Welcome. This is a seminar I led at the recent excellently organised and well attended conference launching the Anglican Network for Intercultural Congregations last month. In a future blog I will be interviewing Bishop Dr Tim Wambunya the Network’s founder.
Enlarging Congregational Awareness.
The title of Guy’s paper used the word ‘catalyst’ – ‘a person or thing that precipitates an event’.
Why do people come to your church: to meet with God, because somehow it sets them up for the week, because they want to pray and hear the word of God, because it is where they feel they belong, because they are lonely, it’s their custom and tradition, to please their parents/wives/girlfriends.
It is unlikely that people in your congregation this coming Sunday will conceive of themselves as ‘racial justice warriors’. They will probably feel the fact that their church gathers together people of different ethnicities is a good thing; or at least it is good that the wider church does. But it may well be that ‘fostering racial justice and global cultural awareness’ are not central to their understanding of what their church is for. So how do we move these issues from being a fairly inert and insignificant part of what being a member of your church means to something that is part of the central ‘esse’, being, identity of their church? In other words, how do we become a catalyst for these developments to happen?
That’s what I am seeking to address in this session. How can we go about doing it?
1. Teach the Bible.
Well, we have been doing that for several centuries, and yet churches have acceded to slavery and brutality, and condoned racial injustice. Churches have been separated from each other along racial lines. So what is it, apart from the obdurate stubbornness of the human heart that has meant scripture has not impacted the Christian church in the way that it should.
Firstly translations haven’t always helped. Here Isaiah 10:4 in the AV:
‘Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed;
2 To turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away the right from the poor of my people, that widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless!’
Compare with the modern NRSV:
‘Ah, you who make iniquitous decrees,
who write oppressive statutes,
2 to turn aside the needy from justice
and to rob the poor of my people of their right,
that widows may be your spoil,
and that you may make the orphans your prey!’
- note in AV the ‘religious words’ that I have underlined, compared with the more accurate modern translation’s use of ‘political words’.
Congregations are heirs of a tradition that hears the Bible in that ‘spititual’ rather than political way.
Secondly, our expectation of what we get from the bible has been slanted. We can expect it to be about how we get right with God and get to heaven, and the church is simply a gathering of those on that same journey, much as I was gathered with a lot of travellers on the train from Liverpool St to Slough this morning, with the only commonality that we were on the same train (unless there’s a problem and then a certain unity develops).
But the train itself isn’t really important. So we have no ecclesiology, little sense of what the church as a body ought to be expressing and saying.
By contrast, N T Wright has written: ‘We often miss what an extraordinary thing it was that the early church, within twenty years of Jesus’s resurrection, was trying to be like this [a Jewish community] despite being a motley community from many different races, with slaves and freemen, women and men all together. They were determined to live as a single family, to conduct a social experiment of a sort never before imagined’ (‘Galatians – Commentaries for Christian Formation’; p 92). We need to stress that the New Testament sees the formation of relationally united, ethnically diverse congregations as central to God’s fulfillment through Jesus of the life of his kingdom.
So as regards being in a multicultural/racial society we have verylargely been blind to the central place it has in God’s purposes. In a contribution on the London Diocesan web-site a year or so back Bishop Graham Tomlin (then Bp of Kensington & Dean of St Mellitus College) confessed that he had never considered ‘race’ as a significant issue for Christians. As another example, in 1988 I wrote the article on ‘race’ for the ‘New Dictionary of Theology’ of IVP; in 2016 they reissued it with slightly different scope, but with my article (without consulting me) reissued virtually the same. I protested and they said in future they would check with me. But of course in the seven years since then it is unthinkable that they would reissue the same short contribution once more - the whole topic of church, theology and race has exploded. The bibliography alone would now be virtually unmanageable (at least for me).
So how do use the bible so that congregations are aware that race and culture are central to God’s concerns?
a) We point them to the ‘golden texts’ Genesis 1, Galatians 3:28, Ephesians 2:16, Colossians 3:11, and centrally Revelation 7:9 – they all point very clearly to the inter-ethnic unity of God’s people.
But note that these focus on unity – which is one pole of our commitment. But they draw less attention to the significance of ethnic diversity & the challenges that it brings, both in terms of justice and cultural differences.
b) We alert people to the significance of ethnicity in biblical passages – Acts 6 & the squabble over food distribution between Hellenists & Hebrews is an obvious case. Less obvious is Paul tip-toeing around different attitudes of Jewish and Gentile Christians to food and sabbath observances in Romans 14. Living with different cultural attitudes today towards parents and authority, to expressiveness, especially in worship, towards punctuality or expectations of the supernatural and the miraculous can also be touchy issues of cultural diversity in our churches today.
