Welcome, to the last blog before a Christmas/New Year break, so that blog #143 will come out on January 16th. Meanwhile may the wonderful grace of the Incarnation strike you again with joy this Christmas-time, and may the daunting prospects that 2024 faces us with be countered with hope in God’s mysterious power to redeem.
Process of Preparation, or Point of Outcome?
Joe’s A Level results were a disaster – 2Cs and a D. An inquest inevitably followed into why he had performed so badly in the exams. He had had a heavy cold at the time – he wasn’t sleeping well and felt tired. He had just broken up with his girl-friend – his head was in a whirl and he couldn’t concentrate. The questions he had prepared for weren’t the ones they asked. The result was that detailed plans were drawn up to eliminate these problems before his ‘retakes’ in a year’s time: keep warm and don’t go out without a hat; drop any girl-friends a few months before the exams to keep emotional balance; study past examination papers more closely to predict likely questions.
It was only a few weeks later that his uncle raised the foundational question: how many hours of homework did Joe do a night. Half an hour!! All that time in his room had been wasted on playing on-line football games (he got to be #68 in the world at one point) rather than studying maths and physics. The evidence for his failure had been misinterpreted. If his retake results were going to be good enough to get him into university then simply changing a few circumstances around the time of the exam itself would lead to only marginal and insufficient improvement. If he was going to get 2As and a B next time around a much more thorough process of preparation would be required.
It is not uncommon for bad outcomes to be assigned to what was happening at the time of the outcome rather than attending to what was happening over possibly quite a long period before the outcome appeared. We need to look not primarily to the present situation but to look at what was going on well upstream and whose consequences are now with us.
Perhaps this is particularly the case when the matters in hand are freighted with personal and moral importance, as with race and ethnicity, so that statistically different outcomes are assumed to result from the situation prevailing at the time the statistics were recorded, rather than from the accumulation of various factors over a possibly extensive preceding period – some of which may no longer be in force. This unsophisticated use of statistics can lead to hasty ‘here and now’ policies rather than addressing what must be done about longer term or underlying issues; that is, making sure Joe doesn’t catch a cold again rather than making sure he does his homework.
In his ‘Discrimination and Disparities’ (2019) Thomas Sowell writes: ‘All too often there is an implicit assumption that the cause of some disparity is located where the statistics of that disparity were collected. . . That approach ignores the very possibility that what happened to people before they reached an employer - or a college admissions office, or a crime scene – may have had disparate impact on the kinds of people they became, and the kinds of skills, values, habits and limitations they bring with them to the places where the statistics are later collected’.
Statistics, then, can be misleading as long as they are not combined with an ‘upstream’ awareness of what contributed to them. For example, Sewell gives the illustration of two hospitals where one is seeing many more patient deaths that the other. It might appear therefore that one hospital is being much more negligent, unhygienic and careless than the other. However ,an important ‘upstream’ factor is that the intake into the high death rate hospital includes many people with serious heart problems, the other hospital is dealing mainly with people with broken limbs.
Statistical disparities abound in the Church of England. One that has received serious attention for several decades is the low proportion of clergy, and then senior leaders, from minority ethnic backgrounds. (I was invited to discuss this with the Prime Minister’s appointments secretary more than two decades ago). But how far is the cause the decisions being made here and now, and how far longstanding upstream problems? The former assumption has tended to dominate the discussion. Firstly, by direct calls to make more minority ethnic senior appointments, as though senior leaders were rather like a terracotta army who you could just call into existence in a very short space of time, rather than real people who would usually need two or three decades of experience, spiritual formation and learning to occupy such posts. Then by following a raft of perfectly sensible measures, as in ‘From Lament to Action’, to improve appointment procedures so that they become more adept in eliciting potential minority ethnic candidates.
There have been some encouragements here. Over one-third of deacons ordained in London diocese this year have been from minority ethnic backgrounds. There is a slowly growing number of minority ethnic background bishops. But there are still major concerns. Pressure to tick boxes and produce ‘good’ statistics can make unwise appointments. I personally know of three that went pear-shaped, primarily to the harm of the appointee themselves, but also to the overall ministry of the church. The minority ethnic bishops were all, except for one, born and nurtured in their faith overseas rather than Britain. Their roots are generally very untypical of Britain’s varied minority ethnic population; for example, three bishops from Britain’s small South Indian population, yet not one man from an African-Caribbean background.
In all this we have still, to use Sowell’s words, made the ‘implicit assumption that the cause of some disparity is located where the statistics of that disparity were collected’, that is in the actual selection or appointment processes, without serious investigation of the upstream issues. Yet I believe it is upstream that (to push the image) the blockages have occurred that have impeded the flow that we have longed for of people from minority ethnic backgrounds into first involvement, then lay ministry, then ordained ministry, then senior leadership in the church.
The specific causes of this impediment constitute the real substance of the often too vague recognition that the Church of England has been institutionally racist. It can be summarised by saying that ‘the Church of England doesn’t think about race except when it thinks about race’: that is to say that it is an ‘issue’ out there to be dealt with rather than that it is in our guts, a very part of who we are. Two symptoms stand out (which I have referred to in previous blogs). Firstly, the ease with which policy documents are produced which tacitly assume that ethnic minorities don’t exist. ‘Mission Shaped Church’ was the worst offender, but also leading, forward-looking books on worship and church planting show the same omission.
Evenmore serious has been the lack of attention to training clergy to minister in ethnically diverse communities. Differences from white, broadly middle-class norms amongst ethnic minorities range from the negligible to the substantial, but overall they are sufficiently significant that a national church has failed in its responsibilities by not training its ministers to account for them. This means not only making students aware of racism, as has happened sporadically, but also developing the necessary skills to minister cross-culturally. Ministerial training has been, and very largely still is, carried out on the assumption that ministers will be relating to people who are culturally very similar to them. Developing the sort of awareness that ‘Cultural Intelligence’ has sought to codify should be an essential in any ministerial training. Despite the recommendations of ‘From Lament to Action’, I am not aware that any significant initiatives have yet happened as regards developing the ministerial competencies necessary for all clergy in a society which is now multi-cultural across its entire geography. It is this past, but still continuing failure to do our ‘homework’ that indicates ‘institutional racism’ and which underlies the poor statistical outcomes that dog the church.
In one sense the fact that the poor present outcome is a consequence of poor policies that have accumulated for more than half a century relieves something of the burden of guilt we should feel today. We can’t change what happened in the past or feel that bad about it. But we are then doubly culpable for being somehow incapable of instituting obviously needed changes to our ministerial training today.
Further, recognising that our present weaknesses in developing multi-ethnic leadership today has long roots in the past, and is not simply a problem that can be turned round quickly with a few ameliorating initiatives over appointments, should deliver us from an unseemly rush to make appointments that have cosmetic value rather than vigorously addressing the missional challenges we face. The legacy of past inaction is to be regretted but also accepted, even though we still have yet to be energised into equipping the church for what is now a profoundly multi-ethnic society.
If thirty or forty years ago all Anglican training institutions had a coherent one-session-for-a-term course for all students not only informing but also motivating them to want to be involved in ministry with ethnic minorities then I believe that by now, without any angst, we would have a phalanx of minority ethnic clergy and leaders representing the range of our minority population (including African Caribbean men). But it was not so. But what would be unforgivable is to have correctly diagnosed the source of our past failure, yet still done nothing to bring about much needed change in both our general mind-set and the specifics of ministerial training.
I agree 100% This is a key strategic need. What would your curriculum include John to train ministers in cultural competency? And how does one move it from head knowledge to heart change ?