Welcome. Back to matters of church life; hopefully of special interest to theological college staff and students, but how we train ministers affects all of us. Please forward to any particularly interested parties. Plus a slightly obsessive add-on about music. I always value hearing your responses.
What do theological students need to learn?
It’s that time of year again – clinging on to the last remnants of summer, but also welcoming brisk new beginnings, not least for the several hundred people who will be beginning training for ordination in the Church of England, plus of course similar numbers for other Christian ministries.
We live in a society and a church with a suddenly heightened awareness of ‘race’. The appearance of the word and its derivatives in the American press was fairly stable until 2010 and has increased tenfold since then. I wrote the entry on ‘Race’ for the IVP ‘New Dictionary of Theology’ in 1988. When its successor, the ‘New Dictionary of Theology: Historical and Systematic’, came out in 2016 my article appeared virtually unchanged. I wrote to the publisher to protest at the complete lack of consultation, and who agreed that I could re-write before any further revision. Thus for a period of over a quarter of a century ‘race’ was seen as a somewhat stagnant issue and of only peripheral interest to theology. Now, a mere five years later, even a ‘classically’ focussed theological dictionary would need a re-written, much longer article with a vastly expanded bibliography.
It is recognised too that theological education badly needs a catch-up. The recent ‘From Lament to Action’ report – which I will refer to during this blog – made suggestions in this area. A major aspect of the Church of England’s institutional racism is that its commitment to training all its future clergy for life and ministry in a multi-ethnic society has been sporadic and unfocused.
So, what do those theological students – ready and eager to learn – need to look at and think about?
1. Knowing the ground.
Every ordinand needs a course that need that gives them an understanding of Britain as a multi-racial society.
It would need to be:
* demographic. People need a factual account of the groups who now create Britain’s super-diversity – where they live, where they are specifically from (eg Mirpur, not just Pakistan), and what are their distinctive characteristics, such as occupational and educational foci.
* cultural. In what ways do ethnic groups (including the English) make assumptions about reality, the supernatural, family, authority, the respective influences of shame and guilt that so easily cause misunderstandings and misjudgements. Note that this goes far deeper than more superficial distinctions such as food or dress or music (which nonetheless are worth paying attention to).
* ethical. Primarily here the focus is on racism, not just that it is wrong, but what it is and how it works, and (especially in the light of current controversy) when disparities of outcome may be caused by structural or institutional racism, or when they most likely lie in a host of other demographic or cultural factors.
Included in presenting such a course would be not just lectures but listening to music, watching films, hearing stories
Aims. Such a course needs to be near the beginning of a student’s training in order to alert them to questions and issues they need to be working on in the rest of their training. The outcome should be that people are able to watch or read the news, or hear people’s stories, and be able to contextualise them, and make their own assessments.
2. Immersion.
This is by far the hardest for training institutions to deliver, but ways should be found. Students need substantial and sustained personal experience of relating to people from other ethnic and social class groups. Nothing can replace experience-based learning. Sunday placements can only provide a beginning. Summer placements make possible a more in-depth experience. Both need opportunity for reflection on issues of race and culture that are raised, preferably with other students, certainly in free and open conversation with a minority ethnic mentor.
I have previously referred to Les Isaacs’ ambitious suggestion that in two of a three year course students be placed in culturally diverse congregations. Colleges need to be creative in engineering opportunities for students to meet with, eat with, share cultural, social or worship experiences with people of other backgrounds. ‘From Lament to Action’ rightly stresses that ‘the work of racial justice is . . the work of the whole church, rather than being seen as a minority concern’ (p 13). That only happens as students take into their hearts the experiences of people they know, rather than it being a ‘diversity issue’ they hear about at a distance.
Ideally, of course, courses themselves should be having a multi-ethnic intake, and thankfully this is happening more thoroughly, but initiatives need to be taken so that unostentatious but nonetheless deep cross-cultural relationships develop. It may be that laissez-faire approaches, especially in non-residential settings, simply fail to overcome attitudes of cultural superiority and social distancing, which means that essential opportunities for becoming familiar with cross-cultural relationships are lost.
Aims. The ‘From Lament to Action’ Report highlights ‘intercultural awareness’ (p 39). Ordinands should leave college with sufficient cross-cultural experience that they are confident to learn, listen and change through encounter with people from diverse ethnic groups, and be at home in a different cultural ambience.
3. A global historical perspective.
I once taught church history in a theological college. It was always a Cinderella subject, constantly squeezed as the syllabus made way for (perfectly justifiable) courses on management and the like (a damaging shortfall in my range of ministerial competencies, not compensated for by fairly intensive knowledge on nineteenth century urban church history).
But as citizens of a multi-ethnic society and members of a globally dispersed church it is essential to have some perspective on how we are placed over against other societies and cultures and the historical processes that got us here. It is significant therefore, that when ‘From Lament to Action’ specified the need to diversify the curricula of training institutions it specifically and rightly highlighted church history and Global Theologies. Whilst students need a basic understanding of the shape and issues of western church history, our past weakness in failing to put that into a long-term global perspective has hindered us from seeing the bigger picture. In particular, the greater salience of race in general discussion over the past decade has wrong-footed us because of a lack not so much of factual awareness but of deep-seated emotional engagement with our responsibility for the slave trade and slavery, as well as other serious abuses of western military, economic and political power.
