If you have ever filled in the Church of England's standard form to apply for a church post, you would recall some boxes about whether you drive and own a car. Sometimes these remain on the form even though the post does not require it and so reinforce the 'normality' and even expectedness of car ownership and driving. It is this largely unthinking embedding of the car in ministry and expectations of ministry that I would like to challenge and scrutinise with a view to offering alternative visions. While I will focus on the pedestrian alternative, it should be noted that there is a lot to be said for cycling and that many of the points made would apply to cycling also1.
I would like gratefully to acknowledge the help of Simon Collings of Sustainable Transport Solutions ( www.sustainable-transport.net) for helpful comments and updated the references.
The car has brought benefits.
The main things in favour of the car are that it gives individuals choices and makes certain kinds of travelling more convenient and it is more private. It therefore can be a force for empowerment and social inclusion in many lives, particularly those who have mobility difficulties due to age or infirmity. It has also meant that many people have been able to broaden their horizons through travel and to find opportunities more easily to better their lives through work and not being quite so restricted in terms of location.
In ministerial terms, the car has been a boon in that it makes pastoral visiting and various parochial tasks quicker or easier and it has meant that pastoral care in physical presence terms can be exercised over a greater geographical range thus allowing for the consolidation of benefices and parishes into units less costly to the central church finances. By the same logics applied to lay church participants, greater choice has been given to people to choose to attend and even participate in churches that are felt to nurture the kind of spirituality that they favour or to exercise the kinds of ministries (for example in youth work) that a family feels it needs at that point in their lives.
The consequences of car ownership.
One of the realities of car ownership is the way that it structures costs and benefits in relation to one another and to wider society. Because of the large capital outlay relative to ongoing costs of running and a rapid depreciation there is an incentive to use a car as often as possible. Once you have it, the more you use it the better you are likely to feel about having bought it, added to which regular use keeps it working better. There is little incentive not to use a car once it is bought. This can fluctuate, of course; there has been a tendency for total cost of ownership to reduce while operating costs have formed a larger proportion of those costs and the relative costs against public transport have fallen over time, mainly as a result of forces we shall look at below2.
In wider society the car has increased the span of an individual's (or a family's or a peer group's) opportunities to access goods or services. In other words where they can shop, go out, socialise, work and so forth. Likewise there are times when the car also makes such tasks and occasions apparently quicker and/or more convenient. What such an increased geographical range implies is the potential (largely realised in our society at the start of the 21st century) to build facilities for mass public use further away from cramped town and city centres where economies of scale in selling can be more readily passed on to consumers. Thus we have large and flourishing out-of-town retail parks while village and small town centres languish and city centres become ever more leisure oriented.
For churches, local congregations are no longer the only possible options for churchgoing or membership, 'eclectic' describes most churches to some degree in that they draw from a wider area than the parish or local community. This has had several consequences. One is that the degree of a church's investment in a local community can be weakened as less of its active membership have a stake in the geographical community the church notionally serves. The geographical parish is, if not dead, at least only one way of organising participation and mission, and in many cases not the most influential.
It also means that there are expectations in church life that arise from a presumption of car use. For example, the pastoral staff are expected to be available at very short notice even at quite a distance. Similarly, the congregants who are not car owners may find themselves routinely excluded or needing to make arrangements that reinforce to them a sense of being either second class or at the very least a burden to others.
The case against the car.
There is some problematisation needed in thinking about the benefits of the car. Not least, for example, is that the inclusion of car owners in a wider society and greater mobility becomes a positive reinforcement, a feedback loop, which actually means that others (the poorest and those unable to drive for various reasons) are excluded more systematically and are less able to access the goods and services increasingly made available in ways that presuppose car ownership. A symptom and an example of this is the way that public transport withers and as that happens reinforces the impetus towards wider car ownership which in turn deprives public transport of further revenue, and so on round the loop. Of course when we then want to cut back on car use, the infrastructure to support such a change is no longer there and cannot be rebuilt so rapidly that it can take advantage of the changes of heart of individuals unless local and national government have a (funded) strategy.
Sometimes, in order to consider a change of convenient and socially-accepted habits, we have to have a bigger picture which gives us strong reasons either to question a habit or to advocate change. I hope to present both kinds of reasons.
Climate change
I assume that readers will be aware of the issue of climate change arising from our over-use of fossil hydrocarbons. The main thing to remember about the issue for the purposes of this article is that it is the burning of fossil carbon in the form of coal, oil and their by-products that results in the release back into earth's atmosphere of carbon dioxide that had mostly been taken out of use during the carboniferous era. Within a few hundred years we have used up what took millennia to remove and fix into the earth's geological strata. Carbon plays a role in keeping the heat that comes to planet earth from the sun from immediately radiating back into space, the greater the proportion of carbon dioxide, the greater the heat retention, hence global warming. It is now well-established that this has been taking place and that the main thing to address now is how climate change will develop and what we can do to attempt to mitigate the effects.
