This Poor Sort - Anglican Franciscans, Poverty and Growth

07/15/2013

Peta Dunstan is a notable historian of Anglican Religious life and, for some years, her history of the European Province of the Society of St Francis has been sitting on my bookshelves waiting to be read. I have at last got round to reading This Poor Sort and would recommend it as a careful and judicious piece of history writing. Her account of the birth and growth of SSF pays close attention to the movement's social context and this is vital, as the earliest days of the nascent order were focussed on the provision of help to men who had no fixed abode and relied on the meagre provisions of the casual wards. The work of Br Douglas and his early companions was first of all compassionate, but that compassion also led to political action to address the inadequate provision for homeless men. This political action was not naive and recognised the deeper underlying issues of poverty and worklessness.

So the origins of one of the Anglican church's most prominent religious communities was not a pious attempt to recreate a medieval religious order, but a genuine response to poverty inspired by the witness of St Francis. The later leaders of the movement established a more deliberate focus on the needs of the community life of SSF, ensuring a firm bedrock of prayer, but the order's missionary focus has never been lost. I was greatly privileged to work with SSF in the parishes where I was parish priest in Glasgow in the late '90s. The work of the small house in Barrowfield in the city's East End was impressive in its humble simplicity. The brothers lived in one of the most deprived housing estates in the city and offered a simple ministry of presence, listening, encouragement and committed involvement in a community that bore the brunt of post-industrial decline. Whether playing cards with unemployed young men or attending the management committee of a community project, the brothers exhibited the same prophetic compassion as their order's founders.

It strikes me that the church's wellbeing resides in no small part in its willingness to understand and identify with poverty and those who are poor. This is an evangelical imperative and I've suggested before that it ought to be there in the creed as one of the marks of the true church!

One of the other interesting insights of Dunstan's book is the slow growth of the order. For the first two or three decades of its life, the order grew very little in its numbers. Founded in the 1930s from three predecessor orders, the Society of St Francis did not really experience significant growth in its numbers until the 1960s. I suspect that this was due, in part, to the time needed to establish a single order out of the differing emphases of its constituent parts - not a smooth process - but it is interesting to me that this trajectory does not fit the common assumptions of numerical growth in the wider church. One might have expected to see more growth in these earlier decades followed by a decline as the radical '60s unfolded. It may not be wise to make too simple a comparison between the growth of a religious order and that of the wider church, but I think the contrast is interesting nonetheless. It suggests to me that growth and decline are much more complex phenomena than many suggest.

The story of SSF gives me hope for our Anglican way of being Christian. It shows that the vitality and faithfulness of the church is not restricted to one dimension of its life (eg parishes) and, more importantly, stands as a witness to the essential place of simplicity, poverty and joy in the life of faith.

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This Poor Sort - Anglican Franciscans, Poverty and Growth

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