For the past nine years, 20schemes has been working to plant and revitalise churches in Scotland’s schemes.
To the rest of the UK they are known as council estates and in the US they are referred to as ‘projects’, but in Scotland they are called ‘schemes’.
Opinions on housing schemes differ, depending on your life history and experience of them. Nowadays, there are still vestiges of working-class people, sometimes holding down two or more jobs as they struggle to pay the bills, but over the years changes have come to the schemes.
Along with modern redevelopment there has been an influx of middle-class social climbers bringing with them their worldview, often not understanding the nuances of entering a tight-knit scheme community where families have lived for generations. Immigrants have also settled in the schemes, often being met with suspicion.
Then there is a group referred to as the ‘benefits class’, who have been on social security handouts for generations. For them work is anathema.
And all of this is being fed by the culture of addiction that is in so many households, coupled with a criminal underbelly that deals in street drugs, prescribed medication and stolen goods as a matter of course. Far too many people in the schemes are ruled by fear, or an addiction to drugs, alcohol, etc, etc.
It’s the same story all over the UK: worse, in fact, in many areas of England and Wales.
Spiritual poverty
We at 20schemes believe that the biggest need, the most urgent crisis, and the most crippling poverty in the poorest areas of the UK, is a spiritual one.
Most people living in schemes and council estates are spiritually dead, trapped, lost, unreached and unengaged by the church. The gospel alone changes lives. The response of the church to the devastating reality of much of life in these areas must be more than support groups and mercy ministries.
Our response as Christians must be for the church to move into the schemes and council estates, to see new, healthy, vibrant, gospel-preaching churches established in these communities – a local church meeting the needs of local people while living side-by-side with them.
That’s why Mez McConnell, Director of 20schemes, wrote The Least, the Last & the Lost. This new book is not only a look at the history of poverty in the UK, but also a call to action for the church to reach the unreached in the housing estates along the road with the life-transforming power of the gospel.
