In the days of Cardinal Manning, the Church was at the forefront of protest against poverty and poor working conditions. Could it happen again, with faith groups taking direct action as a means of promoting justice, fairness and human dignity?

You might think that in the edgy, urban streets of east London there is little to connect people with ancient Greek civilisation. Not much call, you would imagine, for the works of Ovid, or Plato, or Thucydides. But great stories of love and war and strife can still resonate, 2,000 or 3,000 years on, and one account from Greek history has taught the participants of a training course held by the Citizen Organising Foundation a valuable lesson about the need for strength, action and the rejection of passivity.

It is a story, recorded by Thucydides, from the Peloponnesian War in the fifth century BC, when the all-powerful Athenians sent envoys to the little island of Melos. After trying to stay neutral in the Athenians' war against the Spartans, the Melians were faced with a choice. Either, the Athenians told them, you allow yourselves to be subjugated and you keep your property and culture, or you fight and you will die. 

The plucky Melians refused to submit and attempted to stay neutral, with the result that the Athenians laid siege to Melos, which eventually surrendered. The men were put to death and the women and children enslaved.

The 30-odd training course participants drawn from faith communities were asked to role-play the negotiation. Most felt deeply uncomfortable with being arrogant Athenians. Religious people are naturally Melian - preferring to be helpless victims, whether indignant or heroically patient. In almost none of the role plays was any negotiation possible; the Melians were defiant, made nice speeches, and had values on their side; but they saw themselves as powerless, and so did not seek to gain more favourable terms for their occupation, thus ensuring their future.

These days of training sought gently to knock the Melianism out of us - the attitude that it is somehow noble or Christian to be passive and powerless. ("You're telling me to be powerful", protested one sexagenarian Irish sister, "when all my life I've been told to be quiet and serve others.") Instead of translating their values into concrete gains, people of faith often act as if they are powerless, lamenting the decline of the family and the community, wistful for bygone ages when people had time for each other and for God. The media, when not ignoring believers, paint them as good-hearted but ineffectual losers in a real world dictated by political power and money.

But if they unite and organise themselves, the training course revealed, they can promote their values of justice and fairness and human dignity. They need not become Athenians; but they need to know how to act like Athenians, uniting on the basis of self-interest and to use the power of association - "power with" rather than "power over" - mobilised through the faith groups. Thus organised, they can lobby, negotiate, do "actions", cause "reactions" - and achieve amazing results.

Some of those results were on show on 16 November at the boisterous tenth anniversary assembly of Telco, the East London Citizens alliance of 40 mosques, churches and unions. Telco is the oldest and strongest chapter of the Citizen Organising Foundation and has become a formidable player in east London public life, persuading HSBC Bank and the University of London's college Queen Mary, among others, to pay a living wage (£2 an hour more than the national minimum wage, which, in London at least, equals serious poverty) for their low-earning staff. Last Thursday also saw the launch of "Strangers into Citizens", an ambitious national campaign to secure rights for undocumented workers, which even before it has begun has the endorsement of the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the Anglican Bishop of Chelmsford, John Gladwin, and London's mayor, Ken Livingstone.

The mayor and the cardinal both sent warm congratulations to the assembly by video, and messages arrived from Tony Blair and David Cameron - an amazing recognition of the influence of Telco. It is just 10 years since a group of priests, religious sisters and imams came together at the urging of the then Catholic auxiliary bishop responsible for East London, Victor Guazzelli.

They created Telco on the model pioneered in the 1940s and 1950s by the Chicago community organiser, Saul Alinsky, a leader - along with Dorothy Day - of what is sometimes called the "nonsocialist Left". Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation now includes 50 church-based, interfaith and interracial community organisations stretching from East Brooklyn to the East Side of Los Angeles. They enable tens of thousands of ordinary working and modest-income Americans to shape decisions that affect their communities.

The former lead organiser in East Brooklyn, a Catholic priest, is now setting up people's organisations in Berlin. "We build relationships, to enable action around an issue," Fr Leo Penter told us. "People grow from their experience of direct action. They learn about leadership. They learn to do things they never thought they could do."

But they keep their values. Citizens groups are not afraid to play hardball, and on many occasions have won over influential business leaders with their ideas. Take Sir John Bond, former chairman of the world's second-largest bank, HSBC, and now chairman of Vodafone, who was on the podium at the anniversary assembly. HSBC was Telco's first living-wage target. If HSBC, which opened its gleaming 45-storey world headquarters on Canary Wharf in 2002, could be persuaded to pay its cleaners a living wage, others would follow suit, the Telco organisers believed.

They eventually acieved their aim, after disrupting the bank's AGM, organising placard demonstrations, and after nuns publicly withheld candle money from the bank. At an early meeting which Sir John eventually agreed to, he protested that HSBC gave £2 million to charity. "That is all very well", the Catholic Bishop of Brentwood, Thomas McMahon, told him, "but what is called for here is not charity but justice." Sir John eventually capitulated, and became a Telco ally. "I feel very humble," he told the 1,000-strong assembly.

Queen Mary also agreed to change after direct action from Telco. It has decided to build the living wage into its contracts, and was welcomed at the assembly as a "good neighbour" and the first "living wage campus" in Britain. At the financial organisation, KPMG, as well, a representative told the assembly that implementing the living wage and other benefits (sick pay, holidays) for its cleaners had reduced absenteeism and resulted in a happier workforce. It was, he said, a "very positive experience" which he would be delighted to recommend to other companies.

Public assemblies - meticulously choreographed by a small team of full-time organisers - are a key feature of Citizen Organising Foundation. Telco has held 50 of them since 1996, restoring to the East End what was in the nineteenth century a key expression of civil society. A public assembly, with all its drama, reaffirms the place of ordinary people in politics - and it works. A politician owns up to injustice a lot faster in a room packed with delegates representing community organisations of tens of thousands.

The recent assembly was especially theatrical because it was a tenth anniversary celebration. One by one, the Telco members announced themselves - churches and schools which have been present in the East End in many cases for more than 100 years - to affirm their commitment to justice.

"Ghosts" - acted by Catholic high-school students - from the area's past held Telco to account for the ideals for which they had lived and died, interrupting Mgr John Armitage, Vicar General of Brentwood Diocese and Telco stalwart, with fierce questions: "Wot I wanna know is, wot is you doin' for justice?" shouted "Annie Besant", the first worker to go on strike at the Bryant & May match factory. "Beloved people, remember to stay united," intoned a young black biretta-wearing cardinal in full choral scarlet. He was playing Cardinal Manning, who brokered the end to the Great Dock Strike in 1889.

This kind of organising, as an attempt to bring society closer to what all faiths believe it should be, came more easily to Catholic Action and the evangelicals and Quakers of the anti-slave trade movement than it does to our Churches today. The era of Cardinal Manning, when the slums of London were filled with destitute Irish immigrants, when priests organised their people to defend civic society against the brutal commodification of labour by globalised capital, is here again. The slave trade may be 200 years dead, but as W.F. Deedes noted in the Daily Telegraph recently, "in the lower reaches of our informal economy, some immigrants are being used in what are little better than conditions of slavery".

The resistance to those conditions is being led by an expanding alliance of Muslims, Anglicans, Catholics and Sikhs, gathered in four Citizen "chapters" in east, west and south London, and in Birmingham. They have got the message: learn from the Athenians, learn power. And organise.

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