On any reckoning the values and policies that have emerged from western Europe have had a massive and decisive impact on all other parts of the globe. (‘Western European’ is a more precise and less loaded term than ‘white’). As long as clergy leave colleges with that legacy unexplored, or with vague but unexamined feelings of both pride and guilt, so will their sense of themselves in multi-racial communities be faltering and uncertain.
It is an area of vigorous historical focus. The Harvard professor, Joseph Henrich’s recent book ‘The Weirdest People in the World: How the West became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous’ raised the issue this way: ‘Here’s the key question: Are individuals from European regions with longer exposure to the Church and the MFP (Marriage and Family Programme) more individualistic and independent, less obedient and conformist, and more impersonally trusting and fair today than those from less exposed regions?’ (p 234, italics mine). For Henrich it was the Roman Catholic church’s strong prohibitions from the 4th century on of marrying close kin that thereby led to people relying less on immediate family and instead marrying, doing business with, and learning or praying with people from far afield that created those very distinct characteristics that he lists above. It is why the church where I was vicar regularly included six or more sibling pairs, plus other close kin, from South Asian backgrounds, but none from white English backgrounds.
Tom Holland’s ‘Dominion’, or, at a more academic level, Larry Seidentop’s ‘Inventing the Individual’ both emphasised the seminal and very largely positive impact of Christianity in shaping western European distinctiveness. Conversely, the African American theologian Willie James Jennings has argued for the baleful and perverting consequences of Christianity being so decisively shaped in the western European mould.
Aim. The wider perspective that dismantles the sense that western Europeans form what is the normative, and will be the ultimate shape of all human beings (the disastrous sub-text of western foreign policies) needs to be brought to the attention of all theological students. Instead they need to develop a respectful and humble attentiveness to spiritualities, worship and theology that have been shaped by very different cultural and economic contexts, and which are certainly found in our country, and very often (possibly submerged) in our churches.
What I have not emphasised.
Attentive readers may have noticed that some things have not come to the fore in these proposals. Over time a range of training initiatives have been put forward and used – racism awareness, unconscious bias, and most recently, white fragility. Since there is much for white people to feel guilty about, arousing a sense of guilt is not necessarily a bad thing. Nonetheless it may not lead to behavioural change. Living well and appropriately in a multi-racial society needs first of all experience in relating to others as the basis for understanding, love, repentance and change. If the experience of being accused is the first step in the process the danger is that it is also the last step. In particular it can create what has been called the ‘Kafka experience’ (based on his novel ‘The Trial’) where you are held to be guilty from the start, so either you accept the charge, or you deny it, in which case your obduracy becomes even stronger evidence of your guilt.
In reality, in workplaces it is now widely evidenced that such accusation approaches actually produce little change. ‘From Lament to Action’ risks similarly beginning with the negatives. An ‘anti-racist learning programme’ (p 41) has uncomfortable nuances of a drive to create right-thinking, well-processed participants, rather than enabling people to learn and grow through the distinctive patterns of their personalities and experiences.
Beginning with the primacy of experiencing and holding on to personal encounters is much more likely to bring lifelong growth and change amidst the ever-changing context of ministry in a multi-racial society.
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Video of the Week
Dear, White Church . . . (The British POC experience)
This is short, sharp and to the point, after last week’s long, heavy duty recommendation.
Basically, it is young ‘people of colour’ spelling out in clear and important statements ways in which white people can fail to understand. Don’t be put off by the introduction. (Thanks to Christopher Ramsay for the reference).
Add On
Rolling Stone magazine has just updated the Top 500 songs, vividly illustrating how ‘race’ has suddenly come to dominate the cultural horizon, and possibly warp judgements, since its last listing in 2004.
* No 1 is the near-sainted Aretha singing ‘Respect’ – is it really better than her ‘Chain of Fools’ listed at 301?
* Marvin Gaye’s 1971 response to urban and race problems ‘What’s Going On’ was listed at 6. (The album with that title recently appeared from nowhere to be voted all-time No 1 Album in another recent survey). For me ‘I heard it through the Grapevine’, my favourite Motown record, and listed at only 119 was much better, though admittedly more ‘secular’.
* Sam Cooke’s rather bland 1964 Civil Rights song ‘A Change is Gonna Come’ was listed at No 6. Not only is it considerably inferior to his classic 1957 ‘You Send Me’ (not listed!) which created soul music several years before everyone else, but in reality African-Americans saw bigger and better changes in the heroic years until the mid-60s compared to the slow progress since.
In my rather obsessive opinion then, ideology is triumphing over good judgement: middle-aged white men uncomfortably feeling that they need to make amends, rather than simply value good popular music. Percy Sledge’s delicious ‘When a Man loves a Woman’ (rated No 54 in 2004) has disappeared altogether, whilst The Animals brooding southern-Gothic classic, ‘House of the Rising Sun’ (my personal No 1) is only rated at an insulting 471.
But that’s my take. I would love to hear yours.
Thanks John... a lot of that is sound common sense.. What's missing I think... (and it would be a huge add on to a curriculum) is the relationship between race and religion... and I'm specially thinking of hown racism and Islamophobia are intertwined.. But we do need church leaders who are clear thinking not just about their theology of religions and positions on mission /evangelism to people from the major world faiths, but are aware of how religious identity segregates local communities and leads to prejudice and discrimination.