Stephen J. Patterson, The Forgotten Creed: Christianity’s Original Struggle against Bigotry, Slavery, & Sexism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018)

by Paul Thaxter, CMS

This is a real gem of a book of 176 pages which I enjoyed reading, particularly in the current circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic, where significant inequalities globally and within nations and neighbourhoods have been highlighted.

Furthermore, the Black Lives Matter movement has made our understanding of Galatians 3:26–28 even more urgent.

I remember reading these verses when I first became a Christian, believing that it was an early church mantra about the new humanity and I wanted to be a part of it. Listen to these extraordinary words from Paul the apostle:

So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptised into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Gal. 3:26–28

Patterson argues that this was a very early Christian creed, if not the first baptismal creed. If so, the implications remain profound today and require us to reinstate this liturgy into our practices again.

This biblical passage speaks into the heart of so many issues today as it did then in the Roman Empire to multiple communities and vested interests. Patterson appeals to us to re-examine this forgotten creed.

He carefully presents his case for claiming this is a creed where he considers v27 to be explanatory and inserted by Paul into the flow of the creed, shown by its text parallelism. Whether it is or not, he argues v27 is about baptism and the author believes that Paul quoted this creed as it would perhaps not be one he would devise himself. Patterson argues that Paul was ardent about neither Jew nor Greek, about which he directed his missionary activity, but with a less pronounced emphasis on the two latter phrases neither slave nor free, nor male and female. Paul is presented as a revolutionary in regard to the first but more reticent and more culturally conforming on the other two dyads. He argues that verses 26 and 28b have an identical structure and were the opening and closing of the credal statement perhaps with the modified Pauline Christ Jesus rather than Jesus Christ. Certainly a Pauline understanding of baptism is affirmed in this text.

If the creed preceded Paul then it would be very early indeed. Paul used older formularies and hymns and other tradition in his letters and in his mission context. Of course “the oldest cliché” “in the annals of ancient bigotry” is a man in Greek culture who was grateful not to be born a brute (slave), nor a woman nor a barbarian. In the Jewish Tosephta there is a revealing prayer that reflects earlier views and is attributed to Rabbi Judah:

There are three blessings one must pray daily:
Blessed (art thou), who did not make me a Gentile;
Blessed (art thou), who did not make me a woman;
Blessed (art thou), who did not make me uneducated.

The author comments that when this is repeated in the Talmud, the word uneducated becomes slave and attributed to Rabbi Meir.

These are the categories of dividing people into us and them – race, class and gender. They are the other to an educated man – the foreigner, the slave, the woman. Paul contrasts this bigotry with “you are all one in Christ Jesus.” In whatever regard this credal statement is revolutionary and presages a new humanity who all have one Father, one Saviour and one Spirit and all are children of God.

The author explores the notion of becoming children of God in chapter three and then elaborates on each dyad of verse 28 in three following chapters. All of them are exceptional and fascinating reads into the classical Greek and Roman and Jewish worlds. Careful historical research, selective use of sources, keen insights and densely packed ideas make this book a reference text for me. I learned so much more and it has provoked me to read more on some issues such as gender as perceived in the classical world, so that I can consider Patterson’s work more accurately.

Patterson’s succinct conclusion says he wrote this on the eve of 2018 when “all over the world race, gender, and class differences are once again exploited to divide and denigrate foreigners, women, and the poor.” In the USA “they even elected a president who rode to power on a foul wave of racist, sexist rhetoric” – supported by many conservative Christians who endorsed this resurgent popular bigotry. The book is not replete with contemporary applications but it lays a significant foundation to re-appraising early Christian faith and drawing out from it profound missiological and societal Christian implications that would make the world a far better place – if only Christians would re-discover this forgotten creed.

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Christine Caine and Dr Anita Phillips, Body Language: A Conversation on Race and Restoration in the Body of Christ, https://youtu.be/W1P6AXjXnXc (1 June 2020)

by Emily Roux, CMS

This heart-provoking and honest conversation between two champions of our faith, Christine Caine and Dr Anita Phillips will move every listener to wake up and reconsider how we must lay down our individual cultural perspectives in order to tend to the whole body of Christ. Phillips (a leading African-American mental health and trauma therapist and preacher) explains to Caine (Australian-born Greek, preacher and founder of global anti-trafficking organisation A21) how our own ethnic heritage “shapes the way we do Christ”. This key part of the 90-minute YouTube talk was very impactful, as Phillips went on to detail how our implicit cultural memory informs our worldview, which we as Christians then assume is a Christian worldview. Caine encourages believers to look inward and to assess how our own culture and background may have shaped the beliefs we have in Christ differently, which is vital in understanding race and restoration as the body of Christ. Indeed the notion that we “each wear Christ differently” could be strange to many Christians.

The most eye-opening part of the conversation was when these different views were highlighted in the context of George Floyd’s death. Phillips suggests that to restore the church, it is no longer about calling out those who are explicitly racist. It is deeper than this, as the dehumanization of black people since the era of slavery in America has crept into the American subconscious, including the American Christian subconscious. I was impressed by Phillips’ boldness to speak on the concept of how our pre-existing worldviews mean we emphasise different elements of scripture when we read it through our own lens. She goes on to share that her white brothers and sisters address issues of race and racism with their worldview of individualism and deep respect for authority, so when they see an act such as the killing of George Floyd, they first ask for the facts to see the individual’s context and do not want to criticise the police until they see the ‘whole picture’. It was almost excruciating, and yet so important for me as a white woman to hear Phillips then add that this white ‘trait’, as it were, wouldn’t be so bad if white people were moved and crying while asking for the facts but, and she says, “I’ve never seen anyone say ‘wait for the facts’ who looked upset.”

Phillips addresses further how this dehumanization is at work in this context and goes on to detail fascinating psychological studies that have been conducted over many years revealing the subconscious attitudes towards black people from seemingly well-meaning and not explicitly racist Americans – all due to these inherited worldviews carried right into the country and right into our churches.

