‘Professionalism’, Institutional Racism and the Church. # 154. 09/04/2024
Out of Many, One People.
Welcome. This blog is an amended and slightly enlarged version (with a particular spin on ‘professionalism’) of the talk I gave at the Anglican Network for Intercultural Mission conference in late March. The original will be published in the forthcoming ANIC Journal.
Thanks to Bishop Tim Wambunya and his colleagues for their brilliant work in organising the Conference. I also include some reflections arising from the conference.
‘Professionalism’, Institutional Racism and the Church.
‘The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people’.
Thus the classic definition of institutional racism by Lord Macpherson in the ‘Inquiry into the death of Stephen Lawrence’ (Feb 1999; §6.34). Here I want to draw attention to an often neglected word in Macpherson’s definition: ‘professional’. The connotations of the word may be a partial cause of the neglect: professionals are unfeeling, detached, perhaps slightly superior. But the charge of unprofessionalism against the police is central to the report: the Metropolitan Police didn’t treat Stephen Lawrence’s death with the urgency, sensitivity, vigour or expertise that people have a right to expect from the police, and which would most likely have been deployed had the victim been, say, a white public-school boy.
Here I want to highlight particular ways the Church of England’s response to a multi-racial society has been unprofessional.
Last year the Windrush 75 Network produced a report entitled ‘Why the Windrush Matters Today’ (reviewed in my blog #123). It concluded with the challenge: ‘what needs to change in this next generation for every sphere of our society to play their part in unlocking the full potential of a modern Britain, across every colour and creed, social class and generation’?
The question ‘What needs to change?’ is important because it invites us to be specific. Too often discussions in the church never move beyond vacuous generalisations along the lines: ‘Racism is a sin – we have been institutionally racist – we must repent – things are getting better – but we have still got a long way to go’. Until we are much more specific we have not said anything useful.
So, if we are looking ahead (for 10 years, if not 25) three questions:
1. Where have we gone wrong?
As regards the past I would summarise it as saying ‘The church never thinks about race, except when it thinks about race’. That is, it is an ‘issue’; it is ‘out there’. It is not on our guts or in our hearts. Two examples:
1. The documents we produce. Forward thinking documents like ‘Mission Shaped Church’ (which listed several major changes that had happened in recent times in our society, without listing ethnic diversity); or Mark Earey’s ‘Beyond Common Worship’, or Michael Moynagh’s ‘Church in Life’ all did so basically on the assumption that we are a homogenous, largely middle-class white society. Awareness of our ethnic diversity is simply not in our DNA.
* It is unprofessional not to have full awareness of the diversity of your social context as central to your thinking.
2. The training of our leaders. Last week I did a 2.5 hrs training session in a theological college. It seems it is all they will get on ‘race’. In fact, that’s less in terms of hours and placement than I personally got 56 years ago! If we are going to be anywhere near where we ought to be by 2048 we need to be much more serious about training our leaders. More on this below.
The Windrush 75 Network challenged our society to get to ‘net zero’ racism by 2048. The Church still has serious work to do in both shaping the mind-set and behaviour of its members, and its policies as an institution to reach that target.
2. To guide us towards 2048 we need two serious research projects.
1. We need to unpack what creates effective, growing ethnically diverse churches. It is obvious that in multi-ethnic areas there are some moderately sized, effective, growing churches and there are also many small, stuck, declining ones. What causes the difference? Churchmanship and theology? The gifts, the character, the personality of the leaders? Their age, ethnicity or gender? At present we don’t know. But any organisation that is serious about its mission wouldn’t be shooting in the dark the way the Church of England does. Rather than lamenting failure as we do at present, we need to be focussing on success. We need to identify perhaps 20 to 30 multi-ethnic churches around the country that are growing and producing minority ethnic leaders, and see what commonalities there may be, and what we can learn. Perhaps there will be no clear answers, but so far we have never even asked the question.
* It is unprofessional not to look for factors that may make an organisation thrive or decline.
