THE Assembly Hall of Church House, Westminster, is familiar to many within the Church of England because the debating chamber for the General Synod, and, for no less than some bishops, the association isn’t a positive one.
On Wednesday afternoon of last week, nevertheless, the Bishop of Edmonton, Dr Anderson Jeremiah, told a bunch of clergy and ordinands that that they had “redeemed the constructing”.
He was speaking at the primary gathering for UK Minoritised Ethnic/Global Majority Heritage (UKME/GMH) clergy within 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 individuals who staffed the door, the safety team, the caterers, the cleaners, than with anybody I used to be sitting alongside contained in the chamber, because we weren’t on the table, we weren’t represented”.
The report From Lament to Action really helpful the inception of provincial gatherings of UKME/GMH clergy, and, in May, an equivalent event took place at Bishopthorpe Palace for clergy within the C of E’s northern province.
The Archbishop of Canterbury later joined the gathering for a service at St Margaret’s, Westminster, after which hosted a dinner at Lambeth Palace.
In an interview with the Church Times about racial justice, he spoke in regards to the riots that took place in early August. Legal consequences for perpetrators were obligatory for reconciliation, he said.
“Reconciliation means facing truth and justice,” he said, in an echo of the comments he made on 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 since 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 helpful”.
The Church Commissioners’ establishment of a £100-million investment fund to learn communities impacted by the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade (News, 4 March) has been criticised by some 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 in regards to the development of racial-justice work within the C of E.
“Racial justice shouldn’t grow to be like a project with performance indicators that we complete in a selected time. It’s a lifestyle,” Dr Jeremiah said, prescribing “a continuing dynamism that requires [the Church] to continuously query itself”.
Dr Francis-Dehqani spoke in regards to the lessons that the C of E could learn from the Church in places resembling her native Iran, where it’s heavily persecuted. “I feel the persecuted Church has a present to supply the Church of England, which is to make us less anxious and apprehensive,” she said.
“I feel loads of what we’re seeing on the minute within the Church of England is driven by fear and anxiety and a necessity to regulate our way, to be sure that we survive in ten, 20, 30 years — and even greater than survive: that we grow and grow to be big and influential again.”
This didn’t, nevertheless, mean that the Church shouldn’t be “intentional” in its work, she said, and considered one of the parts church leaders could play in efforts towards racial justice was to “create the spaces to offer other people a voice”.
Dr Anderson agreed, and said that an intersectional approach to inclusion was critical in addressing injustice within the Church: “In this country we discuss race, we don’t necessarily discuss class, but they beautiful much work hand-in-hand in grassroots communities”, he said, and suggested that pondering in this manner was key to responding to the riots in August — a subject about which he wrote for the Church Times (Comment, 7 August).
“We need to have a look at who isn’t on 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 folks who weren’t 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 on the gathering. While celebrating the “positive stories” of increased representation within the Church of England, and the expansion of congregations during which a majority of individuals are of Black African heritage, he also emphasised the importance of ensuring that white people didn’t find yourself feeling unwelcome in certain churches.
In her remarks to the gathering, Dr Mallett praised the introduction of the terms UKME and GMH within the C of E, saying that “expanding the terminology has meant that many more people feel that they will come under the gathering tent, and feel that they too are a part of the conversation . . . and that they belong”.
Although often yoked together, the terms seek advice from different identities: GMH describes individuals who come from countries where their ethnicity is in the bulk, whereas UKME describes British individuals who, within the context of the UK, find their ethnicity minoritised.
During his final remarks to the gathering, in a while 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 to not be named, suggested that a key distinction was often that individuals who grew up in a minority were less confident than counterparts who had grown up where they were a part of the bulk — a degree the Archbishop vowed to reflect on.
Before the service, he had urged those attending to talk truthfully. He acknowledged that it might be scary to achieve this (especially with journalists present), but there was no point if people “complimented the sandwiches” but didn’t speak candidly. Besides, he only had 15 months left in post, and “might as well exit with a bang moderately than a whimper”, he said.
The service at St Margaret’s had begun with a hymn sung to the tune related to Tell out my soul, with words adapted from Dr Martin Luther King’s “I actually have a dream” speech.
In his sermon, Bishop Nsenga-Ngoy, begged those present “to not lose sight of him for whom the rhetoric of our life must be focused”.
It was obligatory to realize a future during which “a recent nomenclature of human identity sought in divinity, a future during which were are preserved and redeemed from fracture and disintegration, where we’re invited right 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, in addition to a quantitative change in our lives”, Bishop Ngoy said, before ending his sermon in song.
