has taken no less interest in the moral well-being of society.

Challenging the Assumptions of Late Capitalism

The global financial crisis, coupled with the collapse of major banks and the effective insolvency of countries—Greece and Iceland come to mind—have prompted a new wave of ethical, economic introspection that is focused on the limits of capitalism in relation to the human condition and social flourishing. David Hare’s play, The Power of Yes, which deconstructs the inner dynamics of the financial crises of the twenty-first century— economic growth transformed into an apotheosis—neatly encapsulates the issues:

Once Bradford and Bingley became a bank, I remember taking an immediate dislike to a new non-exec who said, ‘I want one thing from this company.’ He said, ‘What I want is regular, incremental growth.’ In other words, he was saying ‘This company must grow every year.’ Now that we all know that nothing in the world shows regular incremental growth. You know that. I know that.5

In his prescient work6 David Sainsbury reflects on the private equity bid for Sainsbury’s, the family business that he had once run. In his view, the bid for the business was nothing more than an attempt to acquire the company, sell off the firm’s property portfolio, and take on additional debt in the process of acquisition (in much the way that new wealthy owners of Premier League football club might do). Sainsbury maintains that the bidders for his family business had no pretence of seeking to improve the performance of the company. The bid was, in other words, not about the flourishing of individuals, the company or the communities they serve. It was, rather, purely about profit for those driving the bid. In the face of this kind of dynamic, Sainsbury has become a staunch advocate of progressive capitalism. By this he does not mean to imply the state intervention of government, nor of shrinking government and deregulation. Rather, he means to infer better and more intelligent government that can be simultaneously nimble and strong, and, crucially, knows when to intervene and when to stand aside.

Sainsbury’s reflections belong to a burgeoning genre of critical texts that have begun to cast some doubt on the implicit assumptions relating to the nature of humanity and society embedded in late capitalism. Sue Gerhardt, for example, writes as a psychotherapist and social commentator, and in her The Selfish Society she muses on the consequences of a society focused on individual acquisition, independent of the concerns and needs of our neighbours and wider society: ‘selfishness is often a symptom of a failure of human connection.’7 It is a failure of mutuality and our common life.

At issue here, perhaps, is the relationship between business, finance, social flourishing, and morality. In Stephen Green’s Good Value, he considers how capitalism, though obviously flawed, might take a wider account of spiritual and social needs.8 For Green, who writes as both a banker (former chair of HSBC) and an Anglican priest, the financial services industry has responsibilities to the people it serves. Echoing Sainsbury, he suggests that that businesses have a duty to society that go beyond the creation of profit. Whilst he acknowledges that ‘open market capitalism’ may be the best hope for creating wealth, this in itself does not prescribe how individuals are to work together for the common good. This is especially so in an increasingly urban, connected, and demanding world, where the intense and pluralistic pressures on morality and spirituality—which foster value and character in individuals and society—are threatened by the drive to individualistic self-improvement. Green, in other words, is another ‘soft advocate’ of balancing the ‘private’ (i.e. business) with the wider ‘public’ sphere. And he recognizes, in a similar vein to David Hare’s play, The Power of Yes, that the future of social flourishing lies in seeing the distinctive contributions each sphere can make.

Here in the play, Hare has an imaginary conversation between a proprivatization banker and someone in public service, who works in an institution. The character speaking puts it like this:

I come from the private sector myself but I do get tired of a certain private-sector (organizational) arrogance. When people say, ‘Oh get some private-sector people into the schools, that’ll sort them out.’ Actually I doubt if there are many jobs in finance as hard as teaching a class of fourteen-year-old boys in a tough school. Because business is in some way quite simple, it has clearly defined aims. The aim is to make money. So you have a measure against which to judge all the subsidiary actions which add up to the overall result. Managing a hospital is rather more complex. Because it’s very hard to know what your objective is. There’s no money-metric to help make the choice between better cancer care or having a better A & E. It’s a judgement call. And running a hospital is an endless series of judgement calls where the criteria and objectives are very far from clear. So don’t tell me that’s easier than making money.9

What is appealing about Hare’s play is the way in which he sets about questioning the assumptions and values we place on money and economics, appearing not to notice that economics—indeed economic systems—cannot be value-neutral. Carried within any philosophy of economics is a set of values that have implications for individuals, communities, and wider social flourishing. We should be cautious about assuming any immutability in the current economic systems that we have come to take for granted.10

The nub of the problem with the current unchallenged dominance of capitalism within most developed-world socio-economic systems is that capitalism has become a kind of ‘fundamental’ of human existence. Theologians such as Kathryn Tanner have even gone so far as to suggest that capitalism, as an outlook and philosophy, is something of a belief system.11 It is almost as though God said ‘let there be markets’, and ‘lo, they were created, grew, and multiplied’. Yet one should not simply read economics as a faux-religious creed. It can also be clothed in the rhetoric of ‘hard science’—and indeed we note how the term ‘political economy’, a phrase which Marx and Engels would have understood—has been morphed into the simpler, apparently more humble ‘economics’.

