 Wel, yw yw hwn yn gwneud o'r teulu cynghorau gweld wrthuedol, ti'n gweld i'w hawdd mewn eich ddioled wedi'i ddodol, a'r awdurdod yw'r cyffredin iawn o'i gwneud o'r mynd o'r rhagorau. Wrth gwrs, ond, byddai'n gweithio'r amser o'r gymhau i deilol i'r ddiwyllwn i'r cherdd hybriddol. Felly, mae'r ddechrau yn rhan o'r llex yma yn y gyfnodd кли.. 5% o'r populatio yn Gweldon Wales yn ymddill yw'r llwyl Cynllun, Cyfraeg, yw'r Cyfraeg, Menysg, o'r Llywodraeth, 69% i'r Chrysdian yn ymddill, ac yn y gwaith yn dda i'r gael yn fwy hwn. Roedd yma yn bwysig o'r llwyl yma. Eich gwasanaeth gwybg o'r llwyl yma yn bwysig o'r llwyl llwyl. Roedd yn bwysig o'r llwyl Pentecostol. Mae Gwednaeth a Gweithiac Llygrinol, ac mae gwrthoedig yn gyntaf i gyd yn gweld lleiol. Rydym, gyda woedd Gweithiac Llygrinol yn gennym, yn y 40 ac 50, a oedd yn gweithio mewn ffordd a chneid wahanol, sy'n meddylu deall, yn y 60 ac ym 80 ac yw am wahanol. Arweig y gwrthoed yn gweld lleifatarol o Gweithiac Llygrinol mae wedi sydd yn gweld lleifatarol yn gweithio'r gwynd dylun, a o bobl o'i unrhyw angen i'r gweithiac Llygrinol. I estimate there are over 2,000 Pentecostal congregations in Greater London alone and most of those are black. Over the past 60 years and particularly in the past few decades, MBMCs have changed the religious landscape of London if you know where and when to look and listen. In this paper I want to consider what heritage means in the MBMC context. I expect in partial contrast to the experience of other post-migrant faith groups presented today, and no doubt you'll be able to draw out comparisons and I've been busy making notes from the papers that have gone so far, very much making that point really. I'll draw out some of the distinctives of MBMC heritage through considering the significance and character of their places of worship and the contested theological and ideological narratives that arise from their places. These narratives were evident in what is now a longitudinal case study of MBMCs in the London Borough of Suddeck, which is one out of 32 London boroughs that took place between 2011 and 2013, known as Being Built Together, which is the name of the project, and subsequently the Science of Wonder project, which is a follow-on in 2017 and finished last week. Just to give you a sense of where we're talking about right in the centre of London. What we found in that project, which was a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods, especially ethnographic, was that there were 240 new black majority churches identified in just that one borough, which was thought to represent the greatest concentration of diaspora African Christianity in the world at the time, with half of them in just one postal district. We talk about minority and majority, the question is where you are sometimes. With such concentration, space becomes very significant, hence a key focus of the study was a struggle to adapt to acquire suitable places of worship, often requiring change of use permission under English planning law. The planning issues emerging from this study were also addressed more broadly by the faith and place network and the policy briefing produced by that network, and quite a number of folk from that network are here today. It's a little bit of reunion, thank you very much Linda. NBMCs were located in shopfronts, warehouses, railway arches, businesses, industrial units, community centres, and shared and reused churches, and these groups often on the socio-economic margins of society. Signboards and banners on church exteriors striking church names, architecture inside and out, and media products were significant aspects of their materiality of their iconography and aesthetics. Just a moment to draw on one theorist, the French urban anthropologist and Jesuit, Michael de Certeau, assists thinking further about how these contested narratives arose in relation to place, and he may be familiar with his work. He was highly critical of the panoptic vision, or God's eye view, of urban planners that freezes the city in its gaze and therefore totalises the narratives of the city made up of a maritime immensity of practices in Brownian motion that are fractal in their irreducibility, quite a way with words, isn't it? But it reminds me of what Linda was saying earlier about the tension between narrative or metanarrative and the diversity of what happens, and the tension with those things, and de Certeau's work would appear to come down towards one side. So de Certeau emphasised the importance of everyday practices, walking, shopping, cooking, but especially walking, or ways of making do that are the street level experiences of a city, and in particular he distinguished between the strategies of the powerful that seek to control space and the tactics of everyday practice by ordinary individuals and communities that attempt to subvert those strategies and work to transform their places in sites that inform our story of MVMCs in Southwch. As the theologian Philip Sheldraig asks, channeling de Certeau, who was allowed a place in the story of the city, whose heritage is to be celebrated? The material form of MVMCs tells much of the story with its mix of adaptation, negotiation and resistance, drawing a little on Lily Kong's work there. If space produces culture, so space produces ordinary theologies in these different tones. While recognising de Certeau's aversion to this God's eye view, I want to be less dogmatic about the problems of the visual gaze embodied in maps whether literal or figurative, what is needed are multiple layered maps, including maps of the perceived other that are informed by street level practices. So this map, for example, shows the adaptation of the built environment at the borough scale, the northern half of Southwch borough, with MVMC concentrations particularly around clusters of lower cost premises suitable for change of use such as industrial estate units, business premises and shops. Such adaptations have a borough level impact in that the material religious landscape has been significantly reconfigured over the decades where change of use can mean that MVMCs inscribe their growth on the built environment as a legacy for the future. For example, MVMCs will nearly double the number of historic churches in the borough put together. These street level images give you some sense of a street level view, which indicates, as you can see, I think someone I was talking to a coffee break may have