A Christian Vision for Housing

Rt Revd Graham Tomlin, the Bishop of Kensington, is a commissioner for the Archbishop’s Commission on Housing, Church and Community. Here he reflects on some of the key theological ideas underpinning their work.

During the restrictions brought on us by the COVID-19 pandemic, we have become more aware of the importance of our homes. Forced to spend more time in them due to lockdown, whether working at home, an inability to travel or from a reduced capacity to socialise, we have all probably thought about our homes – what we like about them and what we would like to change – more than ever before. Homes matter to us. Shelter is one of our most basic human needs, and to deny someone a good home is to strike at our very soul. As the Syrian architect Marwa al-Sabouni wrote, to lose our home is “losing your shadow in the world, your proof of being here, under the shared light of the sun.”

Since April 2019, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Housing, Church and Community has been meeting, thinking, visiting, exploring and discerning a vision for housing in our nation. We have been listening to those living in areas of housing poverty and deprivation, thinking about what good housing policy would look like, how we should use our own land as a church, what local congregations and individuals can do, and, underpinning all that, reading the Bible with the lens of housing and homes, exploring what a Christian vision of housing would look like.

The central conviction of this Commission has been that we need to build not just more houses, but stronger communities. Yet the question of the kind of houses we build goes a long way to determining whether we have good, strong communities, or whether we grow more isolated or estranged from each other.

The key question is this: how can we bear witness to the goodness of God and the gospel of Jesus Christ through the homes that we build and live in? While thinking through the roots of our own Christian faith, we have developed five core values, based in Christian theology, but also themes that emerged from our conversations with those who live in sub-standard housing. These are five factors or criteria, that emerge from both the story of the gospel and the voice of those who suffer from our housing crisis, that we believe makes for good housing.

• Good housing is SUSTAINABLE: it is a fundamental human calling to protect and to cultivate the created world in which we have been placed (Gen 2.15). The Christian doctrine of Creation requires that good housing does not gradually undermine the planet on which we live and which we are called to protect and to cultivate. It works in harmony with its local environment and over the long term, sustains the balance of the natural world in which it is placed.
• Good housing is SAFE: the story of the fallenness of the world reminds us that left to its own devices, a broken world will lead to broken people, relationships and landscapes. Housing policy will therefore require specific intervention to avoid some of the injustices and decay that will result from a care-less approach to housing quality or policy. It will make a priority of safety, so that houses are places we can live in with security and privacy from unwanted intrusion and violence.
• Good housing is STABLE: the Incarnation tells the story of God making his home with us, in a particular place and a particular time. God puts down roots in the world. Good housing policy creates stable communities, where, if they wish to and act in a neighbourly way, people are able to put down roots and build lives, families and neighbourhoods, free from the threat of dislodgment, not least because we tend to commit to places where we are likely to have a longer term stake.
• Good housing is SOCIABLE: in the establishment of the Church, the new community where all are one in Christ, growing together in unity and harmony, we see a vision of a renewed humanity, “looking to our own interests but each of us to the interests of the others.” (Phil 2.4). Our homes need to have enough space, not just for the needs of their inhabitants, but also to enable us to exercise hospitality towards our neighbours. Developments need proper community space beyond the home, to enable interaction and fellowship, and to build strong community bonds.
• Good housing is SATISFYING: the vision of the new creation we are given in the book of Revelation is a place of sheer beauty and delight, of colour, richness and harmony. Good houses are places we delight to come home to, that give pleasure and satisfaction, both to live in and to look at. Whether through design, or architecture, our growing technological skill needs to be directed towards building houses that we enjoy living in.

This kind of housing, reflecting the sweeping narrative of the gospel from creation to new creation tells the story of the gospel in the very fabric of our homes. Such housing will give people a taste of the coming home to which we are beckoned – the day when ‘God will make his home with us’ (Rev 21.3) even within the constraints of this fallen world. Whether as a test for a particular housing development, an individual design for a home, or for an overarching national housing policy, the more our approach to housing, and the actual homes we build over the coming years meets these criteria, the more we will have built villages, towns, suburbs and cities that will strengthen the bonds between us and enable us to live as God intended us to.

There is however one more factor. At the heart of the story of the gospel is the self-sacrificial death of Christ through which the world is saved. In Christian faith, Resurrection and life only come through sacrifice and death. Our national housing crisis will only be solved through an element of sacrifice voluntarily borne by all actors or partners in the housing sector. At present that cost, that sacrifice is unequally borne by those at the mercy of forces outside their control – those living in sub-standard, unstable and unsafe housing. This element of sacrifice needs to be embraced by all – developers, landlords, land owners, housing associations and so on. It is unrealistic to expect we can solve the crisis with everyone becoming richer. Life comes through death, and only with a resolve for this form of shared sacrificial love for one another, will we see resurrection and hope for a better future in the homes we provide and the communities they build.