Whenever the term “postcode lottery” is used, it’s always as something we don’t want. The idea is that the exact place you live should never determine the quality of your healthcare, child’s education, your entitlement to a particular benefit or the amount of taxation you have to pay.
So journalists love Hazelbourne Road in London. It’s the ‘postcode lottery’ in one street. Grab a camera. Photograph some local residents and you have instant outrage.
The odd-numbered houses on one side of Hazelbourne Road sit in the London Borough of Lambeth. Here the council tax for Band D properties is £1502. On the other sunnier side of the street, the even numbers are in Wandsworth, where the equivalent tax is £824.
Council tax is a postcode lottery and wildly unfair, shrieks the journalist. Living in 13 rather 12 leaves you nearly £700 out of pocket! That’s £7000 over ten years. Thus, you are normally cajoled into feeling a burning sense of injustice about this, even though people moving onto this street are clear about which borough they will be living in, and the rates of council tax. And, of course, everyone knows that if you want to reduce your bills, you could just leave London altogether. Life in rural Northumbria is much cheaper with much better views. How is that fair?
A Solution No-one Wants
There’s one easy fix for this particular situation that no-one is terribly interested in listening to: Lambeth could cut their Band D council tax to £824. The residents of Lambeth could insist their councillors do that – but not enough of them want to for it to happen. Or the people of Wandsworth could insist their council raise the tax to £1502.
The normal solution that is suggested, of course, is that central government should step in and dictate what local councils charge to extinguish this postcode lottery. Wouldn’t that be fairer? In one sense, yes. Ignoring the wishes of people in both Lambeth and Wandsworth is, at least, fair and consistent. But is it more just? It’s certainly less democratic.
Drawing the Line
This hardy political perennial reliably generates a sense of injustice because it is derived from a deeper human issue: the hatred of boundaries. The moment a rule is made, or a line is drawn or a threshold established, we look for the exception or the marginal case that will show the boundary to be some arbitrary piece of tyranny that should be scrapped completely and immediately.
Watch some kids play a game – and they will establish the rules very carefully. This tends not to come from an innate sense of justice. It’s more to restrict their conscientious opponents whilst gaining an unfair advantage by circumventing the newly established rules with some loophole.
In a Christian context, the line drawers and the rule keepers in the New Testament are normally the bad guys. Those who fret about the size or weight of objects on the Sabbath don’t come out of the stories well. In the Gospel of John, two of the seven signs are performed on the Sabbath – as I explain in my Water into Wineshow (now available to stream). We are invited to find these nit-pickers ludicrous and note that these are the people that had Jesus killed.
In or Out?
So where, if anywhere, should we draw boundaries when it comes to Church membership? That’s what Barry Cooper and I have been having words about on the latest episode of our podcast. When we look at the Early Church, which we assume to be halcyon days, we don’t see much about membership forms, electoral roles or coffee rotas. And isn’t it more inviting and welcoming to newcomers to have no barriers to entry? Who needs rules, or in-groups?
The upside of the Church of England is that everyone is welcome. You will not be refused entry, and when you step up to the Lord’s table to receive bread and wine, you cannot really be excluded without getting a bishop involved. It’s the national Established Church.
The Church of England is determined to grow, and wishes to back chaplaincies and new worshipping communities. But what is a worshipping community? They sound more informal, don’t they? But what are the expectations and obligations of being part of one? How does word and sacrament operate within that framework? It is really not clear.
The temptation is always to slacken off the rules, or get rid of them entirely. But we must bear in mind that we are image-bearers of God. And that drawing boundaries and separating things is a divine activity. Look at the first three days of creation in Genesis 1:
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night…. And God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so… And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so.
There’s lots of delineation going on there, isn’t there?
It doesn’t stop there. The Mosaic law makes all kinds of distinctions on clean and unclean animals, and explains how the Israelites can be clean and unclean in that way that, to us, appears arbitrary.
This isn’t all wiped away in the New Testament. There are clear injunctions to exclude false-teachers and have nothing more to do with them. But how do we do that? With discernment. We need divine wisdom.
Again, we find this theme which begins in the very beginning of Genesis (which means ‘beginning’). Here we prematurely reached for the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The tree was something that we would have been allowed to eat from in time – when we needed to make those distinctions but we kicked against the restriction and the rule. The solution to this is not to ‘scrap the rules’ in some kind of childish utopianism.
There is further guidance on how Church governance emerges from the New Testament, and so I recommend listening to Jonathan Leeman from 9Marks run Barry and I through it all, and explain how a church might come about from people washed up on a desert island – and how we could exclude Barry. Have a listen here.
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And if you’re new here, I wrote about the Tree of Knowledge over here:
And while we’re about it, what was Adam supposed to do?