Foundations of Community? Church, Family and Neighbourhood in Birmingham, 1945–1980

This chapter explores the relationship between Christian spiritual renewal, social reconstruction and social and cultural change in the post-war period in the perspective of local Anglican and Free Church leaders and some of their congregations in Birmingham, UK, between the 1940s and 1980s. It focuses particularly upon changes within three spheres of life—family, congregation and neighbourhood—which local church leaders frequently regarded as being of critical importance for the renewal of English society in the decades following the Second World War. Local church leaders widely regarded family, congregation and neighbourhood as three overlapping and interlocking spheres through which Christian values, practices and shared identity might be transmitted. However, in the midst of the profound social and cultural changes of the post-war decades, the relationships between these three spheres changed and fragmented, and organised Christianity became more socially marginal as a result. This also effected a change in Christian self-understanding, with local clergy coming to regard the churches more as a counter-cultural movement within a post-Christendom society, and less the ‘social glue’ which mid-twentieth-century social theologians had hoped it would be.