In 1990, the transport sector [mostly cars] was responsible for 25% of the UK's CO2 emissions. Road transport is now responsible for 21%, and while this looks like an improvement over fifteen years we should note that it is rising and is the only rising figure in our energy economy apart from aircraft emissions. Our car dependent lifestyle, as currently configured, is helping to drive climate change3.
Social consequences of car culture
Perhaps we are less aware of the social consequences of car culture than of the environmental impacts. The car, in line with what Marshall McLuhan wrote4, extends our geographical range or spread. It therefore makes possible suburbanisation and what is being called exurbanisation5 which we can see in the expansion of commuter villages or the take over of rural communities by commuters or those seeking respite from the cities. There are a number of consequences to sub/exurbanisation: rural communities find property prices rise and so the flight of younger people tends to make for particular age and wealth demographics. The concentration of poorer people in certain areas of cities and towns may be reinforced or perpetuated.
The effect of social mobility brought about or reinforced by the car is to bring people into geographical proximity when there is no relationship other than being neighbours and when the things that would otherwise connect neighbours to one another such as common socialisation places, or shopping spaces or even schooling are subject to the greater choice brought about wider geographical access and opportunity. There are less day to day meeting points and less sense of a shared stake in the development of the geographical community.
The provision of shopping and entertainment can be relocated out of town but at the cost of reinforcing social exclusion of poorer people6 particularly those in outer estates who may begin to lose even what provision they started with. Recently we have been made aware of how it is poorer communities that are most likely to have ATM's that charge for withdrawing money, for example.
The road building that has been both a response to and a facilitator of the expansion of car use also has the effect of changing the human geography of areas: dividing communities by rivers of traffic, connecting communities to others in new ways sometimes meaning that the 'rat run' of drivers trying to avoid congestion on other roads makes formerly safe streets busier and more accident-prone. In turn this can change house values and the demographics of an area. It also affects perceptions of safety which can feed a sense that one is safer in a car and that using a car to, for example, take children to school is preferable to walking, a decision which, when taken by more and more people further reinforces the traffic problems.
One of the effects of widespread car ownership is its contribution to privatisation. Technologies always have a cultural effect not only in terms of what they physically enable people to do but also in terms of the ways of thinking that they enable, disable, encourage or rule out. George Monbiot draws a very stark picture of the car-driving mentality. While it will not fit many at all points and while there will be many drivers (readers of this article, I hope) who consciously fight these attitudes in their own experience, yet the aggregation of individual responses to car use which contain some or most of these characteristics leads to a cultural mood:
“I believe that while there are many reasons for the growth of individualism in the UK, the extreme libertarianism now beginning to take hold here begins on the road. When you drive, society becomes an obstacle. Pedestrians, bicycles, traffic calming, speed limits, the law: all become a nuisance to be wished away. The more you drive, the more bloody-minded and individualistic you become. The car is slowly turning us, like the Americans and the Australians, into a nation which recognises only the freedom to act, and not the freedom from the consequences of other people’s actions.”7
And a helpful exposition of the social effects in relation to our cultural choices and the collective mentality of a society which uses these artefacts;
“It’s becoming clearer every day that the roots of climate change lie not just in the technological infrastructure we’ve built to exploit fossil fuels, but in the habits of mind and heart created by that infrastructure. For example: cheap gasoline allowed us to rip up the trolley lines and replace them with cars, which in turn allowed the sprawling suburbs, which in turn allowed ever bigger houses, which in turn allowed an unprecedented isolation from community.”8
Cars take up space and because space for roads is limited the result is actual or prospective gridlock. Studies have shown that while providing temporary respite, road-building actually increases traffic as people respond to the greater perceived opportunities to drive and as public transport provision is further eroded or simply not in a position to take significant advantage of new roads9. Congestion, in itself contributes to some of the other problems identified in this article: most notably pollution and climate change (because drivers rarely turn off engines whilst stationary in jams).
There are also economic and health issues.
The car externalises many of its costs. That is to say that there are costs associated with cars that are not borne directly by motorists but rather by the environment and the rest of society. Because these costs are not reflected in the actual price of driving they are not treated as part of the decision about whether and when and how to drive. These costs that are borne by society and environment are called externalitites.
