by Philip M. Burgess, Ph.D.

These are excerpts from a speech given by Dr Burgess at a fundraising dinner for Anglicare in Sydney on June 29, 2007. For the full transcript visit. Also there is website on the Clapham sect

“I like what you do because what you do represents the essence of compassion – which is primarily about actions, not primarily about feelings.  Compassion is about action verbs:

• doing things for people that they can’t do for themselves,
• helping people where assistance is needed to live a full or better life,
• sharing in their suffering.

In his widely acclaimed book, The Tragedy of American Compassion (1992), Marvin Olasky reminded us that “compassion” is not about the emotion of “caring,” “sensitivity,” “sympathy,” or other such “feeling” words now typically used as synonyms. Compassion is not just about giving money. Giving money is important, and that is called charity. Charity is a key element that enables groups like Anglicare to practice the six mercies on our behalf. Compassion is certainly not about button-holing political authorities to spend more money or to legislate new programs. That’s called lobbying and it has an important place in democratic governance – but it is not compassion.

Compassion is, as the 1834 edition of Webster’s dictionary said, “suffering with another.” So, compassion is about “doing.” Olasky reminds us that compassion, at its root, is about “personal involvement with the needy, suffering with them, not just giving to them.” Compassion is about one person personally involved in helping to meet the needs of another person…dramatically personified by foster parents. To paraphrase the Apostle James, “Caring without deeds is not caring at all.”

Deeds are important. As the sociologist Rodney Stark documents and argues so persuasively in his important book, The Rise of Christianity, it was the deeds of the early Christians – assisting the sick during several First Century plagues and other acts of love and caring – that accounts for the rapid rise of a tiny and obscure messianic movement on the edge of the Roman Empire and how that movement dislodged classical paganism and became the dominant faith of Western civilization. Put another way, deeds trumped doctrine to account for the rapid spread of the Christian faith.

I also like the methods and strategies used by Anglicare to go about changing lives and communities – not just by good works but also through community partnerships that include churches, business enterprises, non-profits and other institutions in the wider community. Strong democracies require a strong civic order, and from all accounts Anglicare plays an important role in knitting together the fabric of the civic order in this community. That’s what I would like to focus on today – building what I call civic leadership networks, like Anglicare, to change lives and communities.

Let me talk about this in cultural terms. Though both the US and Australia are societiescharacterized by great ethnic diversity – a diversity that is an important part of our strength and our capacity for renewal. Still, both societies have deep roots in the Anglo-Saxon tribe which includes a Judeo Christian worldview. That means we have a lot in common – including a common heritage. When you have a common heritage, you also have common heroes.

• From Winston Churchill to the Beatles
• From Abraham Lincoln to Bono and U2
• And what about Banjo Patterson or Steve Irwin…or Rolf Harris

These are all names that are well known in the cultures of the US and Australia – and, of course, in the UK.

I might have mentioned the late Sir Donald Bradman, the great Cricketer, but I have been here 23 months and still can’t get the hang of Cricket – so I’m not going there. But I came here today to talk about another common hero. He may be less well known than Churchill or Lincoln or even Don Bradman. But he is no less important – and this year of 2007 is the 200th anniversary of one of humankind’s greatest achievements, where he was a key leader.
I am talking about abolitionist Parliamentarian WilliamWilberforce

• born in 1759,
• entered Parliament in 1787 at age 28, and
• laboured for 20 years to end British involvement in the slave trade that was “legal, lucrative and brutal”6 until it was abolished in 1807; and another 26 years to abolish slavery in the colonies, achieved in 1833.

Wilberforce was a man small in stature but huge in his impact – described by a contemporary as a shrimp of a man who became a whale when he opened his mouth. Wilberforce was the guiding spirit behind a group called the Clapham Circle, one of the mostinfluential political and social reform networks of his time…actually of any time in modern history, since the advent of modern democracies.

The Wilberforce network was named after the town of Clapham in Greater London. Wilberforce often used Clapham as a gathering place for dinners and discussions among distinguished friends and influential allies. In a way, Wilberforce was an early practitioner of the marketing concept of “touch points” – finding as many opportunities as you can to make personal and emotional contact with your customers, or in the case of Wilberforce, to engage with members and potential members of the coalition you are building to change the political culture of Great Britain.

The Clapham Circle grew to include many people over time. Still, there was a hard core of friends who drove change – not just in the cause of abolition but other social reforms as well. And the friends came from all walks of life and represented all politicalpersuasions – from what today we would call the socialist left to the conservative right.

The core members of the Clapham Circle included:

•  Josiah Wedgwood – of Wedgwood pottery fame – and the creator of the famous plate showing a slave in chains with the plaintive but disarming inscription, “Am I not a man and a brother?”
• John Newton – a former slave trader and author of the hymn Amazing Grace.
• Thomas Clarkson – perhaps the greatest and the most overlooked of all the abolitionist activists, whom the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “a moral steam engine” and “a giant with one idea”. Clarkson was a man of colossal achievements who had a genius for organization, imaginative publicity, along with innovative methods and techniques for investigating social phenomena – methods that now go under the heading of “policy analysis”.
• Henry Thornton – a banker and financial genius who gave generously to support the work of the Clapham Circle.
• Zachary Macaulay – philanthropist and estate manager in the West Indies who was disgusted by Jamaican slavery and whose financial support was also key to the work of the Clapham Circle,

The work of the Claphamites inspired a broad agenda of politicaland social reforms in late 18th and early 19th century England – including:

• a ban on bull fighting and bear baiting,
• suspension of the lottery,
• prison reform,
• improved working conditions in factories,
• banking reform,
• setting higher standards of morality for public officials and politics.

