THE overseas work of the Scottish Episcopal Church (SEC) should aim to “repair relationships” and foster exchange, in response to the Primus, the Most Revd Mark Strange.
“We’re told we live in a world world, so the Church must be a bit of bit higher at not only worrying about its own little corner of that world,” he told the Church Times in an interview on Saturday, at the top of the SEC’s General Synod.
The previous day, Bishop Strange, who can be the Bishop of Moray, Ross & Caithness, had told members a couple of trip to Jamaica in April.
He spoke about an encounter he had had several a long time ago, during his first incumbency in Worcestershire. He was talking to a girl from the Caribbean, and was surprised to search out out that her surname was Mackintosh — the name of a Highland clan.
“They owned us,” she explained, and Bishop Strange admitted that his instinctive response was to not consider her. “I had a bias that my people couldn’t behave like that,” he said.
This realisation of his old biases was a part of what prompted him to travel to Jamaica, he said, because it showed how vital it was to learn in regards to the history of Scotland’s involvement within the transatlantic slave trade.
Asked whether this might involve financial commitments to regions impacted by slavery, Bishop Strange said that he had been “very open from the word go on the current financial state of the Scottish Episcopal Church”, and drew a distinction between the involvement of Anglicans in Scotland — who on the time were being persecuted — and the Church of England’s institutions
Last week, the chief executive of the Church Commissioners for England, Gareth Mostyn, defended research done on links between C of E investments and the slave trade, which inspired the creation of a £100-million impact investment fund intended to profit communities impacted by the legacies of slavery (Comment, 14 June).
On Friday morning, the Synod heard in regards to the history of Scotland’s overseas missionary work from the convenor of the SEC’s Global Partnership Committee, the Revd Dr Hamilton Inbadas. He charted the changing name of the group, which had begun because the Board of Foreign Missions in 1872, chargeable for missionary work in southern Africa and India.
Over time, the name modified to the Overseas Mission Board, because the variety of places during which the SEC was operating multiplied. Next it became the Provincial Overseas Committee, which focused on grant-giving fairly than directly running projects abroad.
This is principally how the Global Partnership Committee still operates, but Dr Inbadas said that they were asking whether or not they could do greater than just offer funding.
Members were asked to debate what the SEC’s global mission should appear like within the twenty first century, in addition to to think about elements of local mission. Feedback from members might be provided to the Mission Board.