“According to OECD estimates, external costs caused by road transport could be as high as 5 per cent of GDP (OECD, 1988: 11). For instance, in the UK road transport externalities accounted for at least £22.9-£25.7 billion in 199110
Some of these externalities are in the form of health costs: relating to mainly to respiratory problems11 and accident rates but also other pollution issues. This has prompted George Monbiot to write castigating the road lobby for a cavalier blindness with regard to the true situation in which their motoring takes place.
“...a massive hidden subsidy for private transport, those who decry the nannying bureaucrats couldn’t afford to leave their drives. Speed cameras, according to the government’s study, now save the country £258million in annual medical bills: a fraction of the billions in health costs inflicted by Mr Clarkson’s chums”12.
And yet more of the externalities are environmental. We have still to work out how much but we do know that the costs of climate change will be enormous, and while they can't all be laid on the bonnet of the car, a significant proportion can. There are the costs to do with changing agricultural patterns, education, migration on a mass scale, compensation, development of technologies to help, civil engineering for flood threatened cities, other related infrastructural changes and so on. None of those costs are yet reflected in the price of oil or of motoring which at the moment enjoys a 'free ride' at the expense of the environment. It has been estimated that the ecosystem delivers $33trillion-worth of services to humanity per year. Now there are some issues about how such things are calculated but not enough to make such a figure insignificant13.
Then there are the social cost which do eventually feed back to society as monetary costs but not usually specifically to motoring. These would be the costs of, for example, care for the isolated and marginalised, for economic development plans and for consequent crime prevention,detection and justice. We have seen above what the social impacts are, we simply need to think what things are needed to offset or mitigate those effects and cost them.
So far and a further thought.
In sum, then, we should recognise that there are grave problems with widespread car use and that the cost of dealing with those problems are not internalised to motoring, but borne by wider society. Therefore motoring is not subject to reasonably rational thinking at the point of use in financial cost terms, but rather is effectively subsidised in such a way as to exacerbate some of the most difficult and challenging problems we face as a national and global community in social and environmental terms.
As a matter of Christian witness, we are involved already in trying to mitigate the social and environmental problems already mentioned. However, given what we are uncovering about the role of car ownership and motoring, I am arguing that encouraging car use either actively or more often passively (by the way that we as churches and church service agencies assume or presume that things will be done or are done), is a counter sign to what we are attempting to stand for and more than that, actively works against much of what we are attempting to achieve in terms of community development, social cohesion and caring for God's good earth.
As things are, our generation is in the process of bequeathing the dark ages to our children and grandchildren. Our car usage is part of the means by which that bequest is being made. It is said that in the medieval dark ages the churches, that is the monasteries, were the instruments of preserving knowledge. It would be good if the churches could bequeath a legacy of earth care and being part of the solutions to climate change. In apologetic terms it will be important, also, that our great great godchildren can point to the church of the period of time we are now living in and say that we were at the forefront of making necessary changes and challenging vested interests that preserve the climate-changing status quo.
For those reasons I advocate that we rediscover pedestrian ministry, although in a different context that that of the likes of Francis Kilvert (1840–1879, who was the author of voluminous private diaries describing rural life in the Victorian era). One of my abiding impressions is of just how much walking his pastoral work involved.
Pedestrian ministry.
Because of the way that our culture has taken the car for granted, even celebrated cardom, it is often the case that we collectively assume that ministry with cars is good and that without a car there is something missing or somehow substandard. It is time to challenge that kind of thinking and to offer perspectives that affirm and even celebrate car-less ministry that is, to state it positively, pedestrian ministry.
many of the kinds of things that many clergy are seeking to address in our wider ministries such as community breakdown, social exclusion, good local environment, community safety and so forth, are in greater part implications of the way that our society uses cars. As such, the use of cars by clergy is a symbolic contradiction to our wider work and a participation in the very forces that we are trying to challenge, redirect or mitigate.
However, it is not enough to “just say no”, and there are some positive other reasons, apart from climate change, welfare and community health for engaging in pedestrian ministry and making it a fuller part of what clergy do.
A pedestrian ministry can be closer to the community. One of the effects alluded to earlier is the isolating nature of car driving. A driver is physically apart from the local environment and is mentally focussed on traffic, road signs and speed cameras. On the whole, those things are not the main focus of those using the streets for shopping or leisure. In addition, those on foot can and do meet others in a face to face way and exchange neighbourly information and relationship. Walking the parish and beyond or even using public transport puts us more readily in touch with our parishioners and makes us more accessible. It may even help to make our ministry more visible as we are more noticible walking, cycling or waiting for a bus than if we are in a car. A car's windscreen is normally something that makes it hard to see who is in a car and the speed at which the vehicle goes past also makes it difficult to know who is passing us.
