2024 marks the eightieth anniversary of the founding of Sheffield Industrial Mission. There are many accounts of industrial mission’s history, and also some very good work appraising its impact, not least an article by David Price, chair of Industrial Mission in South Yorkshire, published in Crucible in 2004. At its pinnacle Industrial Mission was ecumenical, committed to partnership with employers and workers, grounded in a spirituality that took incarnation seriously, and challenged injustice in the workplace and within the churches.
The influence and inspiration of Sheffield Industrial Mission can be traced through a web of church networks, with points of connection found across other areas of activity including youthwork, a wide range of chaplaincies, civic engagement, and social action. This web extended to include ecumenical partners, and other expressions of faith including the Taize and Iona communities, as well as inspiring industrial mission projects around the world.
In 1944 Bishop Leslie Hunter of Sheffield invited Ted Wickham to take on the founding role of industrial missioner. Moved by the need of people in a heavily industrialised diocese who had little or no contact with the church, Wickham would be released to try new ways, primarily factory visiting, to engage working people in conversation about faith, life, justice, and hope. Influenced by the work of William Temple, and of worker priests on the continent, industrial mission would in turn inspire missionary activity in other cities and other countries. Eighty years on though there is little remaining of the structures that once formed a thriving network of engagement by churches with wider society, but is it possible to detect lingering traces of that work in the activity of sector or pioneer ministries?
Sheffield was home to other creative initiatives in mission – Industrial Mission itself, the parish discussions led by Alan Ecclestone, the Red Vicar of Darnall, Sheffield Council of Churches and the employment of the first full-time ecumenical officer, a house in one of the least affluent parts of the city that was home to brothers of the Taize community, and the Urban Theology Unit founded by John Vincent and committed to exploring liberation theology within the context of an industrial British city; all spoke of a church seeking ways to engage creatively and usefully with the reality of life in its communities.
Within twenty-five years the influence and inspiration of the Sheffield model had been felt across the churches all over the country, with the material and spiritual needs of people being addressed through youth chaplaincy, social responsibility, and industrial mission; moving beyond traditional church settings into the wider community with ministers and church workers freed from concerns about affiliation to the institutional church.
Industrial Mission became a respected partner working with confidence and professionalism alongside organisations that might traditionally have been suspicious of the motivations and aims of churches. By engaging with secular society without an underlying concern for proselytising and increasing membership of churches, the Missions were freed to work on issues of common concern in ways that reflected other traditional priorities for faith groups of advocacy and attentiveness to the signs of the times, alleviation of the needs of people and communities, advocacy for those who are often unheard, and action that enhanced dignity and well-being for many.
This partnership activity reflects something of the analysis by Helen Cameron for the Church Urban Fund which pointed to historical challenges for the Church of England in engaging with people living in deprived urban communities. Cameron suggested that there were three approaches to mission in urban communities; one where church leaders are alongside people, listening to and sharing in their concerns, one where church leaders set up projects to tackle social needs, and a third way ‘represented by the industrial mission model, in which trained and committed clergy immersed themselves in the moral (and therefore theological) issues of the world of work, and at times also in its politics.’
The model of ministry that saw local churches become key agents for the delivery of social projects like foodbanks, pandemic responses, accommodation for refugees, undoubtedly makes a real difference for beneficiaries but can lead to diffidence and uncertainty about political engagement that might critique poverty, isolation, community fragmentation, and forced migration. By combining ‘action’ with the ‘alongside’ industrial mission created a distinctively Christian response to human needs that enabled other participants, whether church members or people who might ordinarily be suspicious of church engagement, to work together to address both immediate need and long-term solutions.
Eighty years on most of the industrial mission projects across England have been wound up and come to an end. Has this ending arisen from a sense of a mission fulfilled, or is this a mission that remains incomplete?
New forms of mission have emerged with renewed emphasis on non-parochial chaplaincy and ‘pioneer ministry’ but questions about the church’s relevance to, and relationship with, people in urban communities are possibly even more pertinent now than they were eighty years ago. Migration over this time has changed the profile of faith adherence especially in larger urban areas, with many of the least affluent people holding a strong sense of commitment to new churches and other faith communities.
The issues of urban alienation from the Church of England that prompted Hunter and Wickham to establish Sheffield Industrial Mission in 1944 have not necessarily gone away, but they have changed in character. Ecumenical relations strengthened over the intervening decades with strong participation by other churches in the work of industrial mission, and in related work like social responsibility. But as many free church congregations have grown older and started to work towards the completion of their mission, and independent congregations have emerged, the possibility of maintaining strong working relationships is clearly more challenging.
For a time a strong network of industrial mission, social responsibility, and church leaders, enabled the churches in England to hold a strong and informed place in debates on the most significant challenges facing society. Reports like Faith in the City and Unemployment and the Future of Work, shaped political as well as theological debate, and were carefully analysed in newspapers and journals, demonstrating an influence that spread well beyond church concerns.
Were these reports reflective of a strength in social engagement that we lack today? Perhaps even the height of industrial mission’s influence just before the structures that supported industrial mission began to give way? And have the churches in Britain produced anything with the influence and impact of that 1997 report on working life and unemployment?
Colin Brady 