Welcome, to a longer blog about a big issue for the Church of England. Please comment, criticise and circulate - not least to those who may influence the Church’s policies in this area.
The Need for Minority Ethnic Clergy.
Over the past couple of decades it has been common for bishops and other church leaders to say that they would like to see more people from minority ethnic backgrounds ordained in the Church of England. My impression is that this hope is now going some way to being realised. I was recently interviewed by a writer for the Church Times on the topic, which concentrated my thoughts, and what follows are my reflections.
A. Why do we need minority ethnic ordinands?
1. We need good people.
The church desperately needs clergy of a high calibre. Stories of potential ordinands from minority ethnic backgrounds being discouraged or overlooked by clergy have been too common. We don’t know how many able clergy have been lost to the church by such racism and negligence, but one is too many. We should be praying that the gifts God has given to minority ethnic Christians might blossom, flourish and enlarge within the ministry of the Church of England.
2. Congruence matters.
The primary need is that clergy of any ethnicity, not least English, are eager and equipped to minister to parishioners of any ethnicity, whether their identities are strongly congruent or markedly different. Time, humility and the readiness to learn should make that an increasing reality. Nonetheless there are situations where the congruence of a shared ethnic background is significant in enabling effective ministry. Funerals, especially with a strongly tragic element, are examples where closely shared identity, culture and life patterns enable a more powerful emotional connection with those experiencing deep grief, so that the contributions of clergy from a congruent ethnic minority becomes especially important. There are numerous similar situations where shared ethnicity is a significant advantage.
3. Motivating other minority ethnic Christians.
‘Role models’ is a loose and over-used phrase, nonetheless it does have force. Seeing someone that we can credibly identify ourselves with encourages our own aspirations. I think it played a part in my own call to ministry. In this sense, having minority ethnic clergy around can have a snow-balling effect - the more there are, the more likely it is that others from that background will consider ordination a thinkable calling. It also needs recognising that role modelling can impact negatively, with poor examples discouraging others, but overall the sight of a growing number of clergy who aren’t white is a positive encouragement to vocations amongst minority ethnic people.
4. A wider range of ministerial gifts are developed.
Whilst simplistic ‘essentialism’ is a danger to avoid (‘they are like this’), and what many minority ethnic clergy bring to the table will be very similar to what white clergy offer, it is also the case that having a body of white ordained ministers that is heavily weighted towards the introverted and cerebral seriously limits and distorts the church’s ability to minister to the whole nation – not just ethnic minorities, but more especially white working class people. It simply is the case that people from some minorities do offer a more dynamic, out-going and confident style than is our norm; others I know more naturally bring a quiet devotional simplicity. At this point, seeking more minority ethnic ordinands raises not just the issue of extending the composition of Anglican orders, but shifting the criteria – a point I will take up towards the end of this blog
5. It is a ‘good look’ nationally.
Being well spoken of by the wider society can be either a virtue (Matt 5:16; 1 Peter 2:12) or a snare (Lk 6:26) in the New Testament. Changing our beliefs about marriage and sexuality, or that all people are called to turn to Jesus, is conforming to our society by betraying our faith. But enabling the world to see communities of varied ethnicities united in faith, love and worship is both central to who we are called to be and has the potential to be a source of hope in a world anxious about the damage wrought by ethnic division and conflict. As I have argued previously the extent to which churches can be distinguished by their ethnicity is a grave weakness to our witness; but where vibrant inter-ethnic unity is apparent we are speaking with gospel-based relevance to the needs of our world.
B. Constraints.
Whilst racism has been a factor in inhibiting ordinands coming from minority ethnic backgrounds, there are other factors at play that have limited our effectiveness.
1. The bulk of minority ethnic Christian vigour is outside the Church of England.
Surveys such as those by Peter Brierley have shown the much greater numerical strength of pentecostal or diasporic churches amongst minority ethnic groups. (In 2012 in London there were 85,000 Anglican attendances; 229,000 Pentecostal attendances). This partly due to their effectiveness in evangelism, partly due to the Church of England’s failure to engage or motivate minority ethnic Christians. An Anglican chaplain to Nigerians in Britain once referred to those who were continuing Anglicans as ‘the remnant’; so many now worshipped in African pentecostal churches. It is a growth referred to by Rev Dr Stephen Laird in Blog #72 on ‘Black Majority Christian Groups at University’. It needs re-emphasising that this shift is not primarily caused by the church’s racism but its lack of relational warmth, evangelistic vigour and failure to be ethically distinctive, not least over same-sex relationships.