A pedestrian ministry can be more observant. One of the things I have found time after time, in conversation with car-driving colleagues, is how much I notice as a pedestrian that motorists do not. To be sure; there are things that I do not notice which motorists do notice, however these tend to be things that are related fairly tightly to driving (road works and the like) whereas the things I notice as a walker-around-my-community tend to be things that are about what is happening that affects people’s lives more holistically. This comes about because a pedestrian tends to be moving more slowly with more opportunities to look at what we are travelling through. It may also be because we are not routed by traffic management systems away from interesting and important locations in our communities. Walkers are also more likely to be experimenting with using cut-throughs, parks and other common land which again gives exposure to things that are both significant for community ministry and likely to be unnoticeable from cars.
A pedestrian ministry is biased to the poor most obviously in the more trivial sense that the expenses of car ownership are not there for the user. However, the knock-on effects also tend towards favouring the poor or disfavouring the relatively rich (and of course this is only relative, being within the terms of relatively prosperous north/western societies). For example, the way that 'business' is conducted by groups where car drivership is taken for granted, can make it harder for those without cars to participate or to participate without feeling that special concessions are being made and that they are making things more difficult. Pedestrian ministry encourages a reshaping of assumptions in such a way to make participation easier and often less expensive.
It is also biased to the poor in that it makes it more likely that in the course of travelling, a minister is likely to encounter examples and signs of poverty and have time to reflect upon the implications and causes, and indeed pray about them.
A pedestrian ministry is a positive witness. It witnesses both to God's care for creation, and to the concern for community and the common good. It may be that witnessing to God's care for creation is more of a long term project in the sense that the biggest pay-off for the chuch's witness, as with the abolishing of the slave trade, will come in future generations. In the short term, it will mean as with Wilberforce and the others, misunderstanding, wrestling with realpolitik and compromise and so seeking wisdom. It will generate misunderstanding and even hostility from some. The Jeremy Clarkson tendency (to develop George Monbiot's iconography) will hate the implied criticism of their 'right to roam' which is really a 'right to pollute'. As with the arguments around the abolition of the slave trade, there will be those Christian voices who will defend the status quo with various theological and practical concerns. We have to keep in mind that the the environmental days of reckoning cannot be avoided, but we can play a part in mitigation and we will be bequeathing a legacy to our successors-in-Christ either of positive environmental action or of continuing to contribute to the problems. The everyday means that we choose to minister and to administer are part of that.
Pedestrian ministry is also a positive witness in the realm of community and fostering the common good. Here again there will be short-term difficulties; those who are invested in unsustainable lifestyles and livelihoods will be threatened, and there is a pastoral ministry to be exercised there. However, a car-less ministry, or at least a less-car ministry, is an act of solidarity with the excluded, an immersion in the necessary perspectives of the less mobile and begins to be a force for re-localisation by helping to rebuild, if only in a small way, demand for local services for local people. Combined with other actions such as seeking to consume less food-miles with our daily bread, we can become a positive force for change and our example can help bolster the resolve of those of good will.
We are also witnessing to a commitment to the local and something quite incarnational, not seeking to devalue locality for transnational and regional 'gnostic' escape. In that way a pedestrian ministry witnesses to and even lays good foundations for the growth and development of community. Community requires commitment of the kind that the car tends to represent a flight from. Part of the point for a number of people is that the car allows them to geographically distance parts of their lives from other parts. What this tends to mean in practice is that neighbours scarcely know one another and the important aspects of geographical community wither away: everyday care for the more vulnerable, common action over matters of local concern, or simple investment of time and energy in neighbourhood which can benefit those who have little or no choice in the matter. The distancing created by car use also augments the forces of personal fragmentation and loss of integrity, so a pedestrian ministry is a step towards wholeness if only symbolically but also quite possibly literally.
Admittedly the car enables the formation and maintenance of more dispersed and voluntarist forms of community and there are undoubted benefits to this, particularly for those who have found their geographical neighbours in some way oppressive or less than neighbourly in attitude. Communities of interest are also potentially very life giving for many and the happenstance of physical proximity does not necessarily mean a congruence of interest. So, the case is not here being made for geographical communities as unmitigatedly good or that dispersed community is without benefit.
