Total Church – British classism and the grace of God

In an earlier post breaking out of middle class suburbia I wrote

I believe homogeneous churches in a multicultural society deny, by their very existence, that salvation is by grace alone

I had used the term “lower socio-economic group” to describe the people overlooked by many suburban professional churches. In Total Church, Timmis and Chester are more refreshingly blunt. They point out that churches which fail to reach people from lower socio-economic groups are classist and that classism puts the grace of God “at stake”.

…class consciousness runs deep in British evangelicalism. One church leader commented to me recently: ‘Social class is British evangelicalism’s equivalent of racism in American evangelicalism.’ The failure to renew our social outlook (Romans 12:2) creates mistrust between the classes and races. Individuals are seen as being (or not being) ‘one of us’. I hope this is mostly subconscious. It means the leadership in conservative evangelicalism largely runs along lines of social class. Those from a lower social class who achieve positions of prominence do so by adopting the culture of the upper class. Many of the divisions within evangelicalism are as much about social class as theological differences. In one direction people are seen as vulgar; in the other direction people are seen as snobbish.

Why does this matter? It matters because we are failing to reach the working class with the gospel. Evangelicalism has become a largely middle-class, professional phenomenon. When we invite people to our dinners and our churches, we invite our friends, our relatives and our rich neighbours. We do not invite the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame. What is at stake is the grace of God. (Total Church, p74)