The Bridge Battersea

Last year I caught up with Tom Dowding from The Bridge in Battersea.  Tom was interested in Thomas Guthrie and his Parochial model in Edinburgh in the 19th century.  I was so excited to hear what Tom was up to I asked him to write about his work in the blog post below.  Please pray for Tom and the team in Battersea.

I serve at The Bridge Battersea - a small church on the Surrey Lane council estate in Battersea, London. We’re in a multicultural urban community characterised by high levels of economic and social deprivation, and many of the ills that go with that: drug and alcohol abuse are rife, broken families more common than not, mental health problems affect a great proportion, and knife culture has contributed to two tragic murders in the last couple of years.

So it was with a keen interest that I listened to Andrew Murray talking about the life of Thomas Guthrie on a 20Schemes podcast earlier this year. To hear of his radical heart for the marginalised and destitute, his biblical conviction that the gospel is good news for the poor, his horror that Christianity might be kept to those with ‘respectable’ lives and his incarnational connection with the social issues of the day (even as gospel proclamation was prioritised) were music to my ears, and broadened my vision for how I’d love to pursue ministry. Guthrie’s setting up of a savings bank and a library in the parish of Arbirlot, for example, where he was brought ‘into familiar and frequent and kindly contact with my people’ is just the sort of pioneering evangelistic creativity that we need to be pursuing in a time where churches are increasingly viewed with disinterest, suspicion, or outright contempt.

When our church was planted 9 years ago one of the clear issues in our estates was absentee fathers, and the adverse effects this had on particularly young boys growing up. When Guthrie spoke in the 19th Century of a young boy in Edinburgh “launched on a sea of human passions and exposed to a thousand temptations… left by society, more criminal than he, to become a criminal, and then punished for his fate, not his fault” he could very well be describing the young lads growing up fatherless in Battersea. Without dads around their influences and role models often tend to be the ‘olders’ in local gangs, and routes from there towards teenage years of school expulsion and immersed in drugs and knife crime are sadly all too common. Into this situation the ‘RISE academy’ was launched to mentor young men, teaching them the gospel and life-skills such as cooking or computer programming. Time and funding wise it’s not as full scale as the Ragged Schools of Edinburgh, but like Guthrie the mentoring Christian men hope to give off something of what he termed the ‘almost omnipotent power of Christian kindness’.

And this era of COVID19 and lockdown is a time when we at The Bridge really want to redouble efforts to move towards those around us. We’ve recently been door-knocking on Sundays as a church, and have come across some who have had bad situations exacerbated by the pandemic (even in an area already dominated with mental health problems, it was a saddening shock to hear one local mother tell of how she’d been so anxious about the virus she was washing her hands with bleach). Others we come across profess largely to be fine, even as they remain sleepwalking in sin towards death and judgement. Not much different, then, to the crowds the Lord Jesus looked out at and felt a deep compassion for, ‘because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.’ (Matt 9:36).

It is this heart of the Lord Jesus for the lost that inspires us in thinking how we might reach out as labourers in his harvest field. I was struck and encouraged by Guthrie’s organising towards all members of the local church ‘working in harmony, like bees in a hive’ – reaching the thousands on our estate needs a whole church, not just one or two evangelists. So as a staff team we are planning to soon unveil 6 new outreach endeavours, praying that we can be a mission minded community with everyone in some way playing a part. Through these we aim to build new relationships with those around us, to love and care for those with pressing practical needs, and ultimately to share the good news of Christ.

I’d love to ask for brother and sisters reading this to pray for us as we seek to reach out to our hard pressed community this Autumn/Winter. Ask the Lord of the harvest to send out workers for the harvest fields! And ask that many are won by the Christ who came to bring good news to the poor, even as the good deeds of his church bring glory to his Father in heaven. When sitting in crowded flats or walking up weed-engulfed tower block staircases it is burdening to see the sights of young boys moving into gang life, men and women crushed by addictions, and Muslims hoping in a god who cannot save. But praise God that through your prayers many lives and eternities could be changed. It remains, as Thomas Chalmers might say, ‘a fine field of operation’!