Consequently the potential pool from which minority ethnic ordinands might be drawn is far smaller than is often realised; people who are strongly motivated to serve God in public ministry are much more likely to be found outside the Church of England. (I describe a meeting with such leaders in Blog # ‘Institutional Racism and the Church of England -2).
2. The goals of immigrant families.
The motivation of most minority ethnic families that migrated to Britain was to work hard to get a better life for themselves and especially their children, notably through education. Thus the aspiration in many families, especially South Asian or African, that their children have successful careers in areas such as medicine and health, business or law (with an encouragingly high level of success). In such a context, that the outcome of their struggles and sacrifices might be that their children enter the low paid and increasingly low esteem ranks of the clergy is highly unwelcome. Whilst in comfortably off English families ordination is seen as a high-minded and honourable, even if increasingly eccentric, career choice, amongst many minority ethnic families it can be seen as a betrayal of all that the parents have sacrificed for.
3. Adapting to complexity.
In a recent edition of ‘The Glenn Show’ (on You Tube as ‘The John McWhorter and Ibram X Kendi Twitter Fight’ ) the black ‘heterodox’ intellectual, and Professor of Linguistics at Columbia, John McWhorter recounted a discussion with the ‘progressive’ academic Ibram X Kendi, where Kendi had argued for a change to the criteria for selecting social workers as they currently seemed less favourable to black applicants. In a nuanced reply McWhorter had argued, using anthropological sources, that social classes (not races) used language in different ways and that middle class (both white and black) linguistic usage better developed a capacity for abstract thinking that was basic to social work (and arguably, by extension, for public ministry in the Church of England). In this respect the ethnic, social, theological and generation diversity of a parish church demands a greater capacity for abstract thinking that much more uniform diasporic churches.
This has significant, even though unwelcome, implications for cross-cultural ministry. As David Livermore points out, ‘Cultural Intelligence’ is generally more common amongst people with higher educational qualifications. Simply, it requires a greater capacity for abstract thinking, and that will be affected by people’s class and educational background. These differ substantially between ethnic groups, and also within.
An important consequence of the above three factors is that the focus on statistics, percentages or quotas as regards ordination is bound to be both misleading and disappointing. A host of cultural differences will affect the extent to which different ethnic groups will figure in the church’s ordained ministry; not least of course the fact that the overwhelming majority of South Asian people, and a substantial number of Africans belong to other major world faiths. On the other hand, given the greater Christian fervency of Africans, we might eventually hope for an ‘above-proportion’ number of African clergy. Nonetheless, when the report ‘From Lament to Action’ gave bulked together minority ethnic goals for particular roles (such as 30% participation in the Strategic Leadership Development Programme) it did so with apparent disregard for the realities of life amongst Britain’s various ethnic minorities.
C. Pitfalls.
The complexities identified above mean that too great an emphasis of recruiting more minority ethnic clergy can have unfortunate consequences.
1. Being blind to distinctions within Britain’s ethnic minorities.
The overuse of umbrella terms such as BAME and now UKME/GMH has served us ill and prevented us from identifying our strengths and weaknesses amongst Britain’s highly diverse minority ethnic groups. We are doing well with Iranians, not badly with middle class South Asians, disastrously with the ‘original’ ethnic minority, African Caribbeans, and most especially men. What such closer analysis has consistently revealed, and consistently been ignored, is that participation reflects social class as much as, if not more, than ethnicity. Totalising minority ethnic clergy blinds us to the real gap in our ministerial armoury, the shortage of male, working class, African Caribbean (and, I would add) Jamaican background clergy.
2. Arousing and disappointing expectations.
Some years ago a Pakistani man came to see me, under the mistaken expectation that I had some influence on the church’s selection processes. The burden of what he said was: ‘The Church of England is looking to find minority ethnic clergy. Here I am!’. I don’t know what happened to him, but I would be fairly sure he would be disappointed. For the church has communicated its intention of gathering multi-ethnic labourers for the harvest in too crude a way – not only motivating those we might have missed out on, but also encouraging the unsuitable, who face not only the personal pain of not being recommended but the deeper rejection of not being recommended after having been told that it is people like you that we are looking for. Further, it is not too hard to believe that when faced with a borderline decision, selectors will find an emotional pressure on themselves to lean favourably to someone who has been primed to understand that we are looking for someone like them.