The Claphamites passed more than 70 reforms over a half century, setting the stage for the Victorian Age and for the many political and social reforms that marked that period of history – not only in the UK but also in America and later in Australia.

Wilberforce and the Claphamites are also important for another reason: Guided by Scripture and a faith-centered approach to life, they were the first modern social reformers to use facts and data to support their political and social reform arguments. They pioneered what today goes under the heading of “policy analysis.”

Examples:

• public opinion polls– used to assess changing “sentiments” of the people about the slave trade and slavery in the colonies.
• systematic surveys and interviews of eyewitnesses – e.g., seamen and ships’ surgeons – about the squalid conditions surrounding the transport of slaves;
• testimonials – e.g., of seamen who had witnessed the squalor and brutality on board the slave ships or testimony of slaves who had been beaten.
• “before” and “after” studies used to make a case – e.g., by have people to count the slaves boarding a ship and others to count those disembarking, Claphamites were able to establish how many slaves died in transit from Africa to the West Indies in the Caribbean. By also counting the number of British seamen who died, they showed that the slave trade was not just immoral, it was also uneconomic.
• books and pamphleteering – including books by Wilberforce and Clarkson that became national best sellers.

The Clapham Circle also pioneered what are today commonly-used approaches to “movement politics” or “issue campaigns” by political parties or special interest groups. These include:

• the petition – to exert pressure on Parliament. At one point Clarkson produced a petition from Manchester with more than a 11,000 names – more than a fifth of the city’s population at the time.
• the boycott – for example, a pamphlet by William Fox advocating a boycott of West Indian sugar that had been grown on plantations using slave labour.
• campaign buttons – e.g., with the inscription “Am I not a man and a brother?” on the pin.
• campaign posters – e.g., a diagram of a slave ship (the Brookes) showing the gruesome and revolting reality of 482 shackled slaves packed like sardines into the hold of the ship. Known as The Print, “the diagram was one of the most effective pieces of propaganda ever produced and came to hang in many homes.
• arm bands – including bracelets and pendants worn especially by women, who did not have the right to vote, so they could show their solidarity with the cause.
• “photo opps” or dramatic “show and tell” examples of the brutality of the slave trade by collecting manacles, leg-irons, whips, thumbscrews, and the like.

The Clapham Circle also pioneered the use of voluntary societies and organized advocacy groups to advocate causes – such as:

• (the first) Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
• Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery (later called the Anti-Slavery Society),
• The Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor
• The Society for the Reformation of Prison Discipline
• And many missionary organizations such as The Church Missionary Society and the Society for Missions to Africa and the East.

So what are the lessons from this remarkable group of faithcentered social reformers. I have been an amateur student of the Clapham Circle for many years now, and I think the lessons are huge.

First, effective social reform is often backed by a movement, andmovements are driven by leaders with ideas. It’s another example of the old notion that “ideas have consequences”. In the case of the Clapham Circle, the organizing idea was that part of the Judeo-Christian worldview that calls us to love our neighbour and make the world a better place.

Second, effective social reform is not just about the cold pricklies of facts and data. It is also about the warm fuzzies of social engagement – finding ways to truly connect with people and to help them understand and bring them along.

Third, there are lessons related to what I would call the organizational requirements of social reform.19 You need to have organization to make things work. And from the experience of the Clapham Circle, I draw four requirements of an effective civic leadership network. These include:

•  Networks or forums for direction – and priority-setting associations that are inclusive and diverse, reflecting important and influential segments of the community;
• Analytical skill – e.g., policy analysis or an action-research capacity for problem identification and analysis;
• Advocates – i.e., campaigners, activists, elected leaders or other people who can make things happen, get things done, deliver;
• Money – i.e., a capital support base that is stable, dependable, and diverse.

Fourth, there are lessons about how we think about the communal and stewardship aspects of a Judeo-Christian worldview. The work of the Clapham Circle over nearly 50 years is a stark reminder that God’s Word is not just about personal salvation and spiritual growth. Our faith calls us to pay attention to all of God’s Creation…that’s why we pray, “thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, in Earth as it is in Heaven…”

In the words of Abraham Kuyper, a Dutch reformed pastor who was also a theologian, scholar, journalist, educator and, for a time, prime minister of the Netherlands, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which the Lord…does not cry: ‘Mine!’”

Today, unfortunately, we have a tendency to privatize our faith and compartmentalize our view of the world.  Too often, we condemn and withdraw from the culture – including the arts and entertainment, which, in earlier times, were powerful conveyers of the faith.  Too often we abandon the public square and retire from what US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes called “the action and passions” of our time.  Or we treat religion as a ritualistic activity that doesn’t much matter to everyday life – except perhaps in times of joy (like marriages), ritual celebration (Christmas, Easter), tragedy, suffering or death.

When we privatize our faith by focusing primarily on our personal salvation while ignoring communal issues and obligations of stewardship – and when we compartmentalize the world into separate domains of faith, work, parenting, recreation, and commerce, to name a few (which we then try to “balance” – as in “I lead a “balanced life”), we say, in essence, that there are parts of ourselves and parts of our life – indeed, parts of Creation – that God doesn’t care about. From Scripture to Kuyper and from C.S. Lewis to Francis Schaeffer and Reinhold Niebuhr we know this is not true.