THE Church Commissioners’ decision to create an impact-investment fund to mitigate long-term consequences of the connection that they’ve identified with the transatlantic slave trade (News, 13 January 2023) was criticised by the Government’s former equality tsar, Lord Sewell of Sanderstead.
In an interview with The Times on Saturday, Lord Sewell, a Conservative peer, said: “We have to have a conversation with the Archbishop [of Canterbury] and ask what he’s doing. It could be so a lot better to give attention to bringing people back to a time when the Church was packed.
“They have to repair their base but they’re doing something political, for show, giving freely this money. It’s a strangely materialistic way for a spiritual organisation to work, almost like bribery. The Church must rethink its purpose and stop using the race element as a mechanism to unravel their very own uncertainty on this planet.”
Lord Sewell chaired the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. Its report, published in 2021, denied that Britain was any longer a rustic “where the system is deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities” (News, 9 April 2021). The Bishop of Dover, the Rt Revd Rose Hudson-Wilkin, described the report’s conclusions as “deeply disturbing”.
The Commissioners, who’ve pledged £100 million towards the impact-investment fund, have expressed hopes that others will join their efforts to “repair the breach” of the transatlantic slave trade, and construct their impact-investment fund to £1 billion (News, 8 March).
Responding to Lord Sewell’s comments, a spokesperson for the Commissioners said: “The legacy of the evil of African chattel enslavement still affects the lives of thousands and thousands of individuals on this planet today — and we have now rightly apologised for the role we played on this horrific fallacious.
“As a part of its response, the Church Commissioners have committed £100 million to determine the Fund for Healing, Repair and Justice. To put this £100 million commitment in context, over the identical period the Church Commissioners shall be providing £3.6 billion of funding to support the mission and ministry of the Church of England.
“We imagine that, by addressing our past transparently, particularly this a part of our past, the Church and its teachings shall be more relevant to more people. We see our response as a crucial missional activity that can support the work and ministry of the Church of England.”
A church spokesperson has also responded to criticism within the media of a suggestion in a recent report by the oversight group to the Church Commissioners on African chattel enslavement. The report called for the C of E “to apologise publicly for denying that Black Africans are made within the image of God and for in search of to destroy diverse African traditional religious belief systems”.
The spokesperson said: “This suggestion addresses complex matters of history and theology, and could be interpreted in a wide range of ways, but we don’t imagine it calls for the Church of England to apologise for spreading the Christian gospel all over the world.
“However, we should be transparent that appalling abuses took place previously, supposedly in God’s name, which have absolutely nothing in common with the gospel of God’s love. For 2000 years, Christians have sought to share the gospel all over the world, as Jesus commissioned his disciples to do, and can proceed to achieve this.”
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