Beautifully, scripture helps us understand that this is about restoration not reconciliation, in the body of the Church. “You cannot reconcile something that was never ‘conciled’”, says Caine. Phillips suggests that reconciliation is a white, western construct as it works along the lines of the individual focus instead of the group or community level (which is more significant in African worldviews). When we look at 1 Corinthians, however, we see that God knew humanity struggles with unity, so much that he warns us through Paul’s words that, “if one part [of the body] suffers, every part suffers with it” (1 Cor. 12:26 NIV).

This helps us to understand why we don’t just want black people to ‘get over it’. “There is a gaping wound that is constantly being opened,” says Phillips, and that is in the same body as our own as we all seek to be Christ’s church on Earth.

This is where Phillips’s professional mental health perspective is so informative in the talk. She advocates that the Church adopts the “trauma-informed approach” used to bring restoration and healing to victims of trauma, suggesting that the white, western church can use this too to bring healing to the wound caused by racism. She is currently developing the trauma-informed approach to be accessed on the group level and is training ministries to more effectively get to the deeper level of addressing group trauma and the wounds of racial injustice in the church.

I felt empowered by the suggestion to consider healing before reconciliation. Caine humbly related to this when she compared it to her own work with sex-trafficking victims, as her team would not first force victims to face their abusers and encourage them to forgive and seek reconciliation, but rather their first priority is to try to bring them healing for the wounds that have been caused.

We are left considering three key challenges when it comes to our own perspectives and actions: to trust and empower the voice of the wounded before asking the “why did this happen?” question; to create safe spaces and relationships – the ‘doing’ rather than simply the thinking (after all, as Phillips said, “actions is the African people’s love language!”); and to practise cultural humility and lay down my own cultural perspective. In the typical Caine style of preaching, she adds that, “Faith without works is dead and most people’s faith is not working because they don’t put their faith to work!” – something she passionately advocates for around the world, that is perhaps more true than ever in the context of how Christians should consider the Black Lives Matter movement.

I am so grateful to have been able to witness what one could say is a historic conversation between these two ‘greats’ of our generation in the church. Indeed, perhaps the ‘white’ church is finally waking up to speak out against racism and is willing to suffer alongside others in the body of Christ. I trust God that I will live to see the tide turn and witness the church leading the way for healing and acting with a new voice, a new type of ‘body language’ that perhaps the world hasn’t seen yet.

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A.D.A. France Williams, Ghost Ship: Institutional Racism and the Church of England (London: SCM Press, 2020)

by Jonny Baker, CMS

I really loved reading Ghost Ship by A.D.A. France Williams. I read through it in just over a day – in other words I didn’t put it down a lot! It’s addressing institutional racism in the Church of England but it’s not quite what you think. A book like that sounds like it’s going to make a case, an argument and dare I say be a bit dry and perhaps overly earnest (sorry if that is a thought I shouldn’t be having). But it’s far from that…

First up I loved the style of writing of the book. It’s playful, cheeky, provocative, powerful and has you nodding along and then slaps you round the head. It reminds me a bit of going to poetry gigs where that happens all the time – poets seem to move really fast from one mode to another like no other kind of speech in my experience. Maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise because Azariah is a poet and there are several of his poems in the book. There’s metaphor, poetry, story, anecdote, vulnerability, theology (that is inside the flow of local, contextual, liberation theology), exegesis, research, history, moving personal testimony with heart on the sleeve writing that is vulnerable and questioning with raw honesty. It’s inspiring, challenging and moving. It’s a work of practical liberation theology (if that is a genre?!) in that it is very much a conversation between experience/context and the tradition/bible/theology. It’s very much theology done from below, through the eyes and experience of the oppressed calling for change, liberation, freedom, an end to the domination system. For me it’s the kind of theologising I wish there was a whole lot more of.

One of the stylistic things I particularly loved was the way he sits inside a story or metaphor and sticks with that language and carries it through into a repeating motif almost – it’s probably more commonly used in oratory than writing but it really worked for me to the degree that I have made a mental note to try and do it more myself both in writing and speaking. So for example, he tells the story of Samson in the Bible, someone subjugated to a dominant aggressor. He reads it back through a lens of Samson being a black slave and the Philistines being the slaver class. This is a story black theologians in America in particular have often turned to, so Williams locates himself in the trajectory of black theology here. At one point in his telling of the story where Samson sets a riddle, he imagines the Philistine slavers put their drinks down, wipe the froth of their mouth and have him repeat the riddle. Later in the text when he describes discussing his writing with a white area bishop he says, “he put his drink down, wiped the froth off his mouth, looked me in the eye and said….” I loved those kind of moves which are playful in style but so powerful and well done. There are surprises all the way through. He follows up on Samson with a spin on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – I won’t do a plot spoiler but it is a great piece of storytelling and research.

The message, which perhaps I should have led with, is pretty clear and hits you from multiple directions and layers – the Church of England has not done well when it comes to race and, in the case of this book, especially with regard to its ministers, lay and ordained. Black and brown people are not flourishing. Racism is embedded in the systems and culture – in other words it’s institutionalised. In case we were unsure about this, those experiences come through time and again through Williams’s interviews with people with black and brown skin. That is their experience full stop. He also looks at the last 30 years or so of what has happened since the Faith in the City report. That report was brilliant and I didn’t know this but one recommendation was not picked up – all the others were. That was for a commission on black concerns. It’s truly extraordinary to read the tale. Williams catalogues occasion after occasion where decisions were deferred to a standing committee (‘Ronald and Reggie’ as he labels them – the C of E bouncers or gatekeepers) who basically don’t do anything. He laments Justin Welby’s reimagined Britain and shares his own personal experiences in shiny church, as he calls it (read powerful London evangelical charismatic church), where the only option seemed to be to perform as a puppet for Dagon (back to the Samson story), reduced to the role of entertainer for the show. Anything else was not welcome – and just to be clear, that anything else is the incredible gift of Williams himself with his creative theologising, insights, care, love for the church, prophetic gifts, teaching gifts, the ability to see with black eyes, to write, to be a poet, a friend who cares and so on and so on – so much is missed.