The consequences of this are serious, as ‘economics’, as a ‘science’, can then simply reduce everything to the realm of commodification: labour, services, relationships...and even religion. Drawing on the work of Michael Sandel, Rowan Williams singles out education as a sphere that is particularly under threat from commodification: ‘that education could have some value other than improving profits seems to be unthinkable.’12 Sandel himself thinks the balance may have tipped:

we believe that civic duties should not be regarded as private property but should be viewed instead as public responsibilities. To outsource them is to demean them, to value them in the wrong way . . . without quite realizing it, without ever deciding to do so, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market economy.13

Sandel is keen to proscribe the limits of the free market economy. We cannot ‘buy’ friends, for example,14 as friendship is constituted by certain norms, virtues, and attitudes that are beyond pricing: sympathy, generosity, thoughtfulness, and attentiveness cannot be replaced by market values. To attempt to purchase such characteristics as commodities would be to simultaneously destroy them in the very act of procurement.

Conclusion

Money can’t buy love; and it can’t buy true friendship either. Yet the marketplace has an uncanny knack of developing and producing simulacrums that replace the slow, patient business of building relationships and developing reticulation with something that is quick and instantly gratifying. Richard Sennett’s essay, ‘Together’15 cites the example of Phillipa, a teenager who has 639 friends on Facebook, and claims to know the vast majority of them. Sennett points out that if all 639 friends sent one message or image each and received a reply, that would be 816,642 messages to digest—simply impossible.16 Sennett is alive to the limits of capitalism and market economies. In a world where relationships are increasingly stretched by the demands of economic life, friendship, education, family life, and love emerge as forms social bonding and human flourishing that put the market economy back where it belongs: something that society has, rather than something that ‘has’ society.

There are signs of hope in the midst of this current phase of our human existence. Churches, theologians, and campaigning groups have recently begun to focus on issues such as transparency (in business and government), fair trade, and taxation. Money and markets are not neutral in terms of their values. We are increasingly coming to see that the myopia of the market economy rests on a set of values and assumptions that prioritize the individual over the social, and wealth over wider concepts of flourishing. In calling government, business, and financial services to account, the twenty-first century may yet see theologians playing a key and prophetic role in enabling society to see that what it might initially desire may not be what people actually need, and that tempting though wealth and individual autonomy may be, we are all connected. Our mutuality and social flourishing is all about the bread and honey, and the obliquity of economics. No one is an island.

___

Notes

1. Reed (1978: 139).
2. Kay (2010).
3. Day (2017).
4. Pounds (2001).
5. Hare (2009: 37).
6. Sainsbury (2013).
7. Gerhardt (2010: 115). 8. Green (2009).
9. Hare (2009).
10. For an example of this argument see, Berry (2003: 207–8).
11. Tanner (2010).
12. Williams (2012: 75).
13. Sandel (2012: 10).
14. Sandel (2012: 137–41).
15. Sennett (2012).
16. Sennett (2012: 145).

The Very Revd Professor Martyn Percy (BA, MA, M.Ed, PhD) is the 45th Dean of Christ Church, Oxford. The Dean presides over the both College and Cathedral, as well as the Choir School, with its world-class cathedral choir. Educated at the universities of Bristol, Durham, London and Sheffield, Martyn trained for ordination after a career in publishing, serving a curacy in Bedford (1990-94), as Chaplain and Director of Studies at Christ’s College, Cambridge (1994-97) and then Director of the Lincoln Theological Institute (1997-2004).  From 2004 he was Principal of Ripon College, Cuddesdon, Oxford. He has served as Canon Theologian at Sheffield Cathedral, and is a Canon Emeritus of Salisbury Cathedral. Martyn is a member of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oxford, and also tutors in the Social Sciences Division and the Said Business School. He is Professor of Theological Education at King’s College London, a Professorial Research Fellow at Heythrop College (University of London) and Visiting Professor at the Centre for the Study of Values, University of Winchester, and for the Centre of Theologically-Engaged Anthropology, University of Georgia. Martyn has held number of roles in public life, serving as a Director of the Advertising Standards Authority, and as an Adjudicator for the Portman Group (the self-regulating body for the alcoholic drinks industry). He has served as a Commissioner of the Direct Marketing Authority, and is currently an Advisor to the British Board of Film Classification. He is Patron of St. Francis’ Children’s Society (an Adoption and Fostering Agency), Trustee of the Grubb Institute and the Li Tim-Oi Foundation, and a Vice-President of Modern Church.

Published by Oxford University Press. Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom.

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark ofOxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

© Oxford University Press 2021. The moral rights of the author have been asserted. First Edition published in 2021. Impression: 1.

Some rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, for commercial purposes, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization.

This is an open access publication, available online and distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), a copy of which is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of this licence should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication. DataData available. Library of Congress Control Number: 0000000000. ISBN 978–0–19–887070–8. DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198870708.001.0001.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.