3. ‘Mission Creep’.
Imagine: a football team realises that winning corners often leads on to scoring goals. Then mission creep happens. They start to focus on winning corners rather than scoring goals. They start losing. Mission creep happens when secondary objectives overtake primary objectives, The Church of England suffers from it badly. Our primary aim is to help people of all ethnicities follow Jesus. Yet whilst we frequently show concern and produce numbers about minority ethnic clergy and senior leaders, we rarely give emphasis to our primary mission to help people from ethnic minorities to follow Jesus. Dioceses have been acclaimed or blamed by the Committee for Minority Ethnic Concerns about their number of minority ethnic senior staff, yet with apparently no attention as to whether or not such appointments have taken forward the larger mission. In fact some appointments have been damaging for both the individual and the institution.
An intriguing cast study here comes from the 2007 ‘Celebrating Diversity in the Church of England’ survey, where the most effective diocese was London, with the percentage of its minority ethnic members reflecting very closely the diocese’s proportion of minority ethnic inhabitants, notwithstanding the fact that the area of London diocese includes unusually large numbers of people from other world faith backgrounds. And yet, surprisingly, London also had the smallest number of minority ethnic clergy in relation to minority ethnic church membership of any diocese. It is generally argued that the diocese’s effectiveness was due to its emphasis on appointing missional-orientated clergy – that is holding to its primary aim, rather than allowing mission creep to shift the focus to secondary aims.
4. Looking for ‘Black Messiahs’.
One important emphasis in ‘white privilege’ is that white people are not burdened with unreal expectations that they will be exemplars, heroes, or role models for other white people. Our flaws and failures are ours alone, not an indictment of our race. But by contrast in a situation where we are conscious of our failure to have sufficient impact in a multi-ethnic society, we too easily look for black people to get us out of the mess: ‘messiahs’ who will do for us what we can’t do for ourselves. In some quarters black clergy can be lionised by the church to make us feel good about ourselves, and unfairly loaded with unrealisable expectations. In her 1997 Reith Lectures Patricia Williams lamented that black people ‘ricocheted between invisibility and hyper-visibility’ – since the death of George Floyd the hypervisibility pole has been very much in the ascendant to a degree that is likely to lead, unfairly, to disappointed expectations. As a middle class white man I was never expected to solve the church’s very serious problems with ministry to white working class people. By contrast, too often we have unreal expectations of the problem-solving capacity of minority ethnic clergy.
D. Ways Ahead.
1. Well-trained clergy.
With one person in six in the UK born abroad, virtually every parish in our country will be multi-ethnic, and yet a central element in the charge of ‘institutional racism’ by the Church of England has been its lethargical approach to training its clergy for this context – a need that Clifford Hill identified in 1950s. This applies to both ‘general’ ministry in all parishes as well as specific training to work in high density or specialised minority ethnic areas.
Minority ethnic clergy will very largely appear from vitally multi-ethnic parishes; having clergy (of any ethnicity) trained to develop such parishes is the surest way to see the emergence of well-motivated and mission-minded minority ethnic clergy.
2. Developing multi-ethnic congregations.
As a continuation of the above point, and alongside well-trained clergy, we need a clearer understanding of what generates effective multi-ethnic parishes. It is helpful that Dr Selina Stone has recently looked at the issue of well-being amongst minority ethnic clergy; we also need a much larger and more comprehensive study to understand why in multi-ethnic areas some parishes flourish and produce ordinands and others don’t. Professional seriousness in the Church of England should mean close attention to our actual performance at a parish level, rather than the present tendency to avert our eyes and simply be content with hypothetical and speculative proposals rather than being driven by data. By now there ought to be a solid body of institutional wisdom about how multi-ethnic parishes might flourish. Sadly, there isn’t.
3. Tentative exploration of ‘niche’ ordinations (and training).
I was once involved in training a deaf person for lay ministry. Subsequently she was ordained and served in a ‘deaf’ congregation, though it was very unlikely that she could be an incumbent in an ‘ordinary’ parish. Once my attempts to explore the possible ordination of a Tamil leader with very limited command of English ran into the sand (rightly in this case). I know well a South Asian clergy with a very effective and appreciated inter-racial ministry who was ordained by the bishop initially for a ‘diasporic’ congregation without attending a Selection Conference, and culturally was probably not ‘incumbent material’. In tentatively exploring whether minority ethnic clergy might be ordained primarily for ‘niche’ ministries within an ethnic group I am aware that I am raising controversial issues both about the nature of, and especially indivisibility of ordained ministry, and more controversially risk making proposals that could be portrayed as racist, condescending or ‘essentialist’. Nonetheless we ought to consider whether some people who are unlikely to have the gifts to be incumbents can nevertheless play a very important ancillary ordained role in specific congregations, including those that are ethnically distinct. The ‘Peter Stream’ in the diocese of London, giving basic training to older people in good standing leading to ordained ministry in their parishes, is an innovative and possible model for other types of exceptional ministry.