This was a weird response in me I noticed: I began to wonder what is whiteness and what is entitlement. I am white, heterosexual, educated and male so I have no idea what it is like to experience being invisible or shunned or mistreated or dominated because of skin tone (or sex or gender or sexuality or class and so on) and I like the challenge of interrogating whiteness. But I have always hated entitlement, which is summed up by one passage where Williams describes the public school network reuniting over a game of diocesan cricket as a light bulb moment where he realises he does not have access. To say it another way, I identify with many of the issues around visibility, injustice and exclusion and access and they make me enraged and I suspect quite a lot of pioneers do too because for very different reasons they see differently and what they are saying is invisible to the system. Perhaps it is simply that they hang around on the periphery – that was a kind of weird question for me that I wasn’t expecting. But this book is about race and there is simply a different order to the injustice and experience, which is brought home as Williams shares movingly the experience of being heartbroken when his own child is struggling with their own sense of worth, having been subjected to racist comments at school. I felt so upset about that. I know that for me as a parent and for my kids, we will never experience that because of white privilege.

Azariah does some future imagining and makes some suggestions. I thought they were great. I’d love to see a truth and reparations process. There is no reason I can see why there couldn’t be some of the church commissioners’ money that was set aside to invest in black and brown futures through grants, scholarships, and all sorts of other creative things – I thought that was a brilliant idea.

For me I found the book really helped my awareness, though I need ongoing sensitising and awareness, so I hope through conversations and friends and reading I can continue to do that. But a particular challenge in my area of work is around what texts we use in theological and mission education and what voices contribute in teaching. So I intend to sharpen up that area. We are pretty unusual at CMS I suspect, in that we teach systematic theology as simply being one local (western) theology among many and try and expose students to multiple voices and authors from round the world. I am not a fan of a systematic approach at all really. But we can do better I am sure, so we’ll be chatting about that in our team over the months ahead.

Writing a book is such a big effort, especially when you make yourself vulnerable and put yourself on the line. So thank you Azariah for your book and your gift and sharing it and so much of yourself. May we have ears to hear.

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Layla F. Saad, Me and White Supremacy: How to Recognise Your Privilege, Combat Racism and Change the World (Quercus, 2020)

by Rachel Smith, CMS

Criticism can be hard to hear. It can hurt, it might feel unfair or even unfounded. But the true purpose of good criticism is to engage and challenge us, pushing us to improve ourselves and the world around us. Me and White Supremacy began as a 28- day Instagram challenge, which then became a free online PDF resource before ultimately being turned into a published book by its creator, Layla F. Saad. Over the course of the “challenge” Saad asks us, the white readers, to engage in a process of self-reflection and criticism that works to break down our internalised prejudices by first exposing then dismantling them.

The process is by no means an easy one. So often when white people start to engage with racial justice and particularly at the moment when we try to understand movements like Black Lives Matter, we find ourselves becoming defensive. I think I’m a good person. I try hard to treat everyone I meet with respect and dignity, and to afford them with the same opportunities regardless of the colour of their skin. So, it’s hard to hear that despite my good intentions I can still be racist, or that I still play a role in perpetuating white supremacy. But just because I don’t want to believe it, doesn’t mean that it’s not true, and it certainly doesn’t mean that I can exempt myself from trying to do better.

Me and White Supremacy offers the tools and structure needed to work through that discomfort. When I found it I’d already begun the process of trying to read more and engage with people who were challenging my comfortable status quo. But reading about something is not the same as putting it into practice. The challenge that this book lays out gave me the push I needed into actively working on changing my own thinking, as well as trying to help to change the thinking of the people around me.

Saad offers a mixture of information and journalling prompts, laid out in an easy to follow course. You can take these as quickly or as slowly as you like, you can try tackling the exercise as an individual or in groups and even get creative with it. As I have worked through each step there have been times when I have found the process painful and I’ve had to take a moment to work past my initial feelings of hurt and shame. There are even times when I know that I’ve only touched a topic on the surface level but digging any further would have been too raw and overwhelming. But despite the emotional pitfalls of undertaking such an exercise, I find myself emerging from the other side with optimism. Yes, change is hard, yes, it is demanding, but despite that we can change, we can make a real difference.

In the opening pages of the book, Saad says the following;

But if you are a person who believes in love, justice, integrity, and equity for all people, then you know that this work is non-negotiable. If you are a person who wants to become a good ancestor, then you know that this work is some of the most important work that you will be called to do in your lifetime.

To me that is everything. It is what we should all be striving for. As an individual I may not be able to change the world but I may be able to make a difference to one small part of it. If I can help lay the building blocks for a more equitable and unprejudiced future then I am willing to try doing the right thing rather than the easy one.

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Sarah Shin, Beyond Colorblind: Redeeming our Ethnic Journey (IVP, 2017)

by Mark Simpson, Cardiff

We can’t get away from the colour of our own skin, however much we may want to. Sarah Shin tells the story at one point of an Armenian American who “would vigorously scrub his skin in the shower, hoping that it would change his complexion.” It is a common experience of shame, and so early waves of the antiracist movement sometimes pointed towards a denial of ethnic difference – “colourblindness”. Shin re-tells the good news (as you would expect under the IVP banner), but with an emphasis on ethnicity. God made us with an ethnic identity, he redeems us with an ethnic identity and he draws us into a multi-ethnic people with a mission to the whole world.

We served for the last several years at a church in Rio de Janeiro that had handed its keys over decades ago to the school it shared a site with. Story after story reached us of differing attitudes at the gate to people visiting the church, depending on the colour of their skin. We had a church weekend away: the light skinned Englishman who came to practise the organ was let in, while the dark skinned Brazilian who came to get the sound equipment ready was turned away. (It was a rather quiet weekend away.) It would not be enough to ask the security guards to ignore skin colour. They have too much experience of the sad correlation between skin colour and criminality, created by the legacy of slavery (only abolished a handful of generations ago) and consequent poverty and marginalisation. African and Afro-Brazilian ethnicities need to be celebrated, their songs need to be sung, their voices need to be heard. So we took on board the white pleas to stop talking about “the problem with the gate” and shared the microphone around.

