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Race and Justice; Race and Evangelism.
Or ‘The farmers and the cowboys should be friends’ (Oklahoma’).
When I was first ordained as a curate in Harlesden I joined a group seeking to work out a Christian response to ‘race’, led by Rev Dr David Bronnert, and which was the nascent Evangelical Race Relations Group. One thing I soon realised was that our concerns covered two separate though connected issues.
One related to responding to and opposing racism. This was not long after Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech made ‘race’ a hot issue of national debate, and the church was by no means free of racist attitudes and assumptions expressed in numerous ways; for example, a Children’s illustrated Bible where a black Cain slays a white Abel! A Christian response to ’race’ required a concern for racial justice.
The second issue was pastorally responding to the new challenges brought by the arrival into our parishes of people from different ‘racial’ or cultural backgrounds, principally at that time from the Caribbean. We had to learn how to care pastorally and evangelise effectively amongst adults, teenagers and children from quite different cultural and religious backgrounds so that membership of our churches witnessed to people ‘from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages’ (Rev 7:9) gathered in worship to the Lamb and to God. A Christian response to ‘race’ meant a commitment to evangelism.
In identifying the existence of two separate but closely intertwined issues, one concept that I later found to be illuminating was the distinction made by Thomas Sowell between the impact of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ factors. External factors were those pressures that impacted ethnic groups from the outside, of which various forms of racism were the most obvious. Internal factors were those cultural patterns within an ethnic group that affected their outcomes in a wider society. At the risk of over-simplification, racial justice focuses on the external effects of racism whilst engagement with the particularities of different cultures is an integral part of pastoral and evangelistic ministry.
One further preliminary point needs making. At present there is no symmetry between the church’s involvement with racial justice and with evangelism. We live in a society deeply concerned about racial and ethnic divisions and where, therefore, any moves to combat racism and promote racial justice will get a warm welcome. On the other hand, proclaiming that Jesus is God’s answer to the problem of universal human sinfulness and the consequential need for all people to come to him in repentance, to be reconciled, and to receive eternal life is not, to understate the issue, a policy that receives warm approbation in our society.
The outcome is that in order to stand well as a multi-racial institution in our society the church puts front and centre its commitment to racial justice but is distinctly mute in expressing its commitment to preach the good news of Jesus to every sector of our society. One consequence is concept creep so that the term ‘racial justice’ gets deployed as the fall back term for almost any activity involving the interaction of people of different ethnic groups, even, one suspects, with church growth smuggled in under the term’s increasingly capacious umbrella. Meanwhile, with a marked decline in instances of flagrant racism, the sort of activities to be undertaken to promote racial justice can become elusive or remote.
In this situation, then, how can the church fulfil both its ethical vocation to work for racial justice and also its evangelistic vocation to proclaim Christ to all ethnicities, and what problems arise when we neglect either calling?
What happens when evangelicals neglect racial justice?
1. We lose credibility?
Tony Sewell describes his response during the Brixton riots of April 1981 in attending the Anglican church which had warmly nurtured and welcomed him as a child. ‘This was the biggest social justice issue of the day. But my church had no comment to make. As the sermon rang in my ears, I felt conflicted. . . . Jesus, surely, would have been at the front of the crowds just a couple of miles down the road, screaming for fairness. . . After the service my brother and I left the church both physically and emotionally’ (‘Black Success’, pp 1,2).
More broadly, the association of evangelicals in the United States with Donald Trump and a hostile attitude to migrants, Muslims and anti-racist movements has had the impact of discrediting evangelicals world-wide as being perceived as at best unconcerned to oppose racism and at worst actually fomenting it, especially as these policies have had the imprimatur of Billy Graham’s son, Franklin Graham
2. We become manipulative.
The temptation to make the growth of our church as our central concern can easily tip over into a pragmatism which causes us to uncritically embrace growth initiatives with disregard for issues of racial justice, or even to tolerate racial injustice in order to avoid losing growth opportunities. Whilst this is most evident in the United States where the desire to become megachurches can subvert the vocation to promote racial justice or rebuke injustice, it can also affect churches in this country which leads to subdued responses to issues of racial injustice.
The temptation of a results-focussed emphasis on technique rather than on self-giving love as the heart of church life and mission means that love and respect for the person becomes side-lined. The emphasis on the Homogenous Unit Principle (HUP) of seeking church growth through focus on ethnically homogenous congregations inevitably militates against Christians experiencing the spiritual maturing that comes from close interaction with those of other ethnicities, and blinds churches from awareness of the injustices being suffered by fellow Christians of different ethnicity. Churches can be in bubbles, losing awareness of the needs of fellow Christians of other backgrounds.
