The Rev Canon Dr Jennifer Smith - 26/08/2026

Available for over a year

What makes a good home? Surely safety, fresh cool air, heating that works. The means to make food and be clean. To choose a colour for the wall, or welcome a guest and put on music? It is news to no one that good housing is one foundation of a community in which neighbours not only notice when someone is ill but knock on their door to check. This week we hear about national investment in new social and affordable homes, much needed – but also of young people turning 18 and ‘age[ing] out of care overnight,’ deprived of personal support with devastating effect even if given the keys to a flat. Clearly, a good home is more than an empty room with a lock on the door. Acts 2 spoke of the early Christians sharing bread and possessions, and opening their homes to one another. Household was not just for private safety, but neighbourly welcome. From their founding, the goal of organisations like the Methodist Leysian Mission among many others was never to have autonomous households behind locked doors. Their goal was neighbours living well alongside one another, helping one another with the support of the church. Without for a second romanticising the past, the hope was that someone on their own would have a place to go and table to eat at, and something to do that was needed. Isolation was as acute and more then as now, but building community still takes more than social housing, however important. I think of a church member in the council flat she has finally moved into with her teenaged son – her pride shows when you walk in. For close to seven years that Mum and son lived in a succession of bedsits in shared accommodation, officially homeless. They did their best to make a home in those rooms too, not least through the church, giving much more help and support to others than they ever received. But I know how many school nights the son stayed with church members or waited for his mum to finish work because she couldn’t know day to day who else would be living in the house where they slept. Last week her son got a strong set of GCSEs – he will go on to A levels – I give thanks for his mum, and all the teachers and friends who have stood by him and others like him. And, our work is clearly not done while one other slips through the cracks of our collective good intention. We all need good homes – what makes one? What always has: love, safety, neighbours, purpose, and hope.