Building an Academy

Chapter 4 focuses on the relations between Riverside Church (open evangelical) and the local schools it was involved in running, situating this in relation to broader debates about faith schools, neoliberalism, and social class. The chapter examines how members of Riverside Church described the moral and religious significance of their engagement with these schools, drawing on a romanticized narrative of evangelicals’ historic work with the children of the urban poor. The chapter demonstrates how these schools are of central moral significance for the church’s aspiration to affect both the local area and wider British society, and explores how the ways in which those at Riverside talk about the work of these schools at times enact moralizing power relations that are simultaneously held in tension with the church’s inclusivist aspirations and self-understanding.