Now we are in Wales, and Shin’s celebration of the God-givenness of each culture strikes a rich chord in this “Old Land of my Fathers”. Reading my way into this land has taken me to works such as Castrating Culture by Dewi Hughes and Sacred Place, Chosen People by Dorian Llywelyn – which together highlight the blindness of many of us English to our own idolatrous imperialism. Sarah Shin teaches me to understand my own ethnic identity (none us doesn’t have one) and to appreciate the cracks in my own cultural history. She memorably evokes Japanese “Kintsukuroi” pottery, which seeks to bring something beautiful out of broken shards, not hiding but highlighting the cracks – much as Matthew does in his genealogy of Jesus, drawing out the scars of incest, prostitution, exclusion, adultery and murder.

We were somewhat taken aback when we were first greeted on a hike here with “Prynhawn da” (Good afternoon). Am I imperialistic to greet people here in English? Can I sing “Swing low, sweet chariot”? Does Boris Johnson have a point when he warns of “selfrecrimination and wetness”? Shin suggests confession, lament and repentance: the gospel always offers hope to the humble, hope of inclusion, hope in diversity, centred in Christ. It’s a great handbook for our days.

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“We Need to Talk about Race” – YouTube discussion featuring Ben Lindsay and Jeanette Burnette at St Barnabas, North London, https://youtu. be/Z45SDMm5-Tk (3 May 2020)

by Ann-Marie Wilson, London

I have always been very aware about inequality in our society, having hit a gender career glass ceiling in banking at age 17, then chosen to work in equal opportunities, advocating for equality at British Gas with STEM, BAME, WISE and other initiatives. I witnessed poor selection for redundancy (maternity and mental health) in the city in the early 1990s and chose to run my own HR and training practice to address inequalities. Having experienced racism in my anti-FGM work with 28 Too Many (28toomany.org), sexism in the church and disability discrimination in much of society, #BlackLivesMatter has been a topic close to my heart for over 40 years.

In May, I was lucky enough to watch a YouTube video co-hosted by Jeanette Burnette from my church, St Barnabas, North Finchley, and Ben Lindsay, author of We Need to Talk about Race. This covered institutional racism in the church and wider society. This was timely for our church, and in the event of George Floyd’s tragic death. In fact, I had to wait for the book to arrive following a massive reprint!

The book discusses the UK church’s complicity in the transatlantic slave trade, considers the role of white privilege, and how to address equality for those who do not have it.

In June I also attended a very moving service of lamentation and hope (https://www.london.anglican. org/articles/we-lament/) based on Psalm 30 and Matthew 11, with a very moving lament written by the Rev Sandra McCalla. I was concerned that of the approximately 250 attendees only about 15 were white. If it is our season to listen, why were white ordained and lay leaders not engaging? I subsequently wrote my own lamentation on racism, Covid-19, cancer and isolation – all close to my heart following five months of shielding.

Unlike other books or services, I have reflected on these two pieces of media as I have been rallied to action. I wrote and read my own lament to my writing group and shared with others. I have read and shared my reflections on Ben’s book and as I help plant a church led by a pastor of colour in a BAME majority area, we hope to put into practice some of the wisdom gleaned over the past 40 years. As we stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before, as Ben puts it, “we hope our glass or racism ceilings will be floors for the next generation.”

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Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (The Women’s Press Ltd, 1988)

by Nicole Stephens, CMS

I first came across this novel several years ago at an event hosted by the African Society at university. At the time I didn’t realise it was a classic, winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1988, but I’ve enjoyed this bold and thought-provoking read and finding out more about Dangarembga, who is from an impressive line of firsts – her mother was the first black woman from Zimbabwe to earn a degree, and Nervous Conditions was the first book published in English by a black Zimbabwean woman.

Set in the 1960s, Nervous Conditions follows the story of Tambudzai, Tambu for short, a young girl in rural Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) desperate for an education. Her uncle is the headmaster of the mission school in the nearest town where he takes Tambu’s brother for schooling. As a girl, Tambu’s education is not a priority for the family, but when her brother dies suddenly, Tambu is able to take his place, and here begins Tambu’s journey of “emancipation” from village life.

The title, Nervous Conditions, is taken from the preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, which says “the state of the native is a nervous condition”. It’s an insightful framing of the book, prompting you to reflect on how the experience of life under colonial rule, interaction with western modernity, culture and pressures impact upon African individuals.

Nervous Conditions has many key themes – a strong critique of female oppression in a male-dominant culture being one of them. But what stood out to me particularly was the way it shows how Tambu’s worldview forms in relation to western culture and ideas of progress.

Set in segregated Rhodesia, it’s interesting that Dangarembga does not address this dramatic context of race relations directly (indeed she has said that anything she writes about race more explicitly turns out sounding too absurd to be true). We get to see, then, the reality of these racial disparities as Tambu’s world itself gets bigger. We see white people as the source of funds for her first few years of schooling, westerners at the mission treated with great deference, even as deities, given their power to intervene and open opportunities previously unreachable for black families, and their sacrifice in choosing such a life. And Tambu’s uncle, Babamukuru, is greatly revered in the family for his having been educated up to postgraduate level in England. For Tambu, then, progress and the way to a better life is intricately wrapped up in western education and a level of assimilation into Englishness.