Similarly, the details of names as pointers to ethnic diversity in the scriptures is often lost on us. An excellent book is ‘Including the Stranger: Foreigners in the Former Prophets’ by David Firth, which highlights the frequency of non-Jewish people in the OT narratives. David’s army during Absalom’s rebellion includes Cherethites, Pelethites & Gittites – all foreigners, including Ittai the Gittite - from Gath (2 Sam 15:18). Similarly, the list of named people chosen by Paul to carry the gift to Jerusalem (Acts20:4-6) was ethnically varied. The Bible time & again takes multi-ethnic contexts as normal and natural. I love Acts 16:14 - ‘Lydia, a worshipper of God . . from the city of Thyatira, a dealer in purple cloth’ – in one verse Luke tells us her gender, her religious status, her place of origin, her occupation. He didn’t just call her a ‘foreigner’!
Therefore, we need to be normalising a positive acceptance of ethnic diversity in our congregations through bringing out the ethnic variety and mixing that was part of the biblical narrative
c) We need to be connecting the big stories of scripture with their ethnic significance. The oppression of the Jews in Egypt, where when Joseph is accused of molesting Pharoah’s wife (Gen 39): of course he is regarded as guilty, ‘an untrustworthy immigrant’. For how many minority people in our church will that resonate with? The Exodus of course has been a major theme in liberation and black theologies, of God setting free a people who were enslaved and oppressed, who had no leverage over God. The Lord’s words in Dt 7:7; ‘The Lord did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples’ is a healthy corrective to ethnic pride in our congregations.
The obverse of that is Leviticus 19:34 :‘The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.’ In other words: ‘You’ve been there’! That identification of God’s people with ‘foreigners’ is important – we don’t really belong here either. We may have lived allour life in the same place; nonetheless this world isn’t our home either. In that sense the immigrant is a sort of sacrament – someone who underlines that all Christians are migrant people.
So too, later on, with the Exile. I won’t sing to you ‘By The Rivers of Babylon’, but that was a Rastafarian appropriation of the exilic Psalm 137 of the lament of people taken from their homeland, and treated as nothing more than amusing entertainment: ‘our tormentors asked for mirth saying ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion’ (v 3). Again the connections with people in our churches who feel away from home or have their culture trivialised is obvious.
But note also the contrasting voice in Jeremiah 29:7:
‘Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.” – a call to seek the prosperity and well-being of the place you have ended up in, even though you were forced to go there.
Between those two low points in Israel’s history were high points of exercising authority, of being a prosperous and powerful nation, and the way kings followed godly or unjust, idolatrous ways of using power.
In NT we see the significance of being a new family: ‘fictive kinship’; a new identity as a people that over-rides all ethnic identities (1 Peter 2:9). ‘Brothers & sisters’ in the New Testament was meant to be taken literally – this really is the people you belong to
In all this we need to have our eyes, in John Stott’s famous words on ‘two horizons’. Firstly the scriptures, but also the horizon of a multi-ethnic world – read the papers, watch films listen to music, watch tv (Steve McQueen’s ‘Small Axe’ tv series was excellent on the early years of African Caribbean people in Britain).
2. Foreground Ethnic Diversity in your church.
a) Find advisers – people of different ethnicities who you can trust for advice. (See David Anderson’s ‘Multicultural Ministry’). Good that ‘Lament to Action’ recommends that each bishop has a minority ethnic adviser they can relate to (maybe several, given the extent of diversity!)
b) Bring in speakers of different ethnicities, esp if a very white church. Means networking, at conferences like this. Be resourceful.
c) Foreground in display – pictures of congregation, church leaders. David Wise at Greenford Baptist Church had flags representing all the different nations in the church around the building.
d) Get people excited about world Christianity. People can have very limited horizons – when members of our church went to another church to take regular family services, they were amazed to discover that south Asians could be Christians! Amazing things happening are in happening in world Christianity – growth of the church amongst Iranians both in Iran and here in Britain.
e) Work at creating interactions in your church – over food especially. Opening a new church centre facilitated this enomously. My own church has a Knitting club it may sound quaint, but it’s a great meeting place for people of different ethnicities..
f) Encourage people to tell their stories -especially in small groups. Sad how little people know generally about each other’s backgrounds; even less about their ‘race’ story. We need to hear without ‘yes butting’ – a big temptation. Weep with those who weep. A big challenge is how far white people take on board the concerns of minority people in their church.
In all this we should aim that people take on board our unity, our love for each other, our bearing of burdens, not self-consciously, but absorbed into their very being. A big question is how far we are upfront in opposing racism, and how far we expect it to develop instinctively as people both hear and respond to the word of God, and more importantly perhaps rub shoulders with each other in natural ways