Indeed, past American evangelicals have been of so separating body from soul, going back to Plato, that they could participate in lynching black people. In ‘Tarry Awhile – Wisdom from Black Spirituality for People of Faith’ Selina Stone quotes the womanist theologian Kelly Brown Douglas: ‘In the American theological scene, Platonised Christianity perhaps found its most comfortable home in the evangelical Protestant tradition. . . This was the tradition that most significantly shaped the theological consciousness of those whites who were party to black lynchings’ (p 34). However this is to misread the history. Of the early days of the evangelical revival in the United States, Professor Donald G Mathews wrote: ‘The inclusion of a pariah class [black people] in almost every Evangelical community is especially remarkable if one takes into account the deep antipathy of white Americans to the colour, culture, and status of blacks. At a time when one of Virginia's leading men - author of the Declaration of Independence, a person who represented the acme of political sophistication - believed that blacks could never be incorporated into society, white evangelicals were trying to do precisely that’ (‘Religion in the Old South’, p 66). Rather the failure was not of their ethnically inclusive theology, but their eventual weakness in compromising that theology under the pressure of the pragmatic choice to be acceptable to the racism of the wider society. A temptation to compromise still with us today.
3. We diminish our humanity.
Relationships are at the heart of being church. If we see others as merely evangelistic fodder then we undermine a gospel which celebrates the worth of each individual. To be aware of the damage wrought by racism on peoples’ lives, of the humiliations, denial of potential, exclusion, and yet still to walk by on the other side, not only leaves the sufferer unsupported but damages us. Our failure to demonstrate active concern diminishes our humanity, our capacity to be enfolded and enlivened by participation in the human family.
Our desire to avoid experiencing the pain of others can mean we seek easy answers, to hear only ameliorative voices from contented minorities, to shut out the voices of hurt or anger, or seek to reduce the gospel as a cure-all for every pain. The black Christian who was once asked in a public meeting to give a ‘two word answer’ to the problem of racism was being manipulated to meet white needs for an easy solution. (If you went to Sunday School you will know the answer).
What happens when racial justice advocates ignore evangelism?
1. We decline numerically and have less impact.
Particularly for an established church there can be a complacent assumption that we have a place at the national table regardless of whether or not people attend our churches. The myth needs exploding. As the Church of England declines numerically its potential to be salt and light for the nation on racial justice issues declines. The Episcopal church in the United States has a commendable record as regards anti-racism, but its plummeting attendance from 884,386 in 2002 to 547,107 in 2019, and then post-Covid to an estimated 418,165 in 2023 means that its public voice has inevitably declined.
So the contrasting policies and fortunes of the dioceses of London and Southwark are instructive. Southwark has been on the front foot as regards racial justice. It has employed specialist officers, two of them for a period, has been assiduous in promoting minority ethnic vocations, and even commissioned a report by Sir Herman Ouseley into its performance as regards racial justice. Yet its record as indicated in the 2007 report ‘Celebrating Diversity in the Church of England’ is less impressive than that of the diocese of London. Although London had no specialist officers, had fewer minority ethnic clergy, and had less leadership from the top on the issue, yet it was impressive in having ethnic minority participation roughly proportionate to the overall diocesan population, despite having large numbers of other world faith adherents. The difference was a much more explicit commitment to mission, reflected in its criteria for appointing incumbents, and promotion of parochial Mission Action Plans. By comparison Southwark’s Ouseley Report made no mention whatsoever of evangelism in the work of the ordained ministry (4.4.3). The outcome was that it was London’s churches that more vigorously reflected to their population the reality of varied ethnic groups gathered together in united worship. (See the chapter on ‘The Anglican Church in London’ by Bob Jackson, in ‘The Desecularisation of the City: London Churches, 1980 to the Present’, edited by David Goodhew and Anthony-Paul Cooper, 2019, esp pp 267-268).
In this respect therefore will it mark an ominous change of emphasis that the highlighted qualification of the newly appointed Bishop of Edmonton was experience in Diversity, Equality and Inclusion, rather than the capacity to lead the church forward in evangelistic mission to the heavily secularised population of north London?
