How the Church of England can get 'Race' Wrong - Part 2. # 106. 07/02/2023.
Out of Many, One People
Welcome! A continuation of last week’s analysis of the Church of England - fair or unfair? Please comment, critique, and especially commend to others.
How the Church of England can get ‘Race’ wrong – Part 2.
Last week I looked at two wrong understandings that I think are made widely in the Church of England as regards ‘race’:
1. Not recognising the complexity of ‘race’.
2. Not connecting ‘race’ and class.
Here I want to look at a third issue, and then attempt an overall summary.
3. Neglecting what happens in parishes.
Why are parishes so important?
* The basis of the Church of England is 12,000 or so parish churches, to which people (including ethnic minorities) do or don’t come. Ultimately the credibility of our call to be a united multi-ethnic people of God stands or falls in what happens in them.
* Leaders are mostly produced by parish churches. Whilst university Christian groups, or various other networks may have a role, it is largely the life of the parish that produces future clergy and more senior leaders. The top floors of senior multi-ethnic leadership can not be built without the work being first done in ground floor parishes.
* Parishes are fertile soil for pastoral innovation and development. The Alpha Course – whether you love it or like it (I quite like it) - was developed in a local parish, albeit a very wealthy one. It was then rolled out in entrepreneurial fashion. It required neither central funding nor sanction. So too, we should be looking for positive developments in multi-ethnic ministry to be developed, and then, ideally, dispersed out into parish churches.
* More than any other group in the church, parish clergy have, to use the title of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book, ‘Skin in the Game’ – defined by Taleb as one who ‘takes his or her own risk’ (p 47). For example, the performance of those involved in diocesan structures or theological education are less likely to have obvious outcomes than does the performance of parish clergy, where the policies, or ‘risks’, of the incumbent manifests fairly directly in whether people attend or not, and the parish church either thrives or struggles. Much as parish clergy may want to protect the incumbent’s freehold as a buffer against the accountability that people have in many other jobs, taking responsibility for the outcome of our work is both testing and an invigorating blessing. Parishes are places where theory gets mugged by reality.
Neglect of the parish in policy formation.
* Glynne Gordon-Carter’s ‘Recommendations’ following her work as the first Secretary of CMEAC (‘An Amazing Journey’, pp153-7) covers national and diocesan levels, but has nothing to say at the parish level, despite ‘sharing good practice’ being one of CMEAC’s stated responsibilities. Similarly in its early days, CMEAC carried out ‘ofsteds’ reviewing diocesan performance, but didn’t scrutinise what happened in parishes. CMEAC has been consistently concerned about the visibility of minority ethnic leaders at senior level, whilst paying scant attention to what happens at parish level.
* The most thorough review of the actual performance of the Church of England, the 2007 ‘Celebrating Diversity in the Church of England’ gathered together statistics from a random selection of parishes to produce a picture of individual diocesan but not parish performances.
* The reason for the neglect of parish experience are fairly clear. Whereas dioceses’ are fairly amenable to central control and there is both collegial and financial pressure to pursue a fairly common line, the sanctions that can be employed against parochial incumbents are very limited. Less than 70% of clergy returned the 2007 Census forms, with no greater comeback than that the diocese probably considers them ‘difficult’. Inevitably, as clergy differ both in capacity and temperament, there is a temptation to by-pass the parish in formulating policy for the church’s mission in a multi-ethnic society. Implementing policy at parish level is, as often said, like taking cats for a walk. Despite the boosterism that often characterises bishops’ communications with their parish clergy, at times one can sense deep frustration behind the scenes.
* A further issue is that parishes can seem trivial, uninteresting and insufficiently influential – flower rotas and blocked drains. The quotidian detail of running a parish pales in significance compared with making grandstanding comments and policies about ‘race’, but averting our attention from the detail of individual, multi-ethnic parish life accumulates into large scale ineffectiveness.
* The consequences are serious. Policy documents, up to and including ‘From Lament to Action’ are like a doughnut – a ring of recommendations about dioceses, colleges and schools, which can seem like displacement activity from the central issue of addressing parish life, and leading to a crucial and disastrous vacuum in the centre concerning what actually happens in the local church.
