Jer 31.27-34, Ps 121, 2 Tim 3.14 – 4.5 & Luke 18.1-8
May I speak in the name of God and of Jesus, who has chosen us to be a people unto himself.
I come before you with a brief to speak about racial inclusion and I cannot begin to say how delighted I am that the church here is being pro-active in talking about ‘race’. It is the first step. Thank you!
It comes at a time when the nation is in the throes of a movement designed to stir up hatred and mistrust among its people. This is a multi-cultural diverse people, originating in part from the colonial history of this country, which contributes to the economy and has a part to play in its workforce and government. I, myself, come to be in the United Kingdom because of the British colonisation of Malawi, where I was born and where my father worked. I lived and studied in Goa, India and arrived as a 15-year old girl, and was enrolled into a Catholic school in Hackney. Life was difficult at first and yes I suffered racist name-calling and other micro-aggressions, which continued into my later life. I was bright and sociable so made my way through school with few difficulties, becoming a teacher and progressing to become a Headteacher in three failing schools, appointed by the Local Authority. I proceeded to take each out of category. What is notable is that I was not ‘selected’ for any of the jobs I actually applied for as Headteacher. Although at first, I naively did not attribute my failure to get my own headship to racism, on hindsight this was clearly the case when on each occasion I was told I was just pipped to the post by someone who was better suited to the community. I would not allow myself to develop a victim mentality but worked hard to ensure that in my schools, racism did not mar any child’s life chances. I believe that it was a positive for my students, staff and community to have a headteacher who was a woman and from an ethnic background.
Racism then does not need to be overt. It is most often masked, hidden. Most of us here, I would imagine, would not count ourselves as racist. Most of us may not have used any racist name-calling or told or laughed at racist jokes, indulged in hate crimes or physical attacks.
But I wonder how we secretly feel at the sight of the Union Jacks and St George’s Cross raised up on so many lamp posts? Do we kid ourselves that these are suddenly patriotic gestures which somehow at this particular time have made an appearance, when they are conspicuously absent around St George’s day?
Paul writing to Timothy warns of a time to come when increasingly people are not ‘putting up with sound doctrine’ but ‘accumulating for themselves teachers to suit their own desires.’ They turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths.’ (2 Tim 3/4 ). Are we in such a time? I wonder how many of us quietly subscribe to immigration discrimination - that is when it is ok to take refugees from Ukraine but not from Syria or Sudan; to racial stereotyping, for example when we cross over to the other side if a black man is walking towards us; or to far right nationalism with its divisive policies; or a Eurocentric curriculum which distorts fact; to employment discrimination or media propaganda? How do these political views play out when we come to church? Do we know where our biases lie? Do we even admit to having them?
In recent years in many organisations, including churches, undertaking unconscious bias training has been seen as the solution. This is just a tick box exercise if no change in culture follows.
We need to consider carefully the assumptions we make about other people – this is the attitude that enables us to become not just ‘not racist’ but also anti-racist, which is where we need to be as Christians.
White privilege which portrays whiteness as the norm, while black is seen as the ‘other’, was first coined by a white man, Theodore W, Allen in 1919. It describes the advantage whiteness naturally affords people so that they do not face the prejudices, people of colour habitually encounter. Christmas cards I receive from India continue to portray snow scenes, where Christmas happens at a temperature of 30 degrees Celsius. We only need to look around our churches and scan the stained glass windows, the paintings, icons, our books to see Jesus, a middle-eastern man, portrayed as a white man.
Against this backdrop of white being the norm, Church can become a place where people of colour struggle to feel included. The Pentecostal movement and other oversees national churches offer a sense of belonging that a white majority church fails to replicate. All too often we invite people to join us – this perpetuates the focus on privilege. A truly inclusive church invites people to come and transform, to come and add what they bring to the mix, to come and change us.
For Church to be truly racially inclusive, it needs to welcome diversity of being, of thought and outcome which blesses and enriches all. It needs to be integrated. Unity under the banner of Jesus Christ is what we are called to work towards.
St Paul writes about all Christians, black or white, Jew or Greek, free or slave… ‘you are the body of Christ and individually members of it;’ ‘if one member suffers, all suffer together.’
In his iconic speech in August 1963 ‘I have a dream’ Martin Luther King Jr. said,
‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.’
In 1993, Stephen Lawrence was murdered purely on the basis of the colour of his skin. Today his family is still struggling for justice. In 2020, the murder of George Flloyd sparked the Black Lives Matter moment, not because all lives don’t matter but because in the messiness of our world humankind had forgotten that black lives mattered as much as every other life.
Jesus teaches that we are to be neighbour to anyone who is in need. The reach of our responsibility stretches well beyond the confines of our church curtilage or even our parish bounds and into our nation and the wider world.
It is not permissible to say we have no black people here this does not affects us. Challenging racism and its effects, wherever it is felt, is everyone’s business.
The report From Lament to Action commissioned by our Archbishops in 2020 called out the very slow progress the church was making in addressing its inherent bias. Subsequent reports continue to identify a slowness in effecting change, particularly in relation to the number of people of colour in visible leadership positions in the church at local and national levels. It raises continuing concerns about a lack of careful and intentional consideration of the needs of the marginalised communities - the ‘other’ and also the ‘neglected majorities’.
The impact of policies which slash foreign aid, which concentrate wealth in the top 1% of the population, which necessitate migration and which demonstrate the apathy among many developed countries to the climate emergency affects those in the poorest countries inordinately, and almost invariably the majority of these are non-white. The Church just cannot afford for this to continue. As Christians we have a duty to speak persistently into these situations, sometimes to convince, other times to rebuke but always with patience and love.
Our reading from Jeremiah exhorts us to acknowledge the past, which gives us such cause to lament the failures of our ancestors, and to take note of what we are called to do today, for no longer can we abdicate responsibility, when we continue to inflict pain on our fellow human beings, whether they are in our church or far across the other side of the world.
In our gospel reading we learn that God listens to the persistent cries of the down-trodden, the ‘othered’ and promises justice. When the Son of Man comes, what will he find in our Church?
Dr Maya Angelou, American Civil Rights Activist, writes ‘people will forget what you said, forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’ This is the challenge to us, how do we translate our words and actions into meaningful change that leaves people feeling loved and valued as God’s creation?
I leave you with three questions to ponder …
- How do you invite and value diversity in your church?
- How do you promote integration and honouring of the ‘other’ in your midst?
- Could you, as a church, go beyond just settling for racial inclusion towards being actively ‘anti-racist’?
Revd, Belinda Beckhelling, 19/10/2025
at St Thomas, Southborough, Tunbridge Wells
God of Grace and Glory, we pray for our Church.
Fill it with all truth, in all truth with all peace.
Where it is corrupt, purify it; where it is in error, direct it;
where in anything it is amiss, reform it.
Where it is right, strengthen it; where it is in want, provide for it;
where it is divided, reunite it; for the sake of Jesus Christ your Only-begotten Son,
our Saviour and Liberator. Amen.
Final prayer from words written by Harry Emerson Fosdick, adapted for the dedication of Riverside Church in
New York City in 1930 and used in subsequent Books of Common Prayer within the Anglican Communion.
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