Out of Many, OnePeople - # 1 - 28/09/20

Welcome to the first edition of 'Out of Many, One People', aimed to equip Christians, particularly church leaders in developing churches which reflect the one people of God drawn out of many cultures.

Comment: Does using ‘BAME’ - Help or Hinder?

The acronym ‘BAME’ (Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic) has become standard use in both society and church as an umbrella term to encompass all people who do not belong to the white, English majority.  This article explores both its usefulness for the church and its limitations.

People who are not white and English have experienced significant disadvantage in our society, which certainly includes the church. Tariq Modood, professor of Sociology at Bristol University, and probably the best informed writer on ethnicity in this country, has coined the chillingly accurate term ‘ethnic penalty’ to describe the multiple disadvantages in employment, remuneration and promotion that BAME people experience in the workplace, and which underlines the discrimination experienced by people whose colour is not white or names not English. At this level the phrase ‘white privilege’ is a simple statement of the truth. These are not problems that white people face.

As regards the Church of England, as indicated in the February 2020 Synod, or in recent books by Ben Lindsay, A D A France-Williams, or Chine McDonald (forthcoming), it is all too easy to find similar experiences of people being devalued, ignored or discriminated against.

The term ’BAME’ flags up injustices that need recognising and removing. It points to an across-the-board experience of people of very varied backgrounds and capabilities who share a common suffering. Any reservations about how the term is used is not to devalue its prime significance as a marker of serious injustice.

However there are several reasons for being wary of too-easy use of the term.

1. It is imprecise.

Quite simply, who is BAME? According to the 2011 Census it was anyone who was not white and English. It is not clear that the term is always used in that sense, and often seems reduced to just being ‘not white’. In the 2011 Census the non-white group were 15% of the population; adding the ‘not-English white’ adds another 5%, or increases the size of the group by a third. When the recent Board for Mission statistics said 3.8% of clergy were BAME does that refer to those who are not white, or who are not white and English? I have the privilege of working with a Canadian vicar. I guess she is not usually thought of as ‘BAME’, but in the census categories she is. (As an aside I am struck by what seems an unusually large number of clergy who are white but not English. A few years ago Brent Deanery had more New Zealander clergy than black clergy.)

At a time when proportions and percentages relating to ethnicity are widely deployed there is a serious danger of comparing like-with-unlike, so that mis-comparisons occur between ‘not white, not English’ (BAME?)/ not white (BAME?)/’black’/African-Caribbean. In the 2011 Census the ‘black’ categories combined amounted to 4.5% of the population, thus less than 1 in 20 of the national population and very similar in size to the ‘white other’ group (which, with continued migration from eastern Europe, has probably grown faster since then).

Too often there is confusion over who we are referring to.

2. It obscures significant differences.

Tariq Modood (referred to above) has described the bulking together of all minority ethnic groups as a ‘blunt tool’. Whilst, as noted above, the term BAME highlights very significant similarities, it also obscures the very different trajectories and roles of different ethnic groups. To take some random examples:

• The large number of Indians in Boris Johnson’s government (as was also the case with Jews in Margaret Thatcher’s government), underlined by Priti Patel’s spirited assertion that she too shared the injustices of being minority ethnic. One consequence has been to weaken the too-simple binary of white/rich/oppressor set against BAME/poor/ oppressed. The reality is that affinity of interest and outlook can transcend ethnicity, so that upwardly mobile and thriving minorities are attracted to a free market government.

• The frequency of petrol stations in London being operated by Sri Lankan Tamils - I have no idea of the statistics but the reality is very observable if you have eyes to notice such things. Why? I assume it stems from the resourceful capacity of migrants to find, fill and at times dominate available niches in the labour market.

• The remarkably sudden ascent of English footballers with African parentage over the past five years or less. (List of names on request). Because observers too often see only colour and neglect details of background this has hardly been commented on, but in fact it is very remarkable both how few top footballers emerged from British African backgrounds until less than five years ago, and now how dramatically and numerously they have appeared in national (especially age-specific) teams. Why? One speculative explanation is that it often takes more than a generation for diasporic groups to start to approximate to national norms and show up in significant roles..

• Coming closer to home, the impressively significant number of Iranian men being ordained in the Church of England. This is the more impressive set against the alarmingly small number of men of African Caribbean background being ordained (more alarming still, I would guess, if we focussed just on Jamaican heritage). Again at present we can only guess at reasons. Is it just that Iranians are more middle-class? Or, intriguingly, do people from Moslem cultures feel greater affinity to ordered, liturgical Anglicanism than do people from several other cultures?

