Rt Revd Stephen Lowe

Faith in urban life

When Rt Revd Stephen Lowe was appointed Bishop for Urban Life and Faith in 2006, as a response to the report Faithful Cities, the Church of England installed Bishop Stephen into an area of national ministry, disengaging his Episcopal oversight as the incumbent Bishop of Hulme.

'So I'm spending my time going around all the diocese of the Church of England,' he says, 'listening to urban clergy and lay people; talking with the bishops; trying to link up with government and improve the relationships between Church and government around urban issues; being from time to time prophetic I hope as well; and generally stirring the pot in relation to these issues.'

His current position has inspired an endless journey around the country to find practical solutions, minister encouragement and offer hope - one which recently took him to Frizington, a former pit village, and nearby Workington in Cumbria.

'They have all the problems of urban life,' he stresses. 'There is a lot of poverty there; there is a lot of economic decline which they're trying to work with; there are problems over housing and the provision of adequate housing for people in those areas; and there is also the issue of how the Church engages in these communities.'

Housing, Bishop Stephen concludes, is right at the heart of the problem: 'One of the things I've observed is the still-rigid class system - you have your council housing over here and your rich housing over there and ne'er the twain shall meet.'

Instead, the bishop would like to see more mixed communities, made up of people from different ethnic backgrounds, containing adequate housing for the elderly and young people, and schools for children of all backgrounds.

'You go to Milton Keynes,' he says, 'and there the local authority have decided that when we build new communities we should have 30 per cent social housing in those areas - in others words affordable housing and rented housing - but you should not be able to distinguish between the council housing and the private housing.'

This practice is commonplace in other parts of the world, particularly Scandinavia.

'In this country we haven't done it that way,' Bishop Stephen adds, 'and I think we've made some major mistakes, and we're reaping the harvest.'

Tackling the crop of resulting urban issues, he concludes, will allow us to build communities that work, 'where people of all sorts of different cultural backgrounds, economic backgrounds, social backgrounds, age groups and so on live together in harmony and peace and in happiness'.

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