Care-ful and car-less: towards a pedestrian ministry.

We find ourselves involved in ways of 'doing church' in which car use has become thoroughly embedded. We also find ourselves questioning the contribution of our ways of life to the considerable environmental challenges we face. The way that Christian ministry is conducted must also be scrutinised. In ministerial terms, the car had been a boon: it made pastoral visiting and various parochial tasks quicker or easier and it has allowed the consolidation of benefices and parishes. For lay Christians, greater choice was opened up to attend and participate in churches that nurtured 'their' kind of spirituality or offered ministries (e.g. youth work) that a family felt it needed at a particular time. The consequences of car ownership. Car ownership structures costs and benefits in particular ways: a large capital outlay relative to ongoing costs of running and rapid depreciation. Therefore, 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. This can fluctuate, of course; there has been a tendency for operating costs to form a larger proportion of total costs while the costs of public transport have risen comparitively over time1. Cars have increased opportunities to shop, go out, socialise, work and so forth and have also made everyday travel apparently quicker and more convenient. Increased geographical range makes it possible to build facilities for mass public use (and economies of scale ) further away from cramped town and city centres. 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. Local congregations are no longer the only possible options for churchgoing or membership, most churches to some degree draw from a wider area than the parish or local community. One consequence 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. There are also 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. Car ownership and greater mobility become a positive reinforcement loop. Those outside the loop -the poorest and those unable to drive for various reasons- 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 so reinforces the impetus towards wider car ownership which in turn deprives public transport of further revenue, and so on round a vicious cycle. 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.
1

See

http://www.psi.org.uk/ehb/docs/motoring-potter.pdf

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. The main thing to remember is that the burning of mineral oil put carbon dioxide that had mostly been taken out of use during the carboniferous era back into earth's atmosphere. Within a few hundred years we have released what took millennia to 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. Road transport is currently responsible for 21% of the UK's carbon emissions, and we should note that it is rising -the only rising figure in our energy economy apart from aircraft emissions. Our car dependent lifestyle is helping to drive climate change2. Social consequences of car culture The car, following Marshall McLuhan3, extends our geographical range. It makes possible suburbanisation and exurbanisation4 - the expansion of commuter villages or the take over of rural communities by 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. Shopping and entertainment can be relocated out of town but that relocation reinforces social exclusion of poorer people5 The effect of car-driven mobility is to bring people into geographical proximity when there is no relationship other than living nearby. Things 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 is less day to day meeting and less sense of a shared stake in the development of the geographical community. Road building changes the human geography: dividing communities with rivers of traffic, connecting communities to others in new ways; sometimes the 'rat run' of drivers trying to avoid congestion on other roads makes formerly safe streets more accident-prone. House values may change and then demographics. Perceptions of safety change: one is 'safer in a car' and so using a car to take children to school is 'preferable' to walking, a decision which, when aggregated, reinforces congestion. Technologies affect not only what they enable people to do but also the mentalities of users. George Monbiot draws out the mentality aggregated from individual responses6 to car use which contains most of these characteristics and leads to a cultural mood: ... 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 car is slowly turning us, ... into a nation which recognises only the freedom to act, and not the freedom from the
2 3

http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/statistics/globatmos/gagginvent.htm McLuhan, Marshall Understanding Media Routledge ISBN: 0415253977] 4 see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exurban for further details 5 E.g. 26% of UK households do not have access to a car. See section 2 of this report: http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/dft_control/documents/contentservertemplate/dft_index.hcst?n=14133&l=4 6 There will be drivers (readers of this article, I hope) who consciously fight these attitudes in their own experience

consequences of other peoples actions.7 Our cultural choices steer the social effects of available technologies, Bill McKibben's words also sum up the arguments so far; ... the roots of climate change lie not just in the technological infrastructure weve 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 Economic and health issues. Studies have shown that road-building actually increases traffic9. Congestion contributes to pollution and climate change (because drivers rarely turn off engines whilst stationary in jams). 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 price of driving they are not part of the decision about whether and when and how to drive. These costs 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 11 Some of these externalities are in the form of health costs: relating to mainly to respiratory problems12 and accident rates but also other pollution issues. These externalities constitute ...a massive hidden subsidy for private transport, ... Speed cameras, according to the governments study, now save the country 258million in annual medical bills13. It has been estimated that the ecosystem delivers $33trillion-worth of services to humanity per year. While there are issues about how such things are calculated, they are not enough to make that figure insignificant14. We know that the costs of climate change will be enormous: 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. While they can't all be laid on the bonnet of the car, a significant proportion can. Cars and Christian witness. 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
7

