The common sense driving local charity

Catherine Jupp and her friends give furniture to those who need it at no cost. Ryan Gilfeather explores what motivates them.

Ryan Gilfeather

Ryan Gilfeather explores social issues through the lens of philosophy, theology, and history. He is a Research Associate at the Joseph Centre for Dignified Work.

A group of people stand in front of the side of a van marked 'Furniture Friends.

Catherine Jupp and her Furniture Friends.

It will come as little surprise to the UK public to hear that Christians are involved in charity. In times of great need, several high-profile Christian charities offer help. For example, after the devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria last year, the UK’s Disaster Emergency Committee pooled the resources of 15 leading aid charities to provide relief. Of those charities, four explicitly identify as Christian: Tearfund, Christian Aid, CAFOD, and World Vision. Anyone following these efforts would easily grasp that Christians are involved in large-scale charitable activity that helps those in need.

Outside of the public gaze, however, are ordinary Christians serving the marginalised in their local communities. Around the country, they are running warm banks, food banks, and other enterprises helping those unable to provide for themselves or their families. Despite how hidden these efforts are, they make an enormous difference to their local communities. The collective impact of all these different groups is vast.

My colleague, Catherine Jupp is one of these faithful people. Catherine and I both serve our parish church in rural Hertfordshire, I as a priest and she as a lay minister. In her previous life, she taught in a secondary school in a challenging area. Now, alongside her ministry, she and her husband run a local charity called Furniture Friends.

Their mission is simple: to give furniture to those who need it at no cost. Day to day, this involves volunteers who work with them driving around in a van, collecting beds, sofas and other items from people who have no more use for them. They take calls from a network of social workers around Hertfordshire, asking for particular things for certain people. And, they go and deliver furniture to these individuals and families in need.

Catherine speaks of the challenging circumstances their clients live in: families living without any furniture. Furniture Friends makes a massive difference to these children who can now sleep on beds and families who can sit on a sofa. One recipient said to them,

“Yesterday all I had was a mattress and a camping stove, today I have a bed and a beautiful chair. I feel like a queen, thank you so much.”

A social worker praised their work with these words:

“I just wanted to let you know what a difference you have made to our families. I visited my client today and for the first time in four years the children were dressed and clean, the house was tidy and organized. Your help and donations have given this family a new direction and a sense of pride in their home which has had a huge impact on the children and their wellbeing.”

Over the past year, she has shared her concern about the huge increase in referrals as the cost of living crisis sunk its teeth in. From the outside, I see how they have responded to this increasing need. Working as hard as they can, they deliver a significant amount of furniture around the local area. Although they are one small charity, they have a significant impact.

She also often talks about what drives her to this work. Catherine is theologically trained and taught ethics for years, so she could offer a theologically complex account of her motivation if she wished. However, she has no need to. She simply says that it is the most obvious thing in the world that she ought to do this work. “It’s just what you do,” she says. By this, she means, that it is the clear outworking of her Christian faith.

I often hear this expression when speaking with Christians leading social justice enterprises and movements. When I dig a little deeper, they tend to say that growing up in Church, they regularly heard in sermons that serving those most in need comes hand in hand with loving God. Christians believe this because the Bible repeatedly expresses that God has a special concern for the poor and that we must too. When one hears this message week after week, year after year, it becomes common sense to us. Hence, when Catherine says she delivers furniture to those who most need it, because “It’s just what you do,” she means that for her, love for God and love for neighbour must always come together. It is for this reason that Catherine does this work, outside of the public gaze, which makes all the difference in the world to the many people she serves.

Article

Change

Character

Purpose

Virtues

14 May 2024

6 min read

Life is messy, take part

James Baker's political vocation sheds light on why character counts in this networked world.

Emerson Csorba

Emerson writes on geopolitics. He is also a business executive and holds a doctorate in theology.

Two men in seats adress a pyjamap-clad Ronald Regan.

James Baker, left, briefs a recovering Ronald Reagan, right, in hospital .

White House via Wikimedia Commons.

Few White House Chiefs of Staff have been better than James A Baker III. Nicknamed the ‘Velvet Hammer,’ Baker was originally a Democrat, and only introduced to politics in his forties. But he made up for lost time, serving as the original catalyst behind President Ronald Reagan’s time in the Oval Office. He later served as Secretary of State, helping maintain peace following the Cold War.

In their recent biography of Baker, The Man Who Ran Washington, Peter Baker (no relation to James) and Susan Glasser write that, when called out of his retirement to lead the Republican strategy in the Bush-Gore 2000 Florida vote recount, ‘Baker’s reputation was so formidable that Democrats knew they would lose the moment they heard of his selection.’ More precisely, Baker ‘was not defined by his era; he helped to define it.’

And yet, the calm, cool and collected former Texas lawyer was – by the end of his tenure as White House Chief of Staff – broken. In Chris Whipple’s The Gatekeepers, a history of American White House Chiefs of Staff, a former Reagan staffer reflects that in a conversation long after their tenures, ‘Baker’s eyes filled with tears. He told me what it had been like for him to be chief of staff in a White House riven by different philosophies and ideological outlooks. And every day various people would try to take Jim Baker out.’

