Racial Justice or Make Disciples of All Nations? # 129. 01/08/2023

Out of many, One People.

Welcome, to a blog which more than usually goes slightly into inter-faith territory. This is my last blog before the summer break. ‘Out of Many, One People’ resumes on 19th September. Meanwhile enjoy the rest of the summer.

Racial Justice or Make Disciples of All Nations?

What is the main role of the church in a multi-ethnic society? Looking at the titles of the jobs we create, the priorities we express, the concerns we wrestle with, the matters we are encouraged to pray about, then the answer certainly is Racial Justice.

In a previous blog on ‘Racial Justice’ (# 97) I spelled out some of the ways it is important for the life of the church:

  * hearing new voices – too easily we only listen to voices with accents or making emphases we are familiar with;

  * identifying and nurturing gifts – people who are not familiar with the institution’s culture can easily be ignored or flounder without positive initiatives to support them;

  * tracking institutional racism – it needs alert scrutiny to see how accepted assumptions or policies disadvantage those of different backgrounds.

These are all ways of counteracting the ‘like produces like’ tendency which leads to churches being formed of people who are similar in terms of social background and class, ethnicity and age. That is, they are failing to express the vision set out in Galatians where ‘there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (3:27). Grant Macaskill reads this passage with an ’a’ replacing a ‘the’, arguing ‘it helps bring out the sense that these particularities are all still present but that they are enclosed within a larger reality’ of their oneness in Christ. (Try it). So he imagines Paul saying this in a room whilst pointing to the different sorts of people represented there. (‘Living in Union with Christ’, p56).

Beyond the local congregation, the church rightly has citizenship responsibilities to care for the good of all in society. Central to our faith is respect for all people made in God’s image, and grief and anger when people’s dignity and worth is devalued, when they are denied work or have to live in inadequate housing or receive poor education. Anything that hinders God’s intention for shalom, for human flourishing for all people regardless of their colour or background is an offence before God.

But on what basis ought that to be the seeming totality of our calling in a multi-ethnic society. The call to ‘Go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit’ (Matt 28:19) has greater and clearer centrality in the text of the New Testament, and seems a more powerful underlying motivation in the life of the newly forming church which emerges in its pages. The Church of England is currently emphasising the call ‘to make disciples’, but – despite very consciously placing ourselves in a multi-ethnic (‘many nations’) society - the phrase ‘all nations’ has slipped off the agenda.

It is hard not to see the public expression of the church’s role in a multi-ethnic society as being to promote ‘racial justice’ rather than to ‘make disciples of all nations’ as anything other than timidity in the face of secular society - still anxious about maintaining ethnic harmony, and which sees religious faiths as untrue and irrelevant on the one hand, but as likely to cause unwanted division and disruption on the other. No one will be upset about a church that seeks to promote racial justice, but a church concerned about making disciples arouses all sorts of fears about the dangers of ethnic conflict in a society where there is still a rough though decreasing alignment between faith and ethnicity.

Similarly, identifying the church’s role in a society where over one person in ten identifies as a member of another world faith, then being focussed on ‘inter-faith dialogue’ is acceptable, and unthreatening to the unbelieving opinion-formers in the country. But any thought of seeking to help all people become disciples, obeying everything Jesus commanded, is deemed ‘intolerant’.

So the church can have an ambivalent attitude to seeking to make disciples of people of other faith backgrounds. We like the outcome, and indeed celebrate our diversity, but are uncomfortable with the process that got us there. Too often we are rather like a grand-mother whose daughter has produced a baby as a result of a one-night stand, where stern disapproval of the originating event gives way to acceptance and then delight in the outcome. Anglicans need to reflect on the Venerable Bede’s account of King Ethelbert of Kent's response to Augustine's missionary preaching: "Your words and promises are fair indeed; but they are new and uncertain, and I can not accept them and abandon the age-old beliefs that I have held together with the whole English nation" [A History of the English Church and People, Penguin edition, 1955]. How many Anglicans today would  think that this cool rebuff was sufficient reason for Augustine to give up on his mission, turn tail and sail back across the Channel towards Rome.

Yet if the church holds back from making Jesus’s commission as front and centre of our calling then its life in a multi-ethnic society is impaired, indeed we even become less effective in working for, and exhibiting, racial justice.