And there are the smaller, perhaps more insidious, effects of this on the family homestead – when Tambu’s brother used to return to the family village for school holidays, he was reluctant to speak their Shona language, not only because his Shona had become ungrammatical and “strangely accented” but because he wanted to impress his family by speaking English. While father is impressed, Tambu resents that this restricts communication with her brother to mundane, insignificant matters, and their mother has to admit that although she does want her son to be educated, even more than that, she wants to talk to him. Tambu narrates these instances almost matter-offactly, there are other more dramatic events that occur in the story, yet it is these depictions that I found powerful and stuck with me since as a white, native- English speaker it rarely crosses my mind to consider the impact and superiority of language.

The sheer difference of western modernity is so overpowering and enchanting to a young girl from the village that it is readily accepted as most surely the way of progress. When Tambu first arrives at the mission and her uncle’s house, she can see how her brother was seduced, as the entire house, with its “local interpretations of British interior-décor”, whispers a message of ease and comfort, far from the endlessly hard physical labour she sees her mother destined to at home. While Tambu is throwing herself into her studies at the mission, there are forewarnings of where this path of chasing the opportunities laid out by western education leads. Her cousin, Nyasha, is a wonderfully dynamic character who, having lived for a time in England, is full of alternatives and possibilities that are beyond Tambu’s current frame of reference. Nyasha is unwilling to accept things as they currently are without questioning, and so has many struggles with her parents, often challenging traditional culture, yet also wary of the influence western culture has had on her. In the end, Nyasha becomes a symbolic victim of how western influences and exposure to modernity complicates one’s sense of self, and alienates oneself from all that you knew and were.

Nervous Conditions is a significant work in African feminist and postcolonial literature. The third book in this trilogy, just published this year, has been longlisted for the Booker Prize and I’m looking forward to reading more of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s work. It strikes me that the theme of a dominant culture over another, the dominance of English and Englishness, resonates with prevalent conversations today about the UK church needing greater diversity in our expression of faith, so that experiences in white majority churches are not so tightly wrapped up in a superior culture but have space to celebrate creatively faith in our God who revealed himself for every nation, tribe, people and language. As an accessible and provocative piece of fiction, Nervous Conditions gives insight into the historical and social circumstances that have given rise to this pressing mandate today.

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James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2013 reprinted edition)

by Jonny Baker, CMS

On 3 June 2020 Chance the Rapper tweeted “Jesus was lynched”. This tweet was liked 63,000 times. He then proceeded to follow it up with some quotes from an article entitled “The Cross and the Lynching Tree”, which is the title of James Cone’s book from 2011. The article was by Steve Holloway and was a review of the book prompted by Cone’s death. I don’t think Chance the Rapper had read James Cone’s book but I suspect that it was the highest profile comment in pop culture about it. I hope the book got some new readers as a result. Of course, the comments were polarised and ridiculous. One accused him of blasphemy, saying Jesus wasn’t lynched he was crucified – which was kind of missing the point! The reason I mention this as a way into a review is that I think my own education about racism and injustice has been in some significant part through black music – soul, reggae, hip hop, Afrobeat to name a few genres. Artists feel the culture and somehow find ways to articulate something of the pain, grief and mood of the times and where appropriate call forth a different vision, a different possibility. In this regard art and prophecy are close friends. The most helpful response for me personally after George Floyd’s death, aside from Al Sharpton’s magnificent eulogy, was actually Gilles Petersen’s selection of music and comments and guests on BBC Radio 6 Music in the two weeks after. I found it a lot more helpful than what I heard in churches – in fact it struck me how few hymns or contemporary songs there are that really spoke into that moment in any concrete or grounded way.

Chapter four of James Cone’s book is about literary artists and the connections they made between the crucifixion and the lynching tree. For me it was the most moving chapter of the book and I followed it up by finding some of the pieces online which also led to finding illustrations of the black Christ identifying with the suffering of those lynched. What is particularly striking about that chapter is that it comes in the wake of a discussion about the absence of the connection between the cross and the lynching tree in the theologies of the best white theologians of the day and the pulpits in white churches. Cone devotes a chapter to Niebuhr and goes to great lengths to reflect on this absence in Niebuhr’s work because he was probably America’s most influential theologian, commented on social issues and Cone was very influenced by him, following in his footsteps at Union Theological Seminary in New York. As Cone says, it is extraordinary that this connection was not made. He contrasts that with a moving chapter on Martin Luther King who makes those connections and whose life was one shaped by the way of the cross. I don’t know why I say that is a moving chapter because every chapter I mention I will say is moving! A case in point is the chapter on black women’s experience of suffering, their part in activism and black womanist theological perspectives. I was reminded by that of Billie Holliday’s rendition of Strange Fruit, which I listened to several times as a result of the book (Nina Simone’s is powerful too).

The book opened my eyes to how prevalent lynching was. I knew about it but the scale and horror of the experience was really brought home to me by Cone’s book. Between 1880 to 1940 white Christians lynched 5,000 black men and women. These lynchings drew huge crowds and families came out to watch. Photos of the event were turned into postcards that you could buy. Cone references an exhibition that shocked America by touring these postcards – I found some of the images online. It is so hard to believe and fathom the reality of that black experience in America and that white Christians did it – I found it important for me to look at it and try and see it as best I could without averting my gaze.

James Cone is brutally honest about his own struggle – white supremacy tears faith to pieces, he says. If God loves black people, why do they suffer? And yet the heart of the gospel is struggle for freedom and liberation from oppression. The cross is an empowering sign for those who suffer because of God’s loving solidarity with them. It’s also where the powers and principalities are overcome. And it has to be related to our social reality rather than abstracted. So Cone is right to say that Jesus was a lynchee and make that connection. And he says that every time a white mob lynched a black person they lynched Jesus all over again. “The lynching tree is the cross in America.” At the same time he laments that many white theologians’ theology of atonement (which they are very defended about) fails to name or recognise white supremacy as America’s great sin. It is in danger of being sentimental abstract false piety.

In the conclusion he quotes from James Baldwin who says he is proud of the spiritual force and beauty of black people in America. Why? Because “it demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck.” I was in pieces at that point.