visited this industrial park, we'll see, but there are 14 churches I think listed on that part notice and various places on the old camp road and other parts industrial states that have very high concentrations of churches. And they have proximity very close to each other as another image here. So you can see, I think, three different churches on one road right next to each other. For example, the largest Pentecostal church now in the UK, the Redeemed Christian Church of God had 20 congregations in the borough as one critical church leader said from outside the borough, it means they will not only start a church on your doorstep, they'll start a church on their own doorstep. Theological and ideological narratives pile up around these places, albeit sometimes repelling each other as well as forming crossover narratives. So it's time to just look at some of those specific examples of narratives. In the ethnographic accounts, the MVMC leaders said they chose Southwch for apparently pragmatic reasons, such as convenient location, because it's relatively central if you're seen on the map, lower cost and the availability of adaptable premises. These reasons were embedded in thicker accounts of mission, of congregational geography, and of home or homeless nets. For example, the Redeemed Christian Church of God, their mandate is well known for saying, the aim is to plant churches within five minutes driving distance in every city and town. Such a mandate takes clear material form in the streets of Southwch. Pastors also spoke of the need to find a home from where their often highly dispersed congregation could find a home from home, as Ada Gamay has mentioned, and we've heard similar examples already this morning. This was evident in MVMC resistance, the Planning Authority Strategy, where direct challenges were made at public meetings. Lucy, who was working on behalf of a number of churches, said this at a public meeting. All we get told is we don't want you here, we don't want you here, we don't want you here, we don't want you here, and there's never really any information in a positive sense that we do want you here. So if you don't want churches to be taking over industrial properties and you don't want them in residential areas, where would you suggest that they look? This experience of homelessness was described by one plaster as being displaced, roaming and running about all over the place. Choosing a home was not just a matter of identifying with a geographical place, but a spiritual place that happened to be in Southwch. So Pastor Matthew said his people came from very far to a place where they feel connected to what's in that place and the leadership of that place, a place where God has led you to go and not for convenience. Adapted premises on the streets of Southwch are varying degrees of home for African Christian communities small over London and beyond. Perhaps similar significance is attached to minority faith buildings in other religious traditions too, as perhaps we've been hearing. These narrative exemplars then that I've begun to sketch out for you on a very mentioned mission and home were instances of the many complementary and conflicting and mostly explicit narratives for these NBMC concentrations, both theological and ideological. When they came from the pastors, as we've heard, they came from national black church leaders, from historic churches, from local communities through the planning response forms and through the local planning authority. And so I have a list of themes that tended to circle around the churches. As Deserto puts it, the city is the stage for a war of narratives. Narrative themes included battle, the battle to find a place for our home. Other themes give to the city the benefit of churches to their dispersed networks and increasingly local community as they become established. But also ecclesial and discipline, other churches commenting on why is there need for so many churches close to each other and also noting the aspects of competition between churches. In planning responses, the narrative is often these people are not from here, they're not our community. The churches are often in areas that are rapidly gentrifying and can provoke conflict and someone else wrote, they're a wandering tribe looking for a home. Planning authorities describe the groups sometimes in terms of noise, traffic and parking nuisance and the word nuisance is used. A loss of community immunity perhaps and suitable and unauthorised, perhaps planning permission has not been granted. In Ben Judah's interesting book about this is London, the poor pushed around and the invisible. These contested narratives indicate the degree to which the ideologies and theologies of place are about power and politics and finding ways of sharing a vision for what a city should be. This was evident in the way that place shapes and is shaped by NBMC theologies. Being homeless in rented and adapted places of worship meant that the pastors spoke of the difficulty of engaging with the local community without a stable base. The nomadic existence of some congregations amplified this problem. According to Pastor Solomon who saw such transience as consolidating the monoethnic, African and dispersed demographic which made local engagement very difficult. When a congregation finally settles down, he said, it is then difficult to overcome that history. In negotiating change of use permission with the planning authority and resisting some of their decisions, pastors use the language of war and fight, problem, difficult and even nightmare. What was significant about this negotiation however was how it shaped their theology. Firstly, black churches and planning authorities' notions of community were at odds with one another. Planning authorities typically have a local neighborhood notion of community whereas the black churches of necessity often work with a network understanding. Charitable status is only given to bodies that can demonstrate public benefit and community engagement is also advantageous for planning applications not least because neighborhood responses are sought as part of that process. Consequently, many black churches developed or emphasised their local community engagement activities which were even mentioned as conditions in their planning records and here's one extract of an example on the screen for you. Furthermore, planning conditions were placed on the hours of use which thus