THE place of racial justice in theological education was the subject of a three-day conference at the Queen’s Foundation, Birmingham, last week. Forty participants considered what it meant to “teach, preach, study, lead, and embody the Christian faith to step into deeper, riskier waters”.

The theme of the event, “Take Me to the Water: A baptismal pedagogy for antiracist theological education”, was baptism as the symbol for racial justice and lived experience. Baptism was proposed as “a radical call to justice, not symbolic ritual”.

The conference began with the Principal of the Queen’s Foundation, the Rt Revd Anne Hollinghurst; the Director of the Centre for Black Theology, Dr Dulcie Dixon Mckenzie; and the Research Associate for the Racial Justice Project (funded by the Church of England), Dr Mabel Alkali, opening “a space for lament, courage, and theological reckoning”.

Professor Robert Beckford spoke on the theme “Why are we still talking about race? How can we stop talking about race?” Dr Mukti Barton, a lecturer at Queen’s and an hon. lay canon of Birmingham Cathedral, offered a “critique of Christian supremacy and the theological deification of whiteness”. She asserted that justice was central to scripture: “If you take out the word justice from the Bible, there would be hardly anything left.”

The Bishop of Huddersfield, the Rt Revd Smitha Prasadam, a former Queen’s student, whose mother was the first Indian woman to be ordained priest in the UK (News, 10 March 2023), participated on the second day. The author of Take Me to the Water, the Revd Dr Starlette Thomas, said that “being created is enough reason to belong.” Describing herself as an “author, activist, visual artist, and race abolitionist”, Dr Thomas is an associate editor and the director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative at Good Faith Media. The event drew on her work.

The Birmingham conference was organised by the Centre for Black Theology, established at the Queen’s Foundation in 2018 “to be a centre of excellence in theological education for leaders and members of Black Majority Churches who want progressive and rigorous theology shaped through contextual and liberative lens of Black Theology”, and the Racial Justice Project.