George Monbiot, http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/12/20/the-anti-social-bastards-in-our-midst/ accessed 21/12/2005 8 Bill McKibben, Adbusters Magazine, Dec 20052 http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/63/Change_Who_You_Imagine_You_Are.html accessed 18/01/2006 9 SACTRA Report, Dept of Transport, Trunk Roads and the Generation of Traffic 1994 ISBN 0-11-55 1613 -1 10 Pearce, 1993: quoted in http://www.comu.edu.tr/Turkce/Akademik_Birimler/Aras_Uyg_Mrk/bozcaada/bildr/42.htm Accessed 22/12/2005. 11 I would like to acknowledge with gratitude the help of environmental consultant Simon Collings for help in finding more up to date figures. www.simoncollings.co.uk 12 Road transport is the main source of pollution in most air quality hotspots and the poor suffer disproportionally from this and also from road traffic accidents, in particular children. See further http://www.socialexclusion.gov.uk/page.asp? id=7 and especially http://www.socialexclusion.gov.uk/downloaddoc.asp?id=229 13 George Monbiot, http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/12/20/the-anti-social-bastards-in-our-midst/ , accessed 21/12/2005
14

For further investigation, http://www.ecosystemvaluation.org/ and an overview of ecosystem valuation at http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003494.html

done, works against much of what we are attempting to achieve in terms of community development, social cohesion and caring for God's good earth. Our generation is in the process of bequeathing dark ages to our descendants. 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. If only the churches could bequeath a legacy of earth care and being part of the solutions to climate change. In apologetic terms it would be important, that our great great godchildren can point to the church of our generation and say that we were at the forefront of making necessary changes and challenging vested interests that preserve the global-warming status quo. Pedestrian ministry. We tend to assume that ministry with cars is good and that without a car there is something missing. It is time to challenge that thinking and to affirm and even celebrate pedestrian ministry. many of the things that many churches seek 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. A pedestrian ministry can be closer to the community. A driver is physically separated from the local environment and focussed on traffic, road signs and speed cameras. 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. The things we notice as walkers-around-our-community tend to be things that are about what is happening that affects peoples lives more holistically. A pedestrian tends to be moving more slowly with more opportunities to look at what we are travelling through is not routed by traffic management systems away from interesting and important locations in our communities. Walkers are also more likely to use 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 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 church'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. 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. 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. Community requires commitment of the kind that the car tends to represent a flight from. The distancing created by car-use 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. The case is not here being made for geographical communities as unmitigatedly good or that dispersed community is without benefit. For a number of people, praying and engaging in contemplation while walking is a positive spiritual experience. In addition, the presence of the parish as we walk can itself be an occasion of, and useful information for prayer. The opportunity for reflection on visits, parish business or the morning's readings can be invaluable 'headspace'. In a time when obesity is a national concern and a concern also to clergy, a more pedestrian ministry is a good step towards a 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 car-driver may feel able to motor between widely disparate points for visits or other business. Walking may require 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. Balancing the is and the ought. Let's finish by acknowledging complexities. We cannot quickly undo the developments of the last century. Where we live, shop and spend our leisure has been shaped by the car and cheap oil. The placing of housing and facilities has been made long-term by concrete, stone and tarmac. We must live with what is even while seeking to alter it. The shape of pastoral care has had the car as its unspoken support and medium. Rural clergy deployment would be very different without cars. Perhaps locally ordained ministry would be now be normal without relatively cheap motoring. 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. 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 ways 15 16.
15

Practical tips for living without a car or just using it less; Anna Semlyen Cutting Your Car Use Totnes, Devon. Green Books, ISBN 1930098328. http://www.cuttingyourcaruse.co.uk/. 16 There's an interesting blog post and comments on giving up cars and costings and cycling at http://maggidawn.typepad.com/maggidawn/2006/02/ecological_foot.html#comment-14114116

It is not easy or often right either, simply to dump established commitments and 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. We may need to investigate car sharing, public transport, taxis and use of hire cars. It may even be that it is financially cheaper for the parish that 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 finances or whether it hinders ministry and mission. Andii Bowsher, Durham.