Keeping Faith in Fundraising by Harris Peter;Wilson Rod J.K.;

Author:Harris, Peter;Wilson, Rod J.K.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Eerdmans

OFFERING OUR STORIES

CHAPTER 10

Peter’s Story

Contradictory views within my family formed my own attitudes to money, giving, and then fundraising, as I suppose they have done for many others. The class system still played a major role in British childhoods of the 1950s and ’60s, and my family had effectively formed around two classes. My father came from London and a privileged background but one that, like Rod’s, had inherited paradoxical and conflicted views about how wealth was earned, spent, or given. His own father had become a Christian I know not how, but within essentially Brethren spirituality; the fault-lines within that particular section of the church can be traced back to the conflicts and varied currents that made themselves felt in the earliest days of the Reformation.1

This particular strand of the British church was in some senses at the cutting edge of determined discipleship in the 1930s, when much of the Anglican Church was languishing under the influence of liberal theology and Freemasonry. While my father moved more into the theological mainstream in adult life, finally becoming an evangelical Anglican after a short spell with the Methodists—a typical middle-class trajectory—the different tracks remained in parallel rather than merging. And another influence played a major part in forming his responses to all things financial. The austerities and losses of those who lived through World War II, when he was a pilot on bomber squadrons, gave him a wry perspective on the thoughtless and rapidly growing wealth of my generation as we lived the postwar boom years. Add to the mix that he was an inventive engineer, whereas I was a student of literature and then theology, and there were plenty of grounds for reasonably amicable but mutual confusions.

My mother came from a humbler background, first in rural Bedfordshire and then in the Midlands, and was brought up Methodist and nonconformist in other senses too—her father, who sold soap around the coalmines of the East Midlands, was deeply suspicious of anything establishment. Politically she was liberal left while my father was soft-hearted right. As her circumstances improved along with that of many others in postwar Britain, she welcomed and enjoyed all that rising living standards brought. By nature highly gregarious and practical, she gladly took on the traditional role of homemaker, mother, and wife to a successful engineer. She seemed to have few questions about generously enjoying the rapidly growing prosperity that the Harold Macmillan (“You have never had it so good”) years brought to people in the Birmingham suburbs, which her Warwickshire village rapidly became. Celebration and austerity, the care of self and the needs of others, generosity of spirit and frugality, spending and careful stewardship, these were the poles of endless family discussion and complicated financial decisions. It did not make for a particularly integrated idea of how to make my own lifestyle choices.

I was brought up with the typical British public-school attitudes of self-reliance and independence. So I had little sympathy for those who might be needy; within my small world it all made sense that hard work brought rewards.

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