The important point about these very specific examples is that they point to subtle and complex currents in multi-ethnic Britain that the slapdash use of ‘BAME’ obscures and blinds us to. For as long as the Church of England overly uses the ‘blunt tool’ of the ‘BAME’ acronym then for so long we will be doing a bodged job in ministering to multi-ethnic England. Are we aware that we are ordaining many more Afro-Caribbean women than men? Or that most of our senior minority ethnic appointments are still from people whose faith was nurtured in their country of origin? Or that, at the end of the day, we are still ordaining people very largely from middle-class backgrounds? ’BAME’ can blind us from asking questions which need to be answered if we are to minister effectively in multi-ethnic England

• 3. It hinders personal engagement.

The New Testament is illuminating here. If now we have a ‘white English’/BAME binary, then they had a Jew/Gentile binary. At times the binary did important work. In Ephesians 1 and 2 where Paul is outlining the scope of salvation brought about through Jesus he sets ‘you Gentiles’ (2:11) alongside Jews to underline how Christ ‘might create in himself one new humanity in the place of the two’ (2:15).

But when looking at the church and its mission much more specificity is needed. So he tells the Colossians “there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free, but Christ is all in all” (3:11). The distinctive of ethnicity, religious background and social class are all identified. A similar passage in Galatians 3:28 also includes gender. Here Grant Macaskill makes the interesting suggestion that you could properly add the indefinite article to the translation, so that “One can imagine Paul saying this in a room filled with a mixture of people (some of whom may be tacitly evaluating and judging others) and pointing at each person: a Jew, a Greek, a slave, a free person” (bold type mine).The variety in the church is such that the umbrella label ‘Gentile’, like BAME, loses its traction in the reality of relationships amongst a wide diversity of people.

This is well illustrated when Luke tells what happened when Paul preached at the riverside in Philippi. He might have said the Lord opened the heart of a ‘Gentile’, but his missional perspective leads him to focus on the person’s individuality: “Lydia, a worshipper of God . . .from the city of Thyatira and a dealer in purple cloth” (Acts16:14). In one verse he highlights four vitally significant variables: religious background, gender, social class and area of origin. All these specifics about ourselves matter to us; terms like Gentile or BAME would wipe them out. A church concerned about its mission to people will be attentive to the significance of these variables.

Perhaps the most serious damage that ‘BAME’ does is to distance us from each other, as though putting up a frosted glass screen that allows us to encounter only the vaguest outlines of people. Trevor Philips has said ‘I don’t know what a BAME looks like’. This is particularly damaging to our calling to love one another. BAME is a thin, bureaucratic, ‘othering’ term - people are merely ‘not white, not English’! It has insufficient substance to evoke love. By contrast terms such as Tamil, Polish, black British, Jamaican, white English, Somali - all point to a history, a language, a culture, an identity which can begin to shape a relationship of love.

Amidst the current turbulence in the Church of England over its ministry with and to people of minority ethnic backgrounds, I believe our biggest failure is racism of the heart - not being moved to engage lovingly, closely and in depth with people of other cultures. Initiatives to try and improve our BAME statistical performance - notably over ordinations or senior appointments - will at best be clumsy, remedial (‘bodged’) exercises. Only when we have a heart to love (thence to understand, relate and live closely) with people who are different-yet-similar to ourselves will the enrichment that ethnic diversity brings to our life together and to our witness be seen in our churches.

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Quote of the Week:

“Accessibility is being able to get into the building; Diversity is getting invited to the table; Inclusiveness is having a voice at the table; Belonging is being heard at the table”.

Augustine Tanner-Ihm - Theology Slam Winner 25'/08/20

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Bible - The Church’s first inter-ethnic conflict – the distribution of food to widows in Acts 6:1-7.

“Nothing in chapter 2 prepares us for what comes in chapter 6 – except our suspicion that the heaven of Pentecostal “justice” cannot last long on the earth of Babylonian fears and desires”wrote the Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf, in ‘Exclusion and Embrace’ (1996, p 229), his prize-winning book, coming out of his personal experience of the Balkan conflict. He underlines the disappointingly rapid fall from the high-point of Pentecost in Acts 2, which highlights the inclusion of the young, of women, of servants in the new world of the Spirit, then plummeting down to the sad squabble described in this passage. 

Acts 6, verses 1 to 7 describes how ethnic tensions arose in the church in Jerusalem between Greek and Aramaic speaking Jewish Christians, because widows in the former group were being overlooked in the distribution of food. It is likely that whilst within the wider context of the Roman Empire speaking an international language such as Greek gave higher status, the Aramaic speakers sought compensation by ramping up their sense of priority in the Christian community as the indigenous people of Jerusalem (see Aaron Kuecker, ‘The Spirit and the “other” in Luke-Acts’, p 149). The distinction between the two groups, John Stott writes, “must go beyond origin and language to culture. . . There had, of course, always been rivalry between these groups in Jewish culture; the tragedy is that it was perpetuated within the new community of Jesus who by his death had abolished such distinctions” (in ‘The Message of Acts - the Bible Speaks Today,’ pp 120-1). Drawing on Social Identity Theory, Kuecker attributes it to the ‘malfunctions’ caused when a sub-group identity (‘Hebrew’ or ‘Hellenist”) becomes more important than the primary identity of being Christian. (I am reminded of a friend who bridled at being told that the ‘Indians’ in the church always prepared the Harvest supper – he sensed that the sub-group identity had become dominant.) 