A pedestrian ministry may be more prayerful. In the same way that making a call on a mobile phone is dangerous whilst driving, so might be much of what we are most used to doing under the label 'prayer'. There is much less concern attached to praying while walking! In fact for a number of people, praying and engaging in contemplative practice while walking is a positive spiritual experience. In addition, the presence before a parish minister of their parish as they walk can itself be an occasion of, and useful information for prayer. Alternatively the opportunity for reflection whether on the visit about to be made, some item of parish business or simply on the morning's readings can be invaluable 'headspace'.
A pedestrian ministry is healthier although we have to set that assertion in the context that we all suffer to some extent the effects of pollution which tend towards making ill-health of various kinds more prevalent! However, in a time when obesity is a national concern and one which is a concern also to clergy, making walking a fuller part of ministry is arguably a good step towards maintaining or even reaching a level of physical fitness that can help us to minister more effectively, alertly and with greater generosity of spirit borne of less stress. Many clergy in their current lifestyles may find it difficult to do the 10,000 steps a day that is considered healthy. A more pedestrian ministry would help considerably in this.
A pedestrian ministry means different ways of working. A car-driving parson may feel able to motor between widely disparate points for visits or other business. A walking priest may need to plan an itinerary that takes in a number of points in the same area and perhaps use the phone or the church door encounter more effectively to help plan visits. The further advantage of doing this, though, is that one is seen. Just as with police officers being visible on the beat, the perception of clergy can change positively by being seen on the streets. A car in effect hides a person behind windshield and window reflections, walking gets us seen with reassuring psychological resonances attaching to that being seen.
Many clergy are used to turning up at the crem or graveyard, doing a service and perhaps a bit of after care and then driving off again. Without a car probably the best bet is to get a lift with the undertakers. This gives the opportunity to meet the family before they set off (or not if occasion seems against it) and to spend perhaps a bit more time with them afterwards. It can also mean opportunities to learn from and minister to undertakers and drivers. There can be advantages to knowing funeral services staff better. It is also possible to use some of the time being driven to and from in preparation and prayer.
Balancing the is and the ought.
By the nature of the matter, it has been necessary to lean very heavily away from car use in this article. We have internalised the mindset of motoring so thoroughly and externalised the inner logics fairly thoroughly in concrete, tarmac and human geography that it is necessary to be quite forthright in championing pedestrian ministries. I have to admit that to do so goes somewhat against the grain for me; I am more at home in acknowledging the force of differing positions. So I would like to finish by giving a tip of the hat to the complexities. We cannot undo the developments of half a century or more in the blink of an eye. Where people live and shop and how they spend their leisure has been long shaped by the car and by cheap oil. The positioning of housing estates, shops and facilities has been made long-term by the possibilities that widespread car ownership has opened up. Those concrete, stone and tarmac decisions can't be untaken. We must live with what is even while seeking to adjust or alter it.
So it is that many decisions about the shape of pastoral care has had the car as its unspoken support and medium, for example. Certain kinds of rural clergy deployment would be very different without cars. Perhaps locally ordained ministry would be normal and well entrenched institutionally now without relatively cheap motoring (though there is an interesting issue there about how far mobility may also have effected or amplified some of the social changes which have necessitated changes in clergy deployment patterns).
It would not be easy to move directly to all-out pedestrian ministry in such areas. Some kinds of 'both-and' compromises would need to be worked out. The difficulty for a car owning minister is always likely to be that the availability of their 'steed' is likely to erode good intentions over time: today's “It'll be okay just this time.” becomes next week's “I seem to be driving everywhere, again.” So the challenge would be to find ways to regularly audit usage or to find ways to make ones vehicle effectively out of bounds at various times or ways14.
It is not easy or often right either, simply to dump established commitments and relied-upon patterns of ministry. It will be necessary to weigh such things and practice the art of the possible though without being too easy on ourselves. Sometimes we may need to investigate such things as car sharing or public transport, including taxis. (Simon Collings writes that his “friends who don't own cars make quite a lot of use of hire cars. Despite this they still save money.”) These all have the advantage of promoting neighbourliness, or at least neighbour-awareness. It may even be that it is financially cheaper for the parish that their clergy in at least some situations forego the use of cars for a mix of walking, cycling, public transport and taxis when undertaking normal parish business. We have grown so used to cars that we have stopped asking the question as to whether subsidising a car is the best use of financial resources or whether it hinders the whole mission of parochial clergy.
Further reading
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=74
http://www.newsville.com/cgi-bin/getfaq?file=uk.transport/uk.transport_FAQ
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/12/20/the-anti-social-bastards-in-our-midst/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exurban
Anna Semlyen Cutting Your Car Use Totnes, Devon. Green Books, ISBN 1930098328. http://www.cuttingyourcaruse.co.uk/.
1 comment:
very challenging... thank you
Post a Comment