‘Sell all you have and give to the poor’

The parish in which I serve is some ten miles north of Oxford.  At first glimpse it is exceedingly prosperous – visitors drive through well kept streets lined with honey coloured stone buildings.  Small, independent shops and pubs offer hand cooked food, home made craft objects and expensive kitchens.  The houses are beautifully kept and owned by the wealthy – a quick internet check on house prices shows that a two bedroom cottage can be purchased for half a million pounds.  The community is vibrant and engaged, aware that effort is needed to build and maintain social capital.  On the surface, then, all is picture-book – the perfect idyll. 

Of course, this is only half the story.  The council district is one of the poorest in the region; there is real food poverty and deprivation.  Families are split up because housing is unaffordable and jobs are scarce; the suffering is real and made worse perhaps because of its invisibility.

In August 2020, my church rented two small rooms in a community building in the middle of the town – and Cornerstone was born.  It originally had two purposes – firstly to offer a space for the exchange of surplus food from gardens, allotments and orchards.  Those who have more apples/courgettes/carrots than they know what to do with, can bring them in and swap them for the excess harvest of others.  The second, more serious intention was to provide food and other support to the most vulnerable members of the community, but in such a way that self respect, dignity and anonymity were maintained – the sharecropping providing ‘cover’ for a food bank for the poorest members of our community.

Over the eighteen months of its existence, Cornerstone has flourished and expanded – we now sell second hand books, offer a school uniform exchange, a Learning Café for those affected by lockdown breaks in education, a weekly stay and play session, a memory café, Christmas gift swap, plant swap.. the list goes on.

More profound, however, has been the change in the way the wealthier members of the community view the rest of the population.  From being completely unaware that poverty of any kind existed within the town, there is a growing consciousness of inequality and deprivation – and a corresponding activism concerned with its relief.  From being ‘the poor’ people have become personalised, appreciated as individuals struggling with challenges that others with no imagination cannot hope to comprehend; people just like the rest of us, in fact, but facing tougher times.

There is  still a lot of work to be done in the areas of equality, inclusion, justice – but we are beginning to love, and that is the first and bravest step of all.