If we see, as surely we ought, the building up of congregations worshipping in other languages than English as an essential part of our responsibility to minister across the range of a multi-ethnic society, then an added complexity is training people in languages other than English. It would be interesting to know what the Roman Catholic church, with its far greater diversity of minority language congregations, does in this area. Certainly the sudden florescence of post-pandemic inter-continental Zoom conversations and lectures offers opportunities for people in this country to be given mother-tongue training, thus lectures in South Asian seminaries being transmitted for training ordinands in this country.
5. A different Church of England?
Several of the suggestions in this Blog fit fairly easily into the Church of England as it is; but others involve a more fundamental shift of emphasis in the institution. ‘England’ refers both to a place and the culture that has evolved in that place. As the population of that place has shifted quite dramatically in its ethnic composition so the culture(s) found in England have both changed and become more diverse. How will the ministry of the Church of England change accordingly, for example by giving more weight to such New Testament emphases as fervent prayer (Acts 12:5), affective warmth (1 John 4:7), effective preaching (Acts 7:10) and hospitality (Hebrews 13:1) in our assessment of ministerial potential?
Having more minority ethnic clergy is not just a pleasant cosmetic change which makes us feel good about a fairly superficial visual diversity, but which leaves the body relatively unchanged. Rather it will lead to leadership from people who may be quite ‘unEnglish’ in certain ways, altering the ways we relate, preach, evangelise, organise.
Epilogue: Who would you prefer as your vicar - Matthias or Barnabas?
[Based on Aaron Kuecker’s book from his thesis studying the portrayal ‘the Other’ in Luke/Acts, using Social Identity Theory].
As regards the criteria by which we look for church leaders Aaron Kuecker’s exegesis of the appointment of a replacement for Judas in Acts 1:15-26 is challenging. The criteria Peter sets in verses 21-22 is essentially ‘more of the same’: “So one of the men who have accompanied us throughout the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day he was taken up from us – one of these must become a witness with us to the resurrection.” As Kuecker points out this was before the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost, and though the disciples prayed before choosing Matthias (by lots!), nothing further is heard of him. Indeed, it is startling how little we hear of the twelve (or rather, eleven) in Acts. Peter of course plays a major role, and the other two of Jesus inner circle, John and James, also appear. But of the others we read frustratingly, though possibly deliberately, little. Rather the running is taken up by other leaders who fall well outside the criteria that Peter had established of more Galilean leaders. Not only Paul but also Hellenised Jews such as Barnabas (the first leader who is neither an apostle nor member of Jesus’ family to appear in Acts), Stephen and Philip take on major roles. Whilst we call Luke’s second volume ‘The Acts of the Apostles’ what is startling is how rarely, apart from Peter, any of the Twelve actually appear in the story of the early church’s growth. Meanwhile tradition has other members of the Twelve pioneering further afield. Though the issue may hinge on different emphases in the significance of ‘apostleship’ - does it refer, as Peter implies, to witness to the foundational tradition, or to taking the gospel into new places
Using Social Identity terminology, Kuecker describes the false start in the appointment of Matthias as “an example of a (now defunct) paradigm of in-group homogeneity that exists apart from the Spirit and that bases entitlement claims on sub-group prototypicality” (p 108) – in other words, ‘he’s one of us’. The question is then raised as to whether in the context of contemporary urban England we are also operating with defunct paradigms that create in-group homogeneity amongst our leaders, and which are unable to incorporate the very different cultures of minority ethnic Christian leadership which is proliferating in our cities. To make room for leaders who are more expressive, entrepreneurial, flexible, even authoritarian would demand quite fundamental changes in the core structures of the Church of England, notably the parish system, if we are to have leaders for whom the ever-affirming, boundary crossing Barnabas is prototypical, as opposed the rather undistinguished but safely ‘one of us’ Matthias.