THE Assembly Hall of Church House, Westminster, is familiar to many in the Church of England as the debating chamber for the General Synod, and, for at least some bishops, the association is not a positive one.
On Wednesday afternoon of last week, however, the Bishop of Edmonton, Dr Anderson Jeremiah, told a group of clergy and ordinands that they had “redeemed the building”.
He was speaking at the first gathering for UK Minoritised Ethnic/Global Majority Heritage (UKME/GMH) clergy in the province of Canterbury, where he was joined by the Bishop of Chelmsford, Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani; the Bishop of Croydon, Dr Rosemarie Mallett; and the Bishop of Willesden, the Rt Revd Lusa Nsenga-Ngoy.
Dr Mallett said that, when she first entered the chamber as a member of the General Synod, she had “more similarities, and more actual conversations, with the people who staffed the door, the security team, the caterers, the cleaners, than with anybody I was sitting alongside inside the chamber, because we were not at the table, we were not represented”.
The report From Lament to Action recommended the inception of provincial gatherings of UKME/GMH clergy, and, in May, an equivalent event took place at Bishopthorpe Palace for clergy in the C of E’s northern province.
The Archbishop of Canterbury later joined the gathering for a service at St Margaret’s, Westminster, and then hosted a dinner at Lambeth Palace.
In an interview with the Church Times about racial justice, he spoke about the riots that took place in early August. Legal consequences for perpetrators were necessary for reconciliation, he said.
“Reconciliation means facing truth and justice,” he said, in an echo of the comments he made at the time of the riots (News, 6 August). Asked why the Church’s interventions concerning racial justice were sometimes derided, he suggested that it was because the Church “challenges a certain narrative of what this country is about: the narrative that our imperial past and our history is universally benevolent and beneficial”.
The Church Commissioners’ establishment of a £100-million investment fund to benefit communities impacted by the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade (News, 4 March) has been criticised by some as misrepresenting the part played by the Church in supporting the trade (Press, 22 March; Comment, 22 March).
In June, the chief executive of the Church Commissioners, Gareth Mostyn, responded to the criticisms (Comment 14 June).
At the gathering in Church House, Dr Mallett said that she had once left the C of E after she “learnt the story of its relationship to African chattel enslavement”, but returned “with a determination to be a changemaker”.
In a roundtable interview with the Church Times, Dr Mallett, Dr Francis-Dehqani, and Dr Jeremiah spoke about the development of racial-justice work in the C of E.
“Racial justice shouldn’t become like a project with performance indicators that we complete in a specific time. It’s a way of life,” Dr Jeremiah said, prescribing “a constant dynamism that requires [the Church] to constantly question itself”.
Dr Francis-Dehqani spoke about the lessons that the C of E could learn from the Church in places such as her native Iran, where it is heavily persecuted. “I think the persecuted Church has a gift to offer the Church of England, which is to make us less anxious and worried,” she said.
“I think a lot of what we’re seeing at the minute in the Church of England is driven by fear and anxiety and a need to control our way, to ensure that we survive in ten, 20, 30 years — or even more than survive: that we grow and become big and influential again.”
This did not, however, mean that the Church should not be “intentional” in its work, she said, and one of the parts church leaders could play in efforts towards racial justice was to “create the spaces to give other people a voice”.
Dr Anderson agreed, and said that an intersectional approach to inclusion was critical in addressing injustice in the Church: “In this country we talk about race, we don’t necessarily talk about class, but they pretty much work hand-in-hand in grassroots communities”, he said, and suggested that thinking in this way was key to responding to the riots in August — a topic about which he wrote for the Church Times (Comment, 7 August).
“We need to look at who is not at the table,” Dr Mallett said. “At the moment, there’s a conversation about white working-class men,” she said, and remembered how, when leading a church in Brixton, she was concerned with ensuring that the church was offering something “for the folk who were not coming across our lintel, who were white working-class folk”.
The recently announced next Bishop of Wolverhampton, Dr Tim Wambunya (News, 27 August) was also at the gathering. While celebrating the “positive stories” of increased representation in the Church of England, and the growth of congregations in which a majority of people are of Black African heritage, he also emphasised the importance of ensuring that white people did not end up feeling unwelcome in certain churches.
In her remarks to the gathering, Dr Mallett praised the introduction of the terms UKME and GMH in the C of E, saying that “expanding the terminology has meant that many more people feel that they can come under the gathering tent, and feel that they too are part of the conversation . . . and that they belong”.
Although often yoked together, the terms refer to different identities: GMH describes people who come from countries where their ethnicity is in the majority, whereas UKME describes British people who, in the context of the UK, find their ethnicity minoritised.
During his final remarks to the gathering, later on Wednesday evening, Archbishop Welby asked for comments on what further consideration was needed on the Church’s approach to the categories.
An ordinand from London, who preferred not to be named, suggested that a key distinction was often that people who grew up in a minority were less confident than counterparts who had grown up where they were part of the majority — a point the Archbishop vowed to reflect on.
Before the service, he had urged those attending to speak honestly. He acknowledged that it could be scary to do so (especially with journalists present), but there was no point if people “complimented the sandwiches” but did not speak candidly. Besides, he only had 15 months left in post, and “might as well go out with a bang rather than a whimper”, he said.
The service at St Margaret’s had begun with a hymn sung to the tune associated with Tell out my soul, with words adapted from Dr Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech.
In his sermon, Bishop Nsenga-Ngoy, begged those present “not to lose sight of him for whom the rhetoric of our life needs to be focused”.
It was necessary to achieve a future in which “a new nomenclature of human identity sought in divinity, a future in which were are preserved and redeemed from fracture and disintegration, where we are invited into a space of mutuality”, he said.
Dr King called such a society the “beloved community”, and said that it required a “qualitative change in our souls, as well as a quantitative change in our lives”, Bishop Ngoy said, before ending his sermon in song.