2. We stay predominantly white.
A church that preaches against racism and proclaims the need for racial justice can only do so if there is confident and active minority ethnic participation. Whilst some people will continue to attend the Church of England by tradition, or habit, without the church positively exhibiting the desire to share the gospel with the whole community our witness to racial justice will be shallow.
One consequence of our neglect of evangelism is that we have disastrously lost the support of African Anglicans migrating to this country. One chaplain to the Nigerian community has described those who continue over here as ‘the remnant’. Whilst pentecostal and independent African congregations flourish and predominate, African participation in the Church of England is a fragment of what it could have been. Blog # 72 on ‘Black Majority Christian Groups at University highlighted the flourishing of African Pentecostal groups at the University of Kent.
In this respect, the inappropriate intrusion into the report of the Oversight Group of the Fund for Healing, Repair and Justice requiring apology ‘for seeking to destroy diverse African traditional belief systems’ (§ 32), seemingly without serious consultation with African Christians, simply confirms the suspicion that the church that once sent missionaries to Africa, even with the serious risk of their death through ill health, has now reneged on that commitment.
Similarly our reticence about evangelism has weakened possible participation by South Asian Christians. In the 1990s there were two Gujerati, Hindu background clergy in Leicester diocese. Both left parochial Anglican ministry through frustration at the diocese’s reluctance to take positive steps to sharing faith in Jesus with their fellow Indians.
Without a much more up-front commitment to evangelism, including amongst all ethnic minorities, the Church of England seriously runs the risk of being an overwhelmingly white and liberal-minded institution speaking up for, not with, ethnic minorities, rather than a vigorously multi-ethnic church declaring God’s loving commitment to all peoples.
3. We don’t get to grips with specific cultures.
‘Race’ can be a dangerously flattening category; at its worst, simply and crudely marking off non-white from white. Yet the term has often been held on to for political reasons, thus by bulking up all ethnic minority categories into one BAME (now UKME/GMH) group there is greater lobbying potential. Again, the Church of England is often in error here, celebrating the appointment of minority ethnic people to senior posts without any attentiveness to the details of peoples’ ethnicities. The reality is that England’s small but mostly highly educated Malayalee (South Indian) community has produced three bishops, whilst the large, significant and usually working class African Caribbean, or Black British population has not produced one male bishop.
This is the consequence of racial justice advocates focussing solely on ‘race’ as ‘non-white’ but neglecting close involvement with the very different specifics of Britain’s varied minority ethnic communities. Whilst pre-occupation with ‘culture’ can be a merely instrumental way of maximising converts, in the reality of lived out and loving relationships it involves taking people seriously in their particular histories and identities with a closeness that staying with the hopelessly over-generalised category of UKME/GMH prevents us from engaging with. A ‘racial justice’ mind-set can hinder us from the close understanding and engagement with people that must underlie evangelism, and which enables us to enter into, and hopefully help counter, the injustices minorities suffer.
‘The farmers and the cowboys should be friends’ (‘Oklahoma’)
Just as cowboys can trample down the carefully tended fields and gardens of the farmers, so cowboy evangelists can trample down carefully curated attempts to foster harmony between ethnic and religious groups who are seeking to work together to overcome racial disadvantage and racism in its various forms. Evangelism that is not constrained by ethical scrutiny can produce a waste land of separation and conflict.
But farmers can be land-grabbers, extending their fields and claiming the best land so that there is no place left for the cattle needed to supply milk or meat. ‘Racial justice’ can so dominate the church’s multi-cultural landscape that it is seen as the only legitimate concern of the church, with the consequence that the church begins to lack the widespread and inter-racial support that gives substance to our concern to see racial justice prevail..
It is imperative to give space to each, but in our current context it is mission and evangelism that is at risk of being neglected.
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Quote of the week: ‘The courage to tell a complicated story’. (Professor Esau McCaulley in last night’s excellent event at St Mellitus college.
Thanks John, We (and not just old white blokes like you and me) have got to continue to tell this complicated and nuanced story about racial justice and the church. Maybe the problem is that most of the racial justice debates take place at the national (or at least diocesan) political level, while the important business of becoming a an intercultural, growing, welcoming and racially just church community happens at the parish / congrgational (or possibly local ecumenical) level. We need to to articulate the two themes at both levels.
If people want to engage further in this discussion, please book for this online seminar I am leading on the afternoon of Friday June 21st
Age, gender and race: Christian activism and racial justice
Exploring Christian activists in the cause of racial justice and how they work together
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/age-gender-and-race-christian-activism-and-racial-justice-tickets-886355502167