2. A much more complex project is that we need to be trying to unravel the connections between race and class. Is our relatively disappointing track-record in becoming a racially diverse church because of racism – whether direct or institutional? Which is what is assumed. Or is it because most people from ethnic minorities, especially African Caribbean people - who have been our main area of failure - are working class? Historically the church has had little and now a declining impact on white working-class people. Is our problem, then, based on race or class, or what mixture of the two? At present, we don’t know. In fact I don’t know how far anyone is even asking the question. Yet it is crucial if we are to understand and therefore properly respond to our present situation. At the college I referred to I noted one West African student, and possibly four South Asian students, but my guess is that they were all fairly bright graduates. Quite simply, we are still doing badly with working-class African Caribbean people; increasingly well with Chinese or South Asian graduates. So how far is the Church’s rather agonised concern about racial disparities in its midst actually caused by racism, or rather are we engaged in a ‘displacement activity’ to avoid looking at our long-standing failures concerning class? Without serious research in this area we could well be punching the air.
* It is unprofessional not to scrutinise closely reasons for failure.
Looking Forward to 2048 what do we need to do?
1. Training.
This is largely the reverse of the second area of going wrong, above. Everyone training for licensed ministry should have a basic course on ‘Church and Life in Multi-cultural Britain’. It would need to examine both the ethical and sociological issues to do with racism, racial disadvantage and racial justice, and also the pastoral and cultural issues of how you can lead churches to become visibly and joyfully ethnically diverse communities. Integral to such training (though admittedly difficult to organise) there needs to be some sort of experiential ‘immersion’ (a key word) in life in multi-ethnic communities. As a generalisation, when I hear clergy from multi-ethnic parishes speak about their ministry I often feel a sense of affinity – I can connect with their experience; when I hear church leaders talk about race, I am often irritated – they are abstract pronouncements, untouched by on-the-ground reality.
Such training also needs to be part of in-service training, especially induction for those going to be incumbents in multi-ethnic areas. In the tv series ‘Rev’ the ineffectiveness of Rev Adam Smallbone was not funny. He hadn’t been trained to do his job.
* It is unprofessional not to thoroughly train your staff for the specific tasks they will be facing.
2. Pathways.
There was a useful article in the Church Times a year or two back on rural ministry, which made two important practical suggestions. One was the need for ‘Pathways’ – we do that for rural ministry, we do that for academic ministry, but we still yet have no path for putting the round pegs of those who have a call to ministry in urban or multi-ethnic ministries into the round holes of urban, multi-ethnic parishes. More specifically how do we evangelise groups we have very little impact on, such as prosperous Gujeratis or struggling Somalis, unless we develop intentional pathways for calling, training, placing and supporting such ministers.
* It is unprofessional not to look for, develop or make best use of the human resources available.
3. A centre.
We have the Rank Centre for Rural Ministry. We don’t have any centre that will facilitate, educate and take forward ministry in multi-ethnic communities; and one that will be a base for training, and a repository of ‘institutional memory’. How, as recent national press coverage has thrown up, do we share and refine experience and wisdom about requests for baptism by Iranian asylum seekers? How do we share hard-won experience in ministering to linguistic minorities, such as providing multi-lingual services, maybe with translation facilities, or having separate mother-tongue services? How can we learn to make progress with our biggest challenge – developing effective ministry to African Caribbean or Black British young people, especially men? Too often we are all separately busy re-inventing the wheel.
This conference is a first, big encouraging step towards doing these things. But it has been a need for 75 years! ‘Sharing good practice’ was part of the brief of CMEAC, but over the years there has been virtually nothing on parish life. So, it is good that it has recently held a conference on ‘Worship. In those years we have had Faith in the City, Committees, Commissions, Reports – endless bureaucracy, yet so little that has actually touched the ground of actual parish ministry.
I have had the privilege of knowing Tim for many years. I can assure you that despite the volume of his output, there is only one of him! We can’t go on depending on the voluntary labour of one man and his excellent team of helpers. There is some value in the Archbishops’ Commission focussing on Monuments and Reparations, but they are secondary to the primary need of developing and energising effective multi-ethnic ministry at the parish level. Similar to the Rank Centre for Rural Ministry, we need to develop a set aside focus for Urban, Multi-Ethnic Ministry.