If we play down ‘making disciples of all nations’ several damaging results ensue:

1. Downplaying ‘all nation’ disciple-making leads to ethnic homogeneity.

Only about 5% of the non-white ethnic minority population are of Christian background; twice that proportion are of other world faith backgrounds. In this context only a consciously evangelism orientated church becomes widely diverse. It is interesting to compare the dioceses of London and Southwark in this respect. Southwark has had a much higher racial justice profile, at one stage having two specialist appointments, a conscious policy of encouraging minority ethnic vocations, and produced the Ouseley Report into its policies. London was much more negligent, yet in the 2007 ‘Celebrating Diversity in the Church of England’ report, it recorded a higher impact on its minority ethnic population than did Southwark, despite the fact that London diocese includes a much higher proportion of minorities from non-Christian backgrounds – notably Bangladeshis in Tower Hamlets, Indians across Barnet, Harrow and Wembley, and several major religions in Southall and Hounslow. By contrast Southwark’s ethnic minority populations are very much more of Christian background, including the ‘Black African Riviera’ (Tomiwa Owolade’s phrase) along south-eastern Thames-side.

A relevant contrast here concerns differences as regards discipling. Southwark diocese’s Ouseley Report (c 2000) was notably silent on the topic of evangelism, for example it is not included in its list of six aspects of ordained ministry (4.4.3), whereas London diocese had developed a leading emphasis on mission. Writing on the policies instituted by Bishop David Hope (1991-5), Bob Jackson observed ‘New clergy were to be seen to be leaders in mission and the enablers of other people’s ministries. Their objective was to be to go for congregational growth’ (p 269 in ‘The Diocese of London and the Anglican church in London, 1980 to the present’; in ‘The Desecularisation of the City: London Churches, 1980 to the Present’, eds David Goodhew & Anthony-Paul Cooper; Routledge 2019).

A lack of emphasis on disciple making amongst all peoples by the Church of England leads to the outcome that we actually have – a predominantly elderly, white, middle-class church, with a troubled conscience about racial justice but uncertain about how it engages. Only a deliberate focus on inter-cultural discipling will change that.

2. Downplaying ‘all nation’ disciple making leads to less inter-ethnic relating.

Racial justice rightly involves policies, but policies alone can lead to superficial results. Ultimately the route to a cohesive ethnically diverse society lies through natural, confident inter-ethnic relationships. Such bonding happens in all sorts of contexts: workplaces, sports teams, social activism, sexual relationships. Churches ought to be, and discipling focussed churches usually are, powerful foci for producing spontaneous inter-ethnic relationships, principally centred on faith in Jesus. My impression is that such churches have an above-average percentage of inter-ethnic marriages.

But for there to be richness of inter-ethnic relationships in churches, numbers are significant so that people from ethnic minorities feel neither like alien intruders nor like trophies to whom good must be done, but welcomed ‘normal’ members of a multi-ethnic congregation. For that to happen, discipling of all nations has to be at the heart of the church’s life.

3. Downplaying ‘all nation’ disciple making weakens the church’s national standing.

The Church of England should not take ‘establishment’ for granted. The case is weakened not only by declining numbers but also through becoming a smaller proportion of the Christian community. Anglican decline needs to be set against the growth of both independent churches and diasporic churches. Overwhelmingly minority ethnic Christians in Britain are much more committed to evangelism, and they are seeing growth. Perhaps it is not without significance that the most powerful ‘church-state’ event in recent years was the sermon by the black Pentecostal leader, Les Isaac OBE, at the 2022 Parliamentary Prayer Breakfast, which triggered Sajid Javid’s resignation, and the eventual downfall of the shamefully dishonest Boris Johnson.

Nor is this minority ethnic growth just amongst Africans of Christian background. Church growth is increasingly being seen amongst converts from other world faiths, notably Tamils and Nepalis, but also a host of other ethnicities. As things currently stand, the future shape of English Christianity is likely to be ethnically varied and non-Anglican. Seeing ourselves as committed to racial justice but uninvolved with disciple-making of all nations simply undermines our capacity to speak authentically about racial justice. In effect, we present ourselves as ‘white saviours’, seeking to do good through institutional policies, albeit well-founded ones, but unsupported with insufficient relational bonding across ethnic differences. The church’s voice will only have a certain sound when it comes from a richly diverse body. That diversity can only come from a conscious, explicit, fore-grounded commitment to make disciples of all nations.

That said, the church’s diffidence about cross cultural discipling is not without grounds. It needs to respect and take seriously the faiths of other people. It should usually be personal and low-key, not public and aggressive. It should usually be done by multi-ethnic groups of people. It can easily be done badly.

The relationship between pursuing racial justice and making disciples of all nations is more complex than can be fully discussed here, but simply put a church which ignores discipling people of all nations will ultimately be in a weak position to work for racial justice, whilst a church which ignores the challenge of expressing racial justice will ultimately be ineffective in discipling. The New Testament bears witness and the variegated history of the church underlines our calling to make disciples of all nations. The Church of England ought not to be coy about that aspect of our calling.