I love liberation theologies but it was actually as a result of twitter that I read it. It wasn’t Chance’s tweet but Bishop Emma Ineson saying she was going to read it. At that point I was so upset about George Floyd’s murder and wondering what on earth I could or should do, that I ordered the book and thought I’ll at least read that and try and get a bit better educated. It really has done that in a powerful way.

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An afterword from Paul Thaxter, CMS Director of International Mission

I have been engaged in Christian mission ever since I accepted the call of Jesus to follow him in South East London over 40 years ago.

I was part of a church which had people from multiple cultures and diverse backgrounds. Later in Pakistan I was part of the Diocese of Karachi, Church of Pakistan, as a CMS mission partner. In my work as CMS international mission director I have been granted the huge privilege of meeting brothers and sisters from around the world. In each of these contexts questions, ambivalence and ambiguities about the mission enterprise abound.

Yet it was the death of George Floyd and the actions and messages of the Black Lives Matter movement that was personally revelatory – indicating my own passive complicity with systemic racism and injustice. In the following weeks I read Reni Eddo-Lodge’s book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race, which was brilliantly argued, relentlessly uncompromising and passionately principled. I decided to listen more, understand more, discuss more, lament and repent, and take positive actions in the light of this.

As for CMS, these reflections cut to the heart of our storytelling and mission praxis where we have at times preferenced our anti-slavery and liberating narratives rather than those that show our colonial collusion and culturally compromised mission ventures. As Harvey Kwiyani writes, “Until racism is totally discredited, God’s mission in the world will depend on colonialism.” In the glare of this light, CMS needs to take the time and make the effort to adjust, reflect, repent and act. We are in the midst of this, and are being helped greatly by our brothers and sisters in Asia-CMS and CMS-Africa as well as our friends from minority backgrounds in the UK. Their voices deserve to be heard and amplified, which is one reason this edition of Anvil was produced. I draw hope from Lusa Ngoy’s words in his article “Hope Re-imagined – making the world that ought to be” wherein he says the past can be redeemed today. With our partners from around the world we can not only radically rethink history but as Lusa exhorts us, we can join in “an imaginative effort to build the true, the good, and the beautiful”.

About the author

Born in London, bred in Blackpool, and reborn in London, Paul was an economist in the City in the early 1980s, then a church planter in south-east London in the mid-1980s, before helping lead a drug rehabilitation project in the 1990s in Karachi, Pakistan. 

Since 2001 [until 2021], he has worked for Church Mission Society, encouraging mission worldwide – from everywhere to everywhere – including emerging mission in Britain and wider Europe with an emphasis on biblical and cross-cultural training. He is a believer in the importance of living and sharing Christ, and motivated by the transformation that this can bring about. 

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Racism: dishonouring the image of God

by Awais Mughal

The complexity of racism in its current state is difficult to summarise in a few words; however, in this article I aim to provide a personal reflection on the topic from a Pakistani Christian perspective. Racism elicits strong sentiments of anger, pain and even guilt from our varying viewpoints, and therefore, in this article I will draw on a variety of voices and perspectives both from the UK and from Pakistan to focus on the sociocultural and historical factors that maintain the structural racism within our society and institutions.

Fighting the daily racism we encounter

The recent tragic incidence of George Floyd’s death has once again flared up, on the global platform, the everyday battle of black communities who are victims of racism. Across the cities in the US and the UK many people came out on the streets. Their anger and rage was shown on the media and the backlash from this incident angered and upset some British citizens as well. This is not the first time a racist act of this nature has taken place; however, it did, once again, raise many questions about our responsibility and the role we can play, individually and collectively, to fight the systemic racism within our communities. Many have taken an introspective approach by analysing our own privilege, our role in maintaining the racist society and how we benefit from our privilege.

I was recently reminded of the 2013 film 12 Years A Slave, an adaption of the 1853 slave memoir. [1] For those who may not have seen it, it is heart wrenching story of a free man who was kidnapped and tortured for 12 years. The film portrayed a Sunday service for the black slaves on a cotton plantation, where the oppressive slave owner used Luke 12:47 for his own advantage. The words read, “And that servant, which knew his lord’s will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes” (KJV).

The slave owner deviously used the verse to justify the whipping of the slaves who picked the least cotton each day. In this way, powerful people repressed the good news from the slaves. For example, the slave owner chose to ignore the words, “A new command I give you: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another” (John 13:34, NIV). We can find many beautiful and inspiring examples in Rom. 12:10 and John 13:35 about love being the foundation of Christian faith.

As present mission partners for CMS, we are in a privileged position to influence and play a role in the fight against racism. As people of faith, we believe that God has created this beautiful cosmopolitan world in his own image (an image of love) to empower humankind, to preserve his creation and to encourage us to celebrate our relationship with God and with each other. The co-occurrence of this belief as theological doctrine is acknowledged in Judaism, Christianity and Sufism, making it more relevant to understand the purpose of God in creation of this world. Being made in the image of God also connects to humanity’s reflection of God that illustrates compassion, rationality, love, anger and fellowship. In Heb. 12.14, our relationship with God and others is described as a holy living: “Make every effort to live in peace with everyone and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord” (NIV). Racism shatters the beauty of God’s creation, dividing the image of God through physical appearance. It is based on a false assumption of the superiority of one race over another. Those who have perpetuated these ideas have sown seeds of hatred, division and intolerance, resulting in disrespecting and dishonouring the imago Dei.

Many of us still encounter people who are still using the excuses of their ancestors and still misusing quotes from the Bible. Within our arsenal to fight and counter this racism we need to keep the following verse in mind:

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27, ESV). The Bible teaches us to keep respect and balance in our relationships, which, when disregarded, dishonours the image of God.