* It is unprofessional not to gather together, retain and disseminate the learning and experience needed to carry out your task.
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Some Random Reflections on Issues Arising at ANIC 2.
* The Simon of Cyrene Theological Institute (SOCTI).
At the Conference Bishop Tim referred to his frustrating and unnecessary experience of having to study at SOCTI for a year. I think its story has important lessons for the church which have not been reflected on and from which we need to learn. I was on the Candidates Committee of the Advisory Board for Ministry to which developments for SOCTI were referred, so have some second-hand knowledge of what happened.
SOCTI was the result of proposals in 1989 from the Association of Black Clergy (ABC) primarily for an ‘access’ course to ministerial preparation for what was seen as a cadre of committed but academically unqualified potential black ordinands, fairly similar to earlier pre-ordination training courses for unqualified ordinands, such as at Brasted, which had closed down. The burgeoning of black theology in the United States also fuelled a parallel intention for developing a British black theology.
The proposal was responded to warmly by an almost entirely white church establishment which was eager to do the right thing, and which was attracted by a seemingly cutting-edge proposal.
In the event however the demand for an access course for under-qualified black ordinands was found to be a chimera. Instead, with the need to sustain the institution predominated over the actual needs of individual students so that well-qualified black ordinands, of which Tim was one (another had a Ph D), were shoe-horned into providing students for the Institute’s empty places. Thus the result of a scheme intended to benefit black people in the outcome made victims of black people who had to unnecessarily waste their time at SOCTI. Eventually it closed with little fanfare or attempts to learn lessons from a costly and largely time-wasting enterprise.
There are three aspects which might be learnt from the failure of SOCTI and which I think should sound as warning bells about some of the present proposals before the Church of England.
* A predominantly black group making high-profile proposals but having little ‘skin in the game’, that is no accountability or damage if the proposals fail to result in positive outcomes.
* A largely white establishment concerned to be forward-looking and responsive but unmotivated or unable to ask hard questions about the proposals.
* The lack of a strong evidence-base for the need and potential outcomes for what is proposed, rather than well-intended assumptions.
* Impact on different minorities.
At the conference there were inspiring and challenging accounts of ministry to different minority groups, especially more recent asylum seekers and refugees, especially Iranian and Chinese. This contrasted with less focus on long-standing ethnic groups, especially those who came from largely rural communities to fuel the booming post-war economy’s need for cheap labour – thus especially from Jamaica. Mirpur (in Pakisan) and Sylhet (in Bangladesh). (I am grateful to John Bavington for pointing out this distinction).
Amongst other contrasts this might indicate difference between groups with obvious needs, who are grateful to us and are often better educated, over against groups who we find it more challenging to relate to culturally.
Well said John.. Of course I heard it at Leicester but it's good to have it in writing.
Especially with you on research project 2 on the intersections of class and race... There must be many parishes like ours which are at the junction between being an "estates" church and a multicultural / intercultural church (in a neighbourhood which fits the same description with a large (poor) Muslim and East European community around us) . And our worship (and community activities) are attracting people across the board. But our GMH people are either refugees / asylum seekers, carers, or Windrush generation pensioners with very low incomes.
But unlike many of the more "successful" churches who were at ANIC (I guess because they have lots of GMH geaduates and professionals) , we are fragile and under resourced, weighed down by responsibilities for buildings that are impossible to use, tiny income especially from giving, lots of people who need huge inputs of pastoral support, keen to reach out in God's mission. Currently at crisis point without clergy, ageing lay leadership, in the middle of a botched and delayed parish re-organisation...
So research is needed.. that looks at different types of churches to establish the intersectional patterns of race/class/ income / gender / generation in church congregations across the country, in different regions and types of parish. It needs also to look at why some people end up in Anglican parishses as opposed to other denominations and diaspora churches. It needs to identify faactors that lead to growth and flourishing healthy churches (with some critical thinking about what these terms mean). Finally it needs to develop and implement strategies which will positively impact and revitalise parishes such as ours.