If on the one hand, the Twelve saw the need not to be distracted from their primary work of prayer and preaching by such conflicts, then neither did they see the matter as too trivial to bother with, or even worse as evidence that the two groups 'couldn't get on' and were best left to go their separate ways. Rather they exercised their leadership by taking the problem seriously; by devising an imaginative and practical solution to restore inter-ethnic harmony, that took the needs of the 'outsider' group seriously; and delegated it to wise and Sprit-filled men to implement. 

The creation of the seven deacons in Acts 6, has much to say to churches in all multi- ethnic situations. It reminds us that attitudes derived from this passing age will remain with us to create tensions in our churches. Our response is to be neither apathy nor despair but should be an amalgam of spiritual discernment and practical wisdom that creates specific solutions to these tensions. As history unfolds there are a myriad of new possibilities for inter-ethnic tension; in each case we should be looking to God for the wisdom to create adequate responses that preserve the visible and experienced inter-ethnic unity of the church. In all of this, one important point to learn from the Jerusalem church was its instinct to give power to those who felt excluded; thus all seven deacons had Greek names and probably came from the Greek-speaking Jewish community that had seen itself as disadvantaged in the food distribution. It could be seen as an early example of ‘positive discrimination’. 

Owen Hylton’s helpful book ‘Crossing the Divide: A call to embrace diversity’ lists eight lessons to be learned from how the apostles handled this situation:

a) They listened – only thus do we give value to those who feel they are discriminated against.

b) They focused on the complaint, not the complainant. It is dangerously easy to write people off as ‘troublemakers’, or ‘have a chip on their shoulder’.

c) They took the complaint seriously – they don’t excuse or deny, or say ‘Yes, but’.

d) They brought the complaint to all the disciples – it was a problem for the whole church, not just the Greek widows

e) They clarified their roles and responsibilities. They weren’t distracted from their work but got others to do the job.

f) They allowed the disciples to be involved in finding a solution.

g) They saw the organisation of such a task as an important spiritual function

h) They chose men who were full of the Spirit and wisdom. (pp 140-141).

The first four on Hylton’s list particularly speak powerfully to churches in multi-ethnic contexts where there is discontent and conflict of interest.

Significantly, Luke ends this section by giving us the counter-intuitive information that the apostolic refusal to let the Hebrew speakers claim privileged eminence in the church, rather than diminishing the impact of the gospel on this group, led not only to the word of God continuing to spread, but “the number of disciples increased greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith” (Acts 6:7). Thus Hebrews benefitted from the preference given to the Hellenists. Kuecker observes how frequently Luke immediately follows narratives of the Holy Spirit’s work of ethnic inclusion by going on to give one of his updates on the growth of the church. When the supra-ethnic nature of the church is worked for, the church’s vitality increases.

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News - Covid 19 and Africa

Whilst Europe, the Americas and India are struggling with a pandemic that seems beyond their control, the situation in Africa is far more positive. Senegal, with a population a quarter of the UK, has recorded 302 registered deaths; that is, at one-thirtieth of the UK level. Rwanda, with less than one-fifth of our population has recorded 26 deaths.

The Washington Post article recording this (22/09/20) commented “This should have been moment for media outlets to challenge corrosive narratives about Africa and the idea that Africans are not capable of effective policy-making. We could be learning from the experiences that Africans and their governments have had with pandemics and viral diseases, including Ebola and AIDS.”

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Review: The School that tried to end Racism.

Perhaps television programmers saw Black Lives Matter coming. First the BBC ran an excellent drama and documentary on the so-called ‘Windrush’ scandal that illustrated (as did the McPherson Report into the death of Stephen Lawrence) that black peoples’ allegations of racism in national institutions are, if anything, understated. Now Channel 4 have followed with an excellent two-part documentary on ‘The School that tried to end Racism’ (Thursdays 25th June and 2nd July at 9pm).

Twenty-four eleven-year olds from a school in a south London suburb were selected to form an ethnically mixed class to explore racist attitudes amongst them. An initial bar was sent by an Implicit Association Test which discovered that 18 of the 24 (that is, more than just the white group) had a bias towards white people. The programme then took them through various exercises to counter that. One fascinating sequence was where they were divided into ‘affinity’ groups – white and non-white. For the non-whites there was an immediate burst of energy in the group, they were being recognised and affirmed for who they are. The contrast with the listlessness of the white group was dramatic, perhaps unsettled at seeing their whiteness as a category rather than a norm.