Race and racism

The seeds of racism were sown by the theories of many scientists in the nineteenth century who subscribed to the belief that the human population can be divided into races. [2] Early race theorists generally held the view that some races were inferior to others and therefore should be classified into races with differential abilities and dispositions. Race theorists have divided people into races rather than treating them as human beings. Interestingly, this theory has been contradicted by other scientific research that posits that around 1.2 million to 1.8 million years ago, early Homo sapiens evolved dark pigmentation as a protective evolutionary measure. [3]

Britain and other European countries created among themselves a hierarchy with white Europeans at the top and Africans and Asians at the bottom. Racism against black and Asian people grew after the 1860s based on the theories of scientific racism that, it was claimed, proved that because of brain size, black and Asian people are inferior intellectually to Europeans and can only be humanised and civilised by Europeans.

Many researchers and professionals working to eliminate racism maintain that race is a political construction to execute structures of power, culture, education and identity. [4] The slave trade is an example of such a structure used to justify that black people were inferior. While many maintain that modern issues of racism are a US-based issue, we need to acknowledge that the aftermath of colonialism continues to affect the lives of millions. Britain was one of the richest slave-trading nations in the world, with large numbers of slaves being transported from African and Asian colonies to Europe and America.

By the mid-eighteenth century, London had the largest black population in Britain, made up of free and enslaved people as well as many who had fought very hard to escape. The total number by 1914 may have been about 10,000, which trebled during the First World War. [5] As time passed, tensions between the white community and different ethnic minorities developed. During the Seaport Riots of 1919, in which white workers attacked black workers and their families, five people died and there was widespread vandalisation of property; 120 black workers were sacked in Liverpool after whites refused to work with them. Many of these people were forced to beg due to the lack of jobs and racial discrimination. A study by Jacqueline Jenkinson provides an example of the deep embedded institutionalised racism found within the law enforcement. She reports that during the 1919 riots police officers arrested nearly twice as many black citizens (155) than white (89). This was made worse by the judicial system which convicted half of the black arrestees while acquitting majority of the white workers. [6]

According to Historic England, the increase of immigration in the 1960s and the resulting discriminatory behaviour experienced led to the formation of defence organisations such as the League of Coloured Peoples and the Indian Workers’ Association, both of which were established in the 1930s, and the Black People’s Alliance in the 1970s. [7] However, their fight continues within the contemporary world.

Colonialism and its impact on Pakistan

By the first half of the nineteenth century, the region of India was fully colonialised by the East India Company. At that time Pakistan did not exist as a country. British rule ended with the creation of East and West Pakistan in 1947. When the British left the subcontinent after 90 years of direct rule, the aftermath of their of political decisions led to one of the largest migrations in history, as many moved from India to Pakistan and vice versa. It displaced 15 million people and more than one million were killed. The relationship between India and Pakistan remained sour throughout that time. Simultaneously, the decision to create East and West Pakistan with India sandwiched in the middle led to several governance and identity issues. The division of land ultimately led to East Pakistan seeking independence from West Pakistan. The creation of Bangladesh (East Pakistan) in 1971 and the war of independence resulted in the death of 500,000 people. [8]

Aftermath of colonialism

The negative impact of colonial legacies can still be felt today in the shape of interventionism, imperialism, neocolonialism and institutional racism. The continuing intervention of the West has led to serious problems between Pakistan and India that provoke tensions in the form of religious hatred and prejudices. The unresolved issue of Kashmir continues to raise tensions. Colonialism was followed by imperialism. Instead of taking physical control of another, imperialism is exercised by political and monetary dominance, both formally and informally. Some of imperial tools used to overpower people in developing or former colonised countries are the imposition and presumptive superiority of imperial culture, language and education.

The pandemic effects of the power of hierarchy are seen in all colonised countries, including Pakistan. We have witnessed unrest, bloody wars, revenge and destruction everywhere. British military and noblemen built segregated institutions for themselves including hospitals, clubs, and educational establishments to exclude the locals. Unfortunately, the people who came into power after decolonisation maintained these laws and cultural norms to empower themselves and to control the weak and oppressed. The rich had the right of judgement, which still dominates the Pakistan judicial system.

Ironically, those who struggled and protested for their equal rights and freedom during colonialism promoted and followed the same culture of superiority and inferiority when they came into power. This happened in both secular and religious leadership. So much so that some religious people use references from their holy books to supress the weak, such as the aforementioned verse from Luke 12:47. It has been my observation that religious references have been used to oppress the marginalised (minorities), especially women. It is a shame that political and religious leadership have failed to inculcate values of justice and equality for all. Tragically, the majority of people never dare to speak out against these injustices and have accepted this as their fate.

Social prejudices

Some of the social constructs that are deeply rooted in Pakistani culture are colourism, superiority of languages, fashion, social status and religious discrimination. It is important to acknowledge that subtle examples of western superiority are ingrained within the mentality of Pakistani and European people. For example, young people prefer western food, fashion and music and look down on their local culture. At the same time, while the British nation voted “curry” as its favourite takeaway, the generic term “curry” that is used to describe all form of all Asian food is perceived by some to be culturally inappropriate. In some Pakistani churches, food politics was manifested in racism when white clergy were not allowed to eat on the same table as the local catechists. Some clergy would have them sit on the floor instead of using the same furniture as them.

Regarding colourism, young girls are mostly the victims of this discriminatory judgement. In Pakistan, the culture of arranged marriages is still dominant. Every family wants to have a fair (white) bride for their sons, following a western concept of beauty. Most of the time young girls are rejected because of their dark complexion no matter how educated or qualified they are. Young girls often experiment with different bleach creams or homemade remedies/herbal mixtures to change their complexion. You can find countless varieties of bleach creams in the everyday shops and supermarkets. There are many cultural jokes and sayings that make fun of girls’ dark complexion. Similarly, black skin is taken to be associated with sorrow, suffering , as an insult or to depict the image of the devil.

There is also a hierarchy of language in Pakistan. English is superior over Urdu and Urdu is superior over Punjabi and other dialects of Pakistan. Those who cannot speak English are deprived of executive jobs and are less respected in upper-class society. The standard of education in private or English-medium schools is measured by the perceived quality of English language instruction and high tuition fees, depriving common people from getting admission in these schools.