limited the length of services and the all night prayer meetings and had conditions on transport plans and cycle storage which was a form of environmental theology and there were limitations on percussion instruments and amplified music thus changing their worship practices. Although it is interesting when the planning condition says except for emergencies which we weren't sure what a worship emergency might be but through incentive then and law and tactics MBMCs and the planning authority produced a partially shared theology partially shared theologies covering incarnation, mission, community which we might describe as crossover narratives in the language of post secular discourse as Paul Cloak has put it. It brings out the hushed up voice of religion in the public square with a form of mutual transformation. I don't know how mutual it was to be honest but there's something there I think. More implicit theologies of place then could be read from MBMC iconography and aesthetics a focus for the following project, Science of Wonder while many faith groups wish to make places of the iconic aspirations as Kim Nott and others have argued they do this in different ways. The majority of MBMCs in our case study operated with an exterior functional aesthetic largely driven by necessity as they rented or bought buildings converted from other uses without traditional religious architecture. Theological identity was not invested in exterior aesthetics of design rather in aesthetics of practice obtained for example exuberant worship. The invisibility of some MBMCs but not their inaudibility I should say may be an intentional tactic designed to avoid attention from planning authorities and others and here perhaps just to illustrate an example of a church that one could easily miss on an industrial estate where it may indeed be a strategy on the part of planning authorities to zone such places of worship out of the way. For some struggling congregations the most permanent form of their materiality were their planning applications and responses a view that was given to us by the National Archive but there were significant exceptions to the functional aesthetic however especially their exterior signboards which reflected Pentecostal priorities through their church names, motos and designs sometimes in marked contrast the surrounding built environment and I have a few examples for you here I have so many pictures I can't really I was struggling to select them this morning the mighty pound underneath some Pentecostal themes here of freedom and of course of the Holy Ghost of the Holy Spirit and then we have some contrasts as well so we here have a church which is right on the old Kent Road by the old gasworks there and quite a few churches in shop fronts they actually owned the day nursery that was next door and yet a very rich interior often quite similar stars we found you can probably tell the difference between my photos and those of Chloe Dream Matthews who you see here who was a photographer from the Tate Modern who did exhibition on new black majority churches and so forth the Russian are being the Tate Moderns and the former industrial premises so we have a lot in common Chloe pictures much nicer than mine here we have an example of the industrial estate I showed you earlier something worn by a particular branch of the churches the Aledora churches and some of the contrasts in terms of dress and environment that one might see around the streets of Southwch and here at one of the larger churches in the borough the dress of MDMC congregants on the often rich interiors of the premises amplify the contrasts well giving physical expression to an aspirational theology that might be variously termed holistic, liberative or prosperity search signs might be read as resisting narratives that seek to confine MDMCs to the margins of society or the church our analysis of the signs also suggest that the key function was as an African Pentecostal identity marker that proclaims here we are and hopefully to stay so just a few concluding reflections firstly heritage taking that restricted sense of the preservation of buildings currently has limited scope it would seem for MDMCs they are mostly too new relatively often rented and if owned rarely purpose built so the architectural interest may be limited except where they may have taken over historic church buildings or for some of the older Caribbean majority church buildings the first BMC in the UK was founded in 1906 in the Southwch however and this June is the 70th anniversary of the Windrush arrival where we are being encouraged to celebrate the heritage the line then between new and historic becomes quite thin it seems apparent then that MDMCs are here to stay in the UK and their conversion and adaptation of industrial units shops and business premises cinemas and bingo halls demonstrates their own vernacular religious design and architecture albeit often within significant constraints I say that slightly nervously with so many architects here secondly heritage as this case study is hopefully demonstrated as more than just the buildings but also the contested narratives that are intertwined with their places as I've already heard today Theologically speaking heritage is understood as a gift from God both spiritual and physical including people and places pastors spoke of their places as such a gift often framed in terms of a physical and spiritual battle as a site of struggle seeing tactics as a form of bearing witness heritage in this broader sense indicates valuing physical presence of a faith community of making space for the story of minority faith communities until relatively recently MDMC stories were rarely heard in the public square and often when they were they were often negative but there have been some exceptions to that in terms of archiving and I can talk about that if people are interested later democratising heritage question then becomes who tells these stories who preserves them and in what ways my MDMCs own a heritage agenda and thirdly drawing on our faith and place network experience while MDMCs have their own distinctive histories in terms of heritage they resonate with experience of many other minority faith groups as hopefully has become apparent although at different phases of their migrant or post migrant journey and therefore I suggest they have a distinctive contribution to make to the minority faith heritage discourse thank you