A repeat of the association test at the end of the three-week exercise showed that the group was now substantially bias free. Result! Certainly the organisers of the programme (who observed the interactions remotely) and the school teachers were most impressive. In particular it enabled the children to examine racism together rather than create a narrative of conflict. Nor did it exclude complexity. Alongside white privilege it recognised that Chinese pupils nonetheless out-perform all other groups nationally. There was a particularly moving conversation between a boy aggrieved that he had suffered from racial profiling by having his bag searched in a supermarket, and his Ghanaian mother who defended such actions as necessary to keep shoppers safe.

The key question is how far such an excellent learning programme is transferable. A number of possibly non-repeatable factors ran in its favour. The children (who were very impressive) were hand-picked, and presumably on their best behaviour being televised. I suspect it focused on the most open of the white pupils. Students seemed to live in a fairly comfortable community, the balance of white/BAME was fairly equal, and amongst the non-white group no particular ethnicity predominated. (The BAME coalition dissolved into Asian and Black components). It is not hard to imagine classes of eleven-year olds that would have given the process a much rougher ride. 

For me, the main takeaway was the importance of ‘equal status contact’, of listening and learning together. Whilst recognising the reality of power imbalance, nonetheless it was important that the programme looked at racism relationally not adversarially. A powerful (and surely easily repeatable) exercise was were pupils of different backgrounds were asked to share an experience of racism with each other, and then to recount the experience of their partner to the rest of the group, leading to one white boy recounting his partner’s bitter experience of racist humiliation in a restaurant. The conclusion of the school’s headteacher was fitting and powerful: “Issues of race and racism are too important to be left to chance”.

So, what for the Church of England? It underlined the blandness of statements such as ‘Christians shouldn’t be racist”. Few, if any, of the white children here were consciously racist, rather the programme sought to address the subliminal assumptions of white precedence that is part of the air we breathe. Further, the problem is that in church above the congregational level there is low ethnic minority participation so that equal status contact in strength is rare. It may be significant that the best book on multi-ethnic church life, ‘Leading a Multi-Cultural Church’ by the Baptist minister Malcolm Patten, has as its back-story the author’s friendship with a Jamaican student whilst studying at Spurgeon’s College (he later married his sister). Anglicans have fewer minority ethnic ordinands than is the case at Spurgeons so that relationships are rarer and in danger of being stilted. One recently ordained black friend told me she often felt part of an ‘endangered species’. Nonetheless attempts to create the sort of intelligently planned and monitored learning experiences that the programme modelled are surely worth developing in the Church of England.

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Review: The Gospel according to Mica (BBC4, 31/07/2020, 9pm)

Early on the programme showed the New Testament Church of God in Lee, south-east London (including an advert for their Alpha course) - a member of the first ‘black’ denomination in Britain, but the off-shoot of a ‘white’ American fundamentalist organisation. It is the place where Mica Paris began her singing career, before crossing the high though well-crossed boundary wall from ‘Gospel’ to a successful career in ‘secular’ music.

As the story of Gospel music unfolded through focus on six songs it was told through the prism of Mica’s experience. The yearning for deliverance through the appropriation of the Exodus story in the spiritual ‘Go Down, Moses’ led her to a particularly moving encounter with the stories of escaping slaves. The role of church music to provide joy, hope and uplift in painful times came to the fore. ‘Amazing Grace’ was described as ‘redemptive’, but overall the redemption from what was never specified. John Newton’s robust Calvinism (‘twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace those fears relieved’) was obscured by an over-lay of feel-good adjectives (love, joy, hope, reconciliation) that made no reference to why Jesus came.

Mica’s declaration that she has kept her faith but is wary of organised religion - a variation on the ‘spiritual but not religious’ trope - led to the avoidance of hard alternatives, notably in its coverage of Sam Cooke. The two clips of that heart-wrenching voice filled me with delight, but it avoided Cooke’s powerful but tragic story - the black Dr Faustus, abandoning ‘gospel’ to win fame as the very founder of the soul genre, but ending with his shameful death, shot at age 33 in an argument over a woman in a motel. Nothing of the downside of his leaving religion was recognised by the Los Angeles pastor who eulogised him.

Stormzy’s performance of ‘Blinded by your Grace’ at Glastonbury book-ended the programme with a welcome realism. ‘Gospel’/the gospel is also his recognition that we are broken and in need of God’s grace. The programme shed an interesting light on Mica’s story, and the story of Gospel music, but touched only the edges of the real good news.