Baker, a problem-solver and political moderate, battled with his more ideological counterparts for the ‘soul’ of the Reagan presidency. This battle was ‘more emotionally grueling and deeply painful than almost anyone around him knew.’ His struggles were a harbinger of the more divisive American politics to come. Surrounded by long-time Reagan loyalists, he was an unexpected selection for the Chief of Staff role. He ran the Gerald Ford and George Bush presidential campaigns against Reagan but was recognised by the Reagans as the right person for the job. Baker kept focused within the Reagan Administration despite team members undermining him.

Baker shows that responding to a call requires that a person engage in the world as it is. This realism helps us to reform the world through service.

Through his participation in the world, Baker reminds us that life is messy. This is especially the case when engaging in communities involving competition between multiple worldviews, philosophies, or ideologies. Keeping the ship steady amid such variation comes with emotional cost. But participation is better than withdrawal from the scene of action, and into the safety of technology.

Balancing between perspectives requires a personal sense of restraint. Peter Baker and Glasser note, for instance, that ‘one of the keys to Baker’s success over the years was knowing when to back off’ in meetings. This balancing is difficult. Baker succeeded in his political vocation in part because he participated in this swirling mix of perspectives, but the balancing involved suffering.

What can we learn from Baker on the messiness of life? What does he show us about the living-out of a vocation? Baker was clear-eyed about his calling: that of serving his friend Reagan (and afterwards his close friend George Bush). He put his strategy and negotiating skills to good use as part of a larger life project. This calling strengthened Baker’s persistence, despite the trials and tribulations of participation in the world. Baker shows that responding to a call requires that a person engage in the world as it is. This realism helps us to reform the world through service.

‘Once we remove ourselves from the flow of physical, messy, untidy life… we become less willing to get out there and take a chance.’

Sherry Turkle

How did Baker discover his political vocation? And what is a vocation? The philosopher Robert Adams defines vocation in his Finite and Infinite Goods as ‘a call from God, a command, or perhaps an invitation, addressed to a particular individual, to act and live in a certain way.’ The theologian Oliver O’Donovan defines vocation somewhat differently in his Finding and Seeking. He describes it as ‘the way in which the self is offered to us…. The course of our life that will come to be our unique historical reality.’ O’Donovan focuses on service, where vocation is ‘not a single function, but an ensemble of worldly relations and functions through which we are given, in particular, to serve God and realise our agency.’

Sometimes, as O’Donovan suggests, a calling captures our attention, even if we only know the immediate next step, as if stepping from a quayside onto a boat (a helpful metaphor used throughout O’Donovan’s work). For Baker, it was the death of his first wife that precipitated a call from his friend George Bush. In this conversation, Bush asked whether Baker would be interested in volunteering for a campaign, to help take his mind off his grief. What was initially a way to help keep his mind off a trauma became, over time, a life project.

Baker thought carefully about the world and the people around him as precursor to action. He epitomised the thinking of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who writes that individuals should participate ‘in the times and places which confront us with concrete problems, set us tasks and charge us with responsibility.’ We must remember that people are multidimensional. This is not easy, Baker as a case in point through his political vocation.

Unfortunately, while recognising this is a realm of considerable debate, aspects of our culture discourage genuine engagement in the world. Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, describes ‘networked life,’ where individuals use technological devices (we might think today of WhatsApp or Instagram) to withdraw from hard, in-person conversations. She says that people nowadays tend to communicate with others on their own terms. It is easy for people to engage – or disengage – others whenever convenient.

Yet, as Turkle writes, ‘Once we remove ourselves from the flow of physical, messy, untidy life… we become less willing to get out there and take a chance.’ Networked life is for Turkle an escape from the messiness of life. It prevents encountering others as they really are. This leads to weak personal foundations: personal characters built on sand rather than on rock. It helps to be tested by conflict with others that are different than ourselves. This testing helps to reduce narcissism, in which we think more about ourselves than about the wider world.

Marshall McLuhan, in his Understanding Media, reflects on the Greek word narcosis meaning numbness. The service of networked technologies, to which Turkle alludes, is in McLuhan’s eyes a worshipping of these technologies as God. This numbing via the worshipping of technology is contrary to Baker’s more engaged way of life – encountering others in person in their complexity.

We can remind ourselves that life is messy. What we think we see upon first impressions may evolve upon continuous examination. And what is previously unseen may become evident over time. Jesus states that ‘For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light’ and later, that ‘Nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known.’

The genius of James Baker was found not in academic intellect, but in his ability to understand others through real engagement in the world. This understanding of others, serving them, was the cornerstone of his vocation. Former White House speechwriter and now-columnist for the Wall Street Journal Peggy Noonan once commented – as reported in The Gatekeepers – that Baker ‘was a guy who didn’t seem to move forward with a lot of illusions about life or people or organizations or systems.’ Baker embraced the messiness of life, but also the importance of taking part to serve others and help restore the world.