At the Heart of the Neighbourhood

A former Methodist superintendent has told an influential parliamentary group of the essential work of churches in local communities following the publication of a groundbreaking new report.

The Revd Canon Ian Rutherford, who held the superintendent role in Manchester, spoke to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Faith and Society (APPG) in Westminster on 8 September 2026 after the Heart of the Neighbourhood report was released by Gather Movement.

The research found that churches across England are offering a huge amount of community services including food provision, debt advice, mental health and well-being support, family-support activities, loneliness and social isolation initiatives and crisis response.

If these results are representative of England’s 33,000 churches, this would mean that a quarter of a million essential services are being delivered regularly by churches and Christian charities across England.

The Revd Rutherford, who spoke to the group and is part of the Gather Movement, said he was keen to stress the importance of collaborating with the public sector and charities in helping communities.

He said: “My speech said that we play our part among others, we aren’t the answer but only part of the answer and we have to make sure we work cross-sector on all of this.

“People say to you ‘how much are the Church doing?’ and you need to give some empirical data and that’s the thing we’ve never really had.

“My premise has always been that it’s not enough to just have compassion, you need to have campaigning to get policy change.”

During his time in Manchester, the Revd Rutherford worked closely with then Mayor, and now Prime Minister, Andy Burnham on homelessness among other issues.

He said: “For a lot of people at the meeting there is a strong civic engagement, but for others they’ve never really told their local authority about some of the work that is being done.

“My relationship with our now Prime Minister, when he was Mayor, was such that his argument has always been ‘wouldn’t it be amazing if we could, as a local state, cover the core cost of these situations’ and that they shouldn’t all be done voluntarily.

“He was basically saying that these services need to be funded. We have seen that happening in Greater Manchester and now we will hopefully see it across the country.”

He added that perceptions had changed about the role of churches in helping communities.

He said: “MPs asked if there had been any suspicion around the role of the churches in this provision.

“Maybe 15 years ago that was the sort of thing we were hearing, but now, people realise that they need us and realise what we’re doing.

“The main one was ‘you’re only in this to proselytise’. But the answer is that you are only doing this work to show God’s love.

“These services have to be opened to everyone, not just the Christian community, and available to people whether they have faith or none.”

Gather Movement is a faith-based charity working in over 150 cities and towns, involving over 8,000 churches and charities who are working together and alongside other partners to see places transformed.

Roger Sutton, CEO of Gather Movement, said: “Churches have long been part of the fabric of local communities. What this research does for the first time is to show, with evidence, just how widespread and relied upon this work is.

“This isn’t about belief – it’s about what is happening on the ground in communities every day.”

Dr Jo Blodgett, quantitative researcher, and Dr Fran Harkness, public health researcher, added on behalf of Kohlrabi, who independently verified the research: “This research makes visible a level of community provision that has previously been underestimated.”