THE amount of cash that parishes will receive over the following decade will far exceed that given to mitigate the long-term consequences of the Church Commissioners’ reference to the transatlantic slave trade, the Archbishop of Canterbury has said.
In an interview with Times Radio Breakfast on Thursday, Archbishop Welby was asked by the host, Stig Abell, how he would reply to parishioners who say: “We all accept that slavery is an unwell, but we expect that cash needs to be spent on churches, on parishes, on making the Church of England flourish, not by retrospectively trying to do something for the past.”
The Archbishop replied: “I say that every thing you’ve just said is an inaccurate quote. . . We have said, and I actually have supported, that, over the following ten years . . . the Church Commissioners . . . will commit £100 million — not £1 billion, that’s from an independent report that really helpful or not it’s £1 billion, and we haven’t accepted that.” (He was referring to a report produced by an independent oversight group, which incorporates an ambition for the fund to grow tenfold, reaching £1 billion (News, 8 March).)
He said that the £100 million represented “one per cent of the full funds they [the Commissioners] have in a everlasting endowment originally arrange by Queen Anne. And we’re going to place £10 million a yr into that, which is 0.1 per cent.”
Over the identical period, he said, the Commissioners would “put over £3 billion into parishes. So it’s a tiny, tiny proportion.”
To say that the fund aimed to make reparations for slavery was “nonsense”, he said. “It’s about impact investment in areas where now we have money that is basically the results of slavery, and that should be used to recognise that transatlantic chattel slavery was a sin, was the unsuitable thing to do, and we’d like to make use of a tiny proportion of the cash to assist those areas and folks buy investment for the longer term. And by the way in which, by way of people coming to faith in Christ, within the last yr, our congregations went up five per cent.”
Archbishop Welby also responded to reports that the diocese of Birmingham is promoting a post for an “Anti-Racism Practice Officer (Deconstructing Whiteness)”, to work across six dioceses within the West Midlands.
He said that when he saw the advert, “I rang up the person accountable for that area and said ‘What on earth does this [‘deconstructing whiteness] mean? Why on earth have you place it in?. . . Can we please do these items in English?” He compared it to the sort of language utilized in the BBC comedy series W1A, about television executives who’re keen on using corporate jargon.
“What the person’s job is, across six [dioceses] . . . is to make sure that that those from ethnic-minority backgrounds who apply for jobs within the Church of England have a level playing field.”
He described “deconstructing whiteness” as “a technical term. . . It’s like saying: ‘We want someone to do an epistemological evaluation of our annual reports.’ I mean, nobody would know what we were talking about.”
Archbishop Welby was also asked in regards to the Church of England’s approach to asylum-seekers, and whether there had been “covert conversion of asylum-seekers on demand in an effort to get them within the country”.
The Bishop of Chelmsford, Dr Guli-Francis Dehqani, told MPs this month that there was no evidence of a “conveyer belt” of asylum-seekers cynically converting to Christianity to expedite their applications (News, 15 March).
Archbishop Welby also said that he had not seen evidence, “and we wrote to the Home Office, they usually said they’d no evidence to point out us”.
Asked whether priests might vouch for an asylum-seeker’s conversion simply to enable them to assert asylum, the Archbishop said: “I’m sure they haven’t done that. We take baptism within the Church of England very seriously. . . There is a period of reception, there may be a period of coaching and investigation.
“For instance, the parish in Durham diocese, which was accused of putting people through baptism on an industrial scale [News, 16 February], the ‘industrial scale’ turned out to be seven people [baptised] by one vicar, who was the one who complained, and a complete of 13 people in ten years. If that’s an industrial scale, we’ve got a reasonably small idea of commercial production.”
