Views from the Margin and the Centre, or Vicars and Bishops should be friends. # 163. 11/06/2024
Out of Many, One People
Welcome. A parish pump blog - do you know of vicars and bishops that you think it would be good to send to. And encourage them to subscribe.
Views from the Margin and the Centre, or Vicars and Bishops should be friends.
Last week’s log quoted the song from the musical ‘Oklahoma’, saying that farmers and cowboys should be friends: those who emphasise racial justice and those who emphasise evangelism and church growth need to work with each other. Greg Smith helpfully responded that people’s emphases partly reflect their positions. People at the ‘centre’ (bishops, theologians, committees) are likely to see the wider, global issue of justice, whereas those at the ‘margins’ (local clergy) are likely to see the everyday issues of how you build up a church amongst different cultures.
This connected with my experience. Listening to local clergy talk I sometimes feel the warmth of recognition (but certainly not always). ‘Our treasurer has moved away and we are really struggling’. ‘We are encouraged that a Nepali family has started attending’. These small set-backs and encouragements are the substance of life in multi-ethnic congregations. I recognise them and identify with them. By contrast the voices from the ‘centre’ often irritate and frustrate me. They are too generalised, too abstract, too moralising. They can even sound impressive and convincing until I actually try to connect them with my own experience and they fall apart. Life is just not like that.
So this blog is a voice from the ‘margins’ – a long experience of having been an incumbent and seeking to spell out how things appear from that perspective, and the responses required, as a corrective to how the ‘centre’ speaks of the posture that Christians should have in a multi-ethnic society. I believe this perspective is important because it has generally been ignored. The Church of England has always focussed on the diocese and on national policies and has been reprehensibly neglectful of what happens in the parishes. Thus Glynne Gordon-Carter’s reflections on her time as the first general secretary of CMEAC concluded with recommendations to the dioceses, nothing about parish life. The 2007 Survey …. Only gathered statistics, and so could make recommendations at diocesan but not parochial levels. It is as though parish life is a stone best not turned over in case one finds the horrors underneath. At times I sense that parish clergy are seen as hopelessly out-of-touch backwoodsmen whose experiences don’t bear attending to. There is too much truth in those prejudices for them to be casually dismissed, but parish life also produces the gold of authentic inter-cultural experiences, learning and growth that deserve much more serious attention and learning than they have received.
There is a strange irony here. We constantly hear of the need to listen to the ‘marginalised’, the underside, the subaltern voices. Yet perversely these things are being said from the centre, from theologians, from committees, from ‘progressive’ bishops. In the actual organisation, the Church of England as it is, the ‘margins’ are the parishes the edges where the church actually interacts closely with the society in which it is set. It is a voice that should be listened to more carefully.
What, then, are the realities of parish life that those at the centre need to take note of, and what are the wholesome responses that need to be foregrounded in understanding ministry in multi-ethnic England today?
1. Parishes are very resource stretched.
Parish churches depend largely on volunteers - members who have the time, energy, stability of life, and abilities to enable the church to function. We have to work with what we’ve got, which rarely covers the range of what we ought to do, let alone what we want to do. The administrative demands of parish leadership have increased substantially, as issues such as safeguarding and privacy have required increased attentiveness, paperwork and training, alongside the growing complexity of financial record-keeping. The result is that increasingly a single incumbent on their own is at full stretch simply to keep the church running, without having additional time and energy to lead its ministry into new areas such as ministry to detached ethnic groups or alienated young people. One of the frustrations of parish leadership is that there are vast swathes of your calling to carry out the ‘cure of souls’ across a populous and very diverse parish that you simply can never attend to, unless you can find or are provided with additional human resources
In this respect the contrast between the diocese or the occasional mega-church and the ordinary parish is (please forgive my fondness for footballing analogies) a little like the difference between managing Manchester City and managing the England football teams. Manchester City have almost limitless resources and are able to buy the best players in the world to fill any gaps in the squad. By contrast the England manager has only a restricted pool of English players to pick from – if he has three very capable right-backs available but not one decent left-back then that is a resource limitation that he has to work with and get round. So too bishops (though I am not comparing them to Pep Guardiola) have far greater capacity to surround themselves with staff that can enable them to carry out their tasks. Parish clergy have far less capacity. Being resource stretched severely limits what they can do.
For this reason, improvisation’ is one of my favourite words (see Ned Lunn’s article at blog # 157). The novelty of our situation in ministering in multi-ethnic England means there are no set strategies or procedures. ‘You have never been this way before’ (Joshua 3:4) means we have to lean upon God and learn as we go along. Well resourced parishes can plan that if x does y properly then we can be sure of the outcome z. In under-resourced parishes there is the likelihood that something will disrupt x’s ministry half-way through, that the skills are lacking to do y effectively so that z never happens. But there is a mercy in not being able to follow blue-prints. Improvisation means running with what people can do, it means being alert to opportunities when they occur, it means the joy of seeing people develop unexpected skills. Necessity is the mother of invention; witnessing births is joyful. But far too often churches get stuck in a negative, scarcity mentality which inhibits the risk-taking mentality needed to grow. In such circumstances appropriate prompts from the ‘centre’ become important.
