A NEW report identifies “good practice” on racial justice in the Church of England — but it also identifies a case of “bad practice”, in which a curate felt forced out by his training incumbent.
The fifth report by the Archbishops’ Commission on Racial Justice was published last Friday.
A section of the report details “good practice” on racial justice which is taking place across the Church.
It includes testimony from the Bishop of Dudley, the Rt Revd Martin Gorick, about his “racial justice journey”. In the diocese of Worcester, in which he is a suffragan bishop, there has been “modest but tangible” progress, he says.
Another example of good practice is identified in the diocese of London’s efforts to collect data on diversity among clergy. Only 20 per cent of clerics had declared their ethnicity in the management system, and the diocese had launched a campaign to increase this, so as to gather more accurate data which could be used to monitor changes over time.
“Nothing is more undermining to progress than the right rhetoric with no improvement of the impact to which we aspire,” this section warns.
In his introduction to the report, Lord Boateng, who chairs the Commission, describes legislative proposals to the General Synod on data collection as a “necessary spur to action”. He suggests that this legislation “will remove any supposed obstacles to the collection of the necessary data”.
Amid the examples of good practice, spanning several dioceses as well as Theological Training Institutions and cathedrals, the report also identifies an example of “bad practice”.
With names anonymised, it describes a curate, X, who was “let down” by “the system”. His training incumbent, Y, was alleged to have put multiple barriers in the way of X’s ministry, some of which related to X’s attempts to do multicultural outreach work.
The diocese involved is not named, but the report says that this diocese “now recognises as wrong” the events that took place, and how the allegations were handled, and that it “wishes to share so that other dioceses can review their own practices in the light of this example”.
Among other factors, the report identifies a power imbalance between paid incumbent clergy, who are “disproportionately from white backgrounds”, and unpaid assistant clergy “who are disproportionally UKME”.
The report describes X as “UKME/GMH” — a formulation used extensively in the Church of England — which stands for “UK Minoritised Ethnic/Global Majority Heritage”. The ethnicity of the training incumbent is not stated.
In a letter introducing the report to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, Lord Boateng suggests that some “unwanted headlines” could have been avoided “by taking care not to unwittingly reinforce division”.
Lord Boateng refers to the furore with which the diocese of Birmingham’s advertisement for an “Anti-Racism Practice Officer (Deconstructing Whiteness)” was met (News, 28 March).
At the time, Archbishop Welby suggested that the term “deconstructing whiteness” — which is used in academia and arose in the US context — was unhelpful. “Can we please do these things in English?” he said.
Lord Boateng echoes this view in his letter, writing that “terms imported into the discourse around race that arose primarily in a North American context” were “often deeply divisive and counterproductive”.
“I avoid them and would urge great care in their deployment,” he writes.
The Commission’s final report is expected in November.
The latest report details the commission’s work since the start of the year, which included supporting a motion debated at February’s meeting of the General Synod (News, 26 February).
The report details a meeting in May, at which the members of the commission discussed the reception of the Church Commissioners’ decision to launch a £100-million impact investment fund for the benefit of communities affected by the legacy of slavery, with an ambition to grow the fund to £1 billion through partnerships and further investment (News, 4 March).
In May, members “agreed that there is a definite effort being made to create an alternative narrative to that affirmed by the Church Commissioners — for example, by downplaying the value of the slave trade to British trade and economic development. Commission members agreed to produce short ‘rebuttal’ pieces in response.”
The Commission’s work will continue into next year, and a conference is being organised which focuses on “truth-telling” about “the legacies of slavery, colonialism and the Church’s complicity in racism”.
The report also calls for the work of the Racial Justice Unit, which was originally envisaged as a five-year process, to be extended for a further five years, and, pending a review, that it be “embedded within the administrative structure” of the C of E.
In response to the report, Archbishop Welby said: “Lord Boateng is right in saying that this report contains the good, the bad, and the ugly. While there is much to celebrate in our pursuit of racial justice in the Church over the past few years, we must also focus on those aspects where we could be doing better.”