Episode 18: Steve Chalke
Interview Date: 4 August 2020. Interviewer: Dr Jason Clark. Research and questions by Dr Simon Machin.
Rev Stephen Chalke MBE is a British Baptist minister, social activist, broadcaster and writer.
He founded the Oasis Charitable Trust in 1985, and has presided over its development as a provider of grass-roots social services in the United Kingdom and internationally across housing, healthcare and education.
A prolific author and former GMTV presenter, he has written on Christian Social activism, and Public Theology, and is now a regular contributor and commentator on television, radio and other media.
The founder of the Stop the Traffik global coalition and a former United Nations Special Adviser on Human Trafficking, Rev Chalke was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire in the 2004 New Year Honours “for services to social inclusion”.
Steve Chalke - Timed Intervew Summary
0:00 - 22:30 Family background and childhood
Steve was born in 1955 in Croydon. His mother was English and his father was an Anglo-Indian from Madras. The house where he grew up was not in a great condition, eventually being condemned and pulled down and the family moved to a street at one end of the Crystal Palace football ground. Steve is proud of his Croydon roots and that the term Croydonisation has entered the Oxford English Dictionary. His father encounters racial discrimination and struggles to get skilled work. He meets Steve’s mother working in a London Transport canteen. They marry and face family rejection. Even Steve remembers when his father is walking him to school, some people crossing the street so as not to have to pass him on the pavement. But he watches his parents negotiating this opposition with considerable graciousness. However, because of his mixed background, Steve always felt somewhat in exile. Yet it is a loving and devoted family.
22:31 - 45:11 Schooling and conversion (being saved in every conceivable way)
Steve attends Davidson Secondary Modern School, which he describes as a dump school with no social ambition for its pupils. The school offers no incentive to education or the opportunity to take ‘O’ levels or GCSE exams. His parents are both from cultural Christian backgrounds and they start attending a Baptist Church in South Norwood, and Steve joins them at first but stops attending Sunday services and as a teenager is attracted to the mixed youth group. Some inspiration comes from this Christian youth group. On the evening when Steve learns (through her friend) that an attractive and slightly older girl who attends the local grammar school has no interest in him, he makes a life-changing decision. Walking home up the street next to Crystal Palace football ground, he decides that the story that the church tells him about his potential is better than the story that his school tells him. So, he decides to believe the story that the church tells him and becomes a Christian. On arriving home, he tells his mother what he has done (and adds his ambition to become a Christian minister, create a school that is worth going to, a children’s home, and a hospital). His Baptist Church has no social gospel, but is really about a life insurance policy for life after death. Reflecting back, Steve wonders whether the unjust treatment that his father faced (and his grace), his mother’s incredible capacity for hard work (and her resolve) and his own experience of being mixed race are what have driven him. Recently when dealing with the Ministry of Justice, Steve tells them how his life could have turned out very differently, possibly with a turn to criminality.
45:12 - 1:19:06 Bible college
When still a teenager, Steve is encouraged by the young men who are running the youth group to try to get into Spurgeon’s, the theological college named for the great Victorian Baptist preacher, C H Spurgeon. He has a talk with the Principal of Spurgeon’s, who suggests that he gets some work experience. In his late teens he is interviewed again, and after the interview it is arranged for him to go to work with the Baptist minister David Beer at his Gravesend church. Steve is then admitted to Spurgeon’s College and trains with David, who is now at Tonbridge Baptist Church, for four years. The church community in Tonbridge and David mentor Steve in thinking big, with large programmes, employing staff, whereas Steve was used to a single minister whose focus was limited to preaching. Spurgeon’s was wonderful, but it was also a four-year class in becoming middle-class, and a training in applying the hymn-prayer sandwich. After training, David Beer invites him back, allowing Steve to experiment with enterprising ways of spreading the gospel. Later ideas in Oasis were trialed in Tonbridge Baptist which also provides the support group for his first experiment in social care, a hostel which will become the first project of the charity, Oasis.
1:19:07 – 1:31:22 The first Oasis hostel
Steve Chalke is offered a hostel in Croydon by a benefactor who is aware of his developing interest in providing Christian residential care. However, Steve just knows that his sphere of work should be in Peckham. After some negotiation, the property is sold and the proceeds are used to buy a hostel for young women at risk in Peckham and Oasis is formed as a charity to manage it. Oasis commences a journey of learning, often from its mistakes: a manual is produced for running the hostel which has to be torn up after four weeks, as it simply does not address the range of anti-social behaviours exhibited by the first residents. Rather than looking at housing issues independently, Steve and Oasis learn that a more holistic approach is necessary, that the outer journey into education and employment is of no use unless the inner journey into self-worth occurs at the same time.
1:31:23 - 1:40:19 TV career
Steve Chalke finds himself being interviewed live by ITV about Oasis’s new hostel at Waterloo. Sensing a media-friendly personality, its producer approaches him about a role on GMTV to be a sort of agony uncle. He then becomes a presenter on BBC1, is later given a political show on ITV and then makes a series on social entrepreneurship for Radio 4. He very much likes the people that he meets in the media, but he realizes after some time that his media commitments are slowing down the development of Oasis, so over time he slowly opts out of media work.
1:40:20 - 1:49:24 Maintaining a presence as a church minister
Steve becomes minister of Haddon Hall Baptist Church in Bermondsey, London on condition that Oasis can occupy office space there. Eventually Oasis outgrows its office space and Steve comes across Upton Chapel in Kennington Road near London Waterloo station. In 2003 Steve becomes minister there, and now adjacent to the church is the Waterloo Oasis Hub which has integrated a holistic approach to community development. Steve regards it as essential not to become para-church but to be the church.
1:49:25 - 1:59:00 Working with central and local government
Historically the non-conformist tradition that Steve came from was suspicious of government and politics. Steve believes it is essential to build a network of relationships and that you have to join the conversation to get the opportunity to speak. In his opinion the greatest compromise is not to be engaged. The main government criterion for disbursing grants is the quality of projects already being delivered on the ground.
1:59:01 - 2:10:33 Church community work
Steve has seen growing maturity in the response of the church to society. But Steve still thinks that the church needs to be more prepared to engage in the practical politics of social engagement. Oasis starts running schools in the slums of India, because of Steve’s ancestry. Then the opportunity arises to run academies in the United Kingdom through New Labour.
2:10:34 - 2:21:09 Stop the Traffik
Working in slum schools in India leads an associate of Steve’s to notice cases of child disappearance. The result is the development of a campaign to oppose child trafficking in India, Africa and the United Kingdom. A United Nations symposium in Vienna is planned and Steve is told that if he can get a million signatures of unheard voices, then it will be possible for Oasis to present a session at the symposium about child trafficking. Realizing that literacy is low in parts of the developing world, Steve gets consent for a million thumbprints to be submitted to the UN. Supported by a girl who has been trafficked, Steve and she speak at the symposium and as a result he is appointed as a special advisor to the UN.
2:21:10 - 2:28:4 “We cannot achieve what we cannot imagine”: The future of Oasis
Christianity remains the inspiration for Oasis, its nine habits being based on the life of Jesus, and representing the fruits of the Holy Spirit, but it is inclusive, employing people of all religions and none.