* This reflects the composition of the Commission, which – quite extraordinarily for a report reviewing the church’s performance in a multi-ethnic society – did not include anyone with extensive experience of parish ministry in multi-ethnic communities. Paradoxically then, the ‘lived experience’ of clergy and churches in multi-ethnic areas was trumped by an organisational, rather remote cerebral analysis.
Ways ahead.
* Give serious attention to what is actually happening on the ground. Some churches in multi-ethnic areas thrive, others don’t. Why? The policies of the church? The parish priest? Maybe it just happens? A study of a cross-section of parishes would not be too difficult, and could reveal some important patterns to identify and learn from. Surely an organisation that is serious about the task it faces would long ago have sought to gather together evidence-based information that might give understanding about what it is that can make the church more effective interculturally
* The sort of survey envisaged above is one step towards CMEAC’s intended goal of ‘sharing good practice’. Clergy of all stripes and churchmanships very largely have one common factor: they like to see their churches grow. As mentioned above, the roll-out of courses, of which Alpha is but one, gets widespread take up. It may be possible that there are no readily transferable policies that bring about intercultural church growth. It may be possible that the sort of approaches and actions I have suggested in these blogs may make no actual difference. But I believe there are fruitful ways of ministry in multi-cultural areas, and we need to work at developing collective understanding, identifying and sharing them. That can inform good practice.
‘From Lament to Action’ is helpful in seeking to develop this amongst young people, but little is available at the parish church level. For example, what can be shared about the pros and cons, and lessons learned from having minority language congregations? Is consciously seeking to have minority ethnic office holders progressive or patronising? We need some structured method of sharing.
* We should be serious about motivating, calling, training and placing ministers equipped to work in the complexities of multi-ethnic communities. We recognise specialism for academic or rural ministry. There is as yet no pathway to ensure we have a cadre of ministers with the intention and abilities to minister cross-culturally. Despite constant references to England being a mission field we are not proceeding with the thoroughness of a missionary organisation. The literature on ‘new ways of being church’ seems to suggest we are more serious about our mission to surfers than our mission to Somalis. We need ways to co-ordinate mission to the numerous ethnic and cultural niches in our society.
* We simply need more ministers at a parish level. For one incumbent on their own it is difficult to do much more than just keep the church operating. My own experience is that it was a succession of gifted and able curates (or parish assistants) that made the flourishing of a multi-ethnic church possible. ‘From Lament to Actions’ proposal for a raft of new specialist appointments (part of an often criticised tendency in the church generally) risks drawing energy away from the front lines where they are urgently needed.
Summary.
In an article in The Sunday Times (15/01/2023) Matthew Syed wrote of the failure of Sport England’s attempts, following on from the 2012 Olympics, to increase the level of sporting activity in the country, despite freincreased spending. He sees Sport England’s disappointing outcome as typifying a range of national institutions, including the Health Service.
He writes of ‘the input fallacy . . . that our commitment to any objective is measured by how much we spend on it. . . In the real world we should be concerned with outputs: what did the money achieve?’ He goes on to write ‘there is no learning mechanism or accountability . . data is not tracked . . Institutional memory is non-existent.’
All these comments hold true of the Church of England’s approach to ‘race’. There is concern. There have been initiatives. But it has been stop/start, with no built-up narrative of assessment of strengths and weaknesses; evaluation, learning and amendment; renewed initiatives, followed by further assessment. Partly, I suspect, the issue of ‘race’ is understandably freighted with guilt and the fear of being wrong, so that our brains freeze, and we stumble facing the serious but also joyful calling to make known the good news of Jesus in the extraordinary complex mosaic of multi-ethnic England.
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Add Ons.
‘Towards the Common Good – Rethinking Race in the 21st Century’ was a 24-hour conference in Cambridge on Jan 12/13, organised by the Equiano Project, which featured a stellar line-up of ‘heterodox’ thinkers on race: Trevor Phillips, Katherine Birbalsingh, Tony Sewell, Remi Adekoya, Stephen Bush and Tomiwa Owolade from Britain; and Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Ian Rowe, Jason Riley, Coleman Hughes, and Thomas Chatterton Williams from the USA. Details on The Equiano Projects’s web-site. Hopefully recordings or print outs from some of the proceedings will follow.
A ‘Multicultural Worship Day’ is being held at All Nations College, Ware (but also accessible on-line) on Saturday 18th February. Further details on the All Nations web-site.
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