2. Parishes depend upon random circumstances.
This is a development of the above point – we are not in control, we are tossed about by circumstances which are beyond us (which is also the experience of most of our parishioners). Two couples were members of our church – all four were capable musicians. In the one summer both families moved away, suddenly we moved from being well-resourced for musical worship to being limited and struggling. Such sorts of experience are not uncommon in mid- or small-sized churches.
But by the same criterion, and more or less in the same time period, our church received unexpected boosts to our capacity to minister to South Asians. We were joined by a Malaysian Tamil Christian and his Japanese wife (one of two such unusual ethnic combinations there had been in our church), and we were gifted out of the blue with a non-stipendiary Pakistani minister, the Rev Amelia Jacob. (Amelia’s autobiography, ‘The Priest from Pakistan’, was reviewed at blog # 112). Along with some other people joining our church, the result was the sudden opening up of ministry opportunities that we had struggled unsuccessfully to develop over the previous decade. If there is a strong sense in which such opportunities are random and unplanned, nonetheless there is an important element of responsibility for the local church and its leadership. There already needs to be a mind-set and an expectation, as well as patience, that such developments are possible, and therefore the faith to take opportunities when they arise.
I like the word used by Christopher Lamb in what is now a fairly old book on ‘Belief in a Mixed Society’, where he writes of the importance when ministering amongst those of other faith backgrounds of the importance of ‘loitering’; similar to the phrase in Al Barrett & Ruth Harley’s book of ‘Being Interrupted’. Behind both lies the experience that our capacity to plan, perform and control is severely circumscribed; rather we depend on the events, the happenings and peoples that come to us unbidden. Central authorities can have a vital role in encouraging us to hope, to be alert, to be confident, to be imaginative, and especially to be praying without loading unreal expectations of what we look for in the future.
The blessing is that in prayer we recognise and affirm that God is sovereign, we are not. A faith-based optimism in what the Lord can do needs to both carry us through deserts and lead us to water courses.
3. Parishes encounter complex realities.
One of the most grating perspectives from the ‘centre’ of the church is, to repeat a long-standing grievance, the use of bulking up, umbrella terms for the minority ethnic (or, more accurately, ‘non white’) population - that is ‘BAME’ and now ‘UKME/GMH’. From the margins, actually encountering people in the parishes, these are generalising terms which boil down to little beyond common experiences – though of very varying strengths – of white racism. Whilst from the centre generalisations which include only the one, albeit significant, factor of ‘race’ has some usefulness, by contrast in the parish at the point of encountering real individuals at depth with their own very particular stories, personalities, interests and capacities then a much more fine-grained and personalised understanding becomes essential. Only then can you know, understand and love people in all their particularity. So often what comes from the centre seems, to me, to see people as faceless members of a generalised category who we can move round the board like the pieces of a chess set.
Thus the overall educational differences between, say, Sri Lankan Tamils and Pakistanis becomes a more important predictor of outcomes, and capacity to hold positions of responsibility in the church, than does the simple issue of colour. In my previous church the ratio of women to men amongst South Asians was 1:1, amongst African Caribbeans 5:1. There was a similar imbalance amongst the average age of the members. This is but the most basic level of generalisation to consider about ethnic groups when we start to speculate what level of participation in leadership we might expect.
The American jibe that ‘a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality’ may be a little too combative but it highlights an important truth, that the world never neatly fits into our clear cut theories and expectations. The experience of being part of a multi-ethnic churches requires listening to a variety of voices, of receiving a variety of experiences which do not necessarily form a clear or an uncontested picture. There was the black lady who said she would not rent a room in her house to black people – they could be too much trouble and students were easier to rent to; or the old Irish lady who frequently made critical and racist generalisations, and yet who was generous and caring to the Indian children in her block of flats.
The very call to be an ‘inclusive’ church calls us to receive people whose views we think are wrong or racist but whose history and experiences we are called to enter into, even as we trust that inter-racial interactions within a common life of worship and growing faith slowly builds attitudes of warmth, trust and respect. Affirmation and challenge are central components in encouraging growth of any sort. Knowing how to help people recognise and reject racist assumptions they have formed without being aware requires sensitivity. In this context ringing denunciations of racism can show lack of awareness of the cost to traditional English, especially working class communities, of the major social changes that have happened around them.
At the end of the day, the Church of England rises or falls by what happens in its parishes. The existence of confident, ethnically varied congregations united in love is the strongest contribution and witness we can make in a multi-ethnic nation, and the most urgent need is for close attention from the centre of how such congregations can be formed and nourished.
*********************
The football European Championships, the diasporas’ favourite game, starts on Friday, and should give a further glimpse of the complexity of Europe’s varied population. One significant fact to emerge is that for the first time the England squad (26 players) has more players with African roots (6 - Gomez, Konsa, Guehi, Mainoo, Eze & Saka) than players with Caribbean roots (5). Reading through their background information it is striking how frequent are the references to the ‘immigrant’ qualities of faith, family and hard work.