Introduction: organisations, volunteers and ethics

One of the key questions underlying the work of faith-based organisations (FBOs) is about the precise role of ‘faith’ in the working and achievement of non-governmental organisations (NGOs). In other words, what is the significance of the ‘f ‘ in FBOs? In this chapter, we introduce some research in the field of homelessness in order to explore some aspects of this question. To some extent the emergence of FBOs as an appropriate subject of investigation hangs on this question. The significant empirical trend of increased faith-based activity in particular social settings, serving particular groups of excluded people, has caused academic researchers to sit up and take notice regardless of the near-hegemonic assumption that religious ‘faith’ is a difficult concept in a secular academy. What role, then, does such faith play? We have to be very careful here in extrapolating impact from activity. Recent research by Sarah Johnsen (see Johnsen with Fitzpatrick, 2009; Johnsen, 2012, pp 295-98), for example, argues that many clients of services for homeless people do not differentiate between faith-based and secular services in their understanding of how they are served by particular organisations. This finding at least seems to challenge the idea that religious service providers are engaged in overt proselytisation (or at least if they are, their clients are not noticing it), but if marginalised social clients are not recognising the role of faith in these services, then how and why is it important? This chapter seeks to address this question in terms of the way in which paid workers and volunteers in services for homeless people represent some kind of faith-inspired citizenship and ethos that motivates their activity and their care for marginalised people. It suggests, then, that the significance of faith may be most evident in the motivational underpinning and performance of staff and volunteers in faith-based services.

This chapter draws on a wider-scale research project that has sought to investigate and explain the uneven spatialities of emergency services for homeless people in England. As part of this research we focused especially on the provision of shelters/hostels, drop-in centres and soup runs, seeking to understand both the co-constitutive relations by which services are initiated and sustained in particular places (see Johnsen et al, 2005a, 2005b; May et al, 2006) and their role in the wider performativities of the homeless city (Cloke et al, 2008).