Pakistani minorities face racism outside the country while internally they face extreme religious discrimination. The ill-treatment of minorities in Pakistan goes against some of the teachings of Quran. To disrespect another religion is explicitly condemned in the Quran: “Do not abuse those whom they worship besides Allah” (6:109). If a person claims to be Muslim, he is not allowed to insult or disrespect another religion. This is forbidden according to the Quran. Even to engage in arguments with non-Muslims in a disrespectful manner is prohibited: “And argue not with the people of the Scripture [Jews and Christians], unless it be in [a way] that is better [with good words and in good manner], except with such of them as do wrong, and say [to them]: ‘We believe in that which has been revealed to us and revealed to you; our God and your God is One, and to Him we have submitted [as Muslims’”(29:46).

Contemporary challenges and a way forward

As I reflect on how we can challenge racism and racist structures, I offer some things I have seen and heard as a way forward. Geting rid of the evil practices that dishonour the image of God requires cohesive acts to change the external and internal prejudices connected with institutional racism and social constructs. God is working in a miraculous way in people’s lives, guiding them to find hope in him; despite the antagonistic effects of colonialism, some weak and marginalised people in colonised countries look at its positive side as well. The introduction of Christianity offered more religious mission opportunities to transform people’s lives. CMS is an organisation that plays a significant role in transforming people’s lives all over the world. At this point I must acknowledge that my great-grandparents came to Christ because of the good news shared by missionaries in Pakistan and I am proud of their strong faith in Christ, which enables us to live the positive values of our faith.

A recent statement from Church House is a reconfirmation that the Church of England is committed to taking this issue seriously. The statement reads:

For the Church to be credible voice in calling for change access the world, we must now ensure that apologies and lament are accompanied by swift actions leading to real change. [9]

It is our collective responsibility to help eradicate negative behaviours towards the BAME community across the world. A worldwide 2015 survey by Pew Research Center found that of the 84 per cent of people who identified themselves with a religious group, 31.2 per cent were Christian, 24.1 per cent were Muslim and 15.1 per cent were Hindu; 16 per cent of the world’s population were secular or atheist. [10] Looking at the promising percentage of believers, we can see our potential to take an active role in combating racism by raising understanding of racial issues and its dreadful effects that dishonour different images of God and our churches.

The most widely accepted definition of racial discrimination is found in the European law produced during the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Article 6 states:

The State has prime responsibility for ensuring human rights and fundamental freedoms on an entirely equal footing in dignity and rights for all individuals and all groups.… The State should take all appropriate steps, inter alia by legislation, particularly in the spheres of education, culture and communication, to prevent, prohibit and eradicate racism, racist propaganda, racial segregation and apartheid and to encourage the dissemination of knowledge and the findings of appropriate research in natural and social sciences on the causes and prevention of racial prejudice and racist attitudes. [11]

The charity HOPE not hate surveyed about 1,000 adults in Britain in August 2020 in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in the US and anti-racism protests in the UK. According to the report, 64 per cent of ethnic minorities in total agreed that the police as a whole were good. [12] Black communities were slightly lower on 58 per cent, but still a majority. Most of them agreed that it is down to a few individual officers. More than half of the BAME respondents also expressed that they had witnessed or experienced racist comments being made in public or on social media in the past 12 months. Almost three-quarters said they supported the recent Black Lives Matter protests, but there were fears that they might prompt a backlash from sections of the white population.

There have been some positive signs. Chief constables from forces across the country, the chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, the chief executive of the College of Policing and the president of the Police Superintendents’ Association have spoken following the death of George Floyd and the events that have followed in the United States. “We stand alongside all those across the globe who are appalled and horrified by the way George Floyd lost his life. Justice and accountability should follow.” [13]

Together we can honour God’s image by respecting cultural and racial differences, and avoiding racial comments and the use of humour, words or jokes to intimidate or harass others. We can also use our influence to develop and support strategies that ban racist expressions and organisations. Part of the problem is that international law has not fully been decolonised. We need to work collectively to restore the dignity of those individuals who have been suffering from racism, fight for justice and seek guidance from Paul’s message from 1 Cor. 12:7–11:

Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. To one there is given through the Spirit a message of wisdom, to another a message of knowledge by means of the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by that one Spirit, to another miraculous powers, to another prophecy, to another distinguishing between spirits, to another speaking in different kinds of tongues, and to still another the interpretation of tongues. All these are the work of one and the same Spirit, and he distributes them to each one, just as he determines (NIV).

Human beings are not commodities to be judged by brands or labels. Special measures must be taken to ensure equality in dignity and rights for individuals and groups wherever necessary, remembering that “he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26, ESV). As long as people strive for power, then injustice, inequality and hatred will continue to grow. As human beings we share so many things in common to celebrate together such as humility, simplicity, respect for people and family values, hospitality, love for nature, etc. Finally, it is important to put ourselves in the shoes of victims to understand how racism is damaging their lives.

I want to conclude with Nelson Mandela’s message: “No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love.” [14]

About the author

Awais Mughal is a fourth generation Pakistani Christian working as CMS mission partner in Leeds. In 2013, she began her journey with CMS and after serving almost two years in Pakistan, she moved back to the UK. She currently lives in Seacroft where she teaches language courses designed for asylum seekers and refugees, supports local churches by sharing the gospel and delivers activities that connect women from different cultural and faith backgrounds. In her spare time, she likes to knit, cook and write about human rights issues.

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Notes

[1] Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (Auburn, NY: Derby & Miller, 1853).
[2] Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1982).
[3] Nina G. Jablonski and George Chaplin, “The colours of humanity: the evolution of pigmentation in the human lineage,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 372, no. 1724 (5 July 2017).
[4] Racial Equity Tools, https://www.racialequitytools.org/home.
[5] Stephen Bourne, Black Poppies: Britain’s Black Community and the Great War (Cheltenham: The History Press, 2014).
[6] Jacqueline Jenkinson, Black 1919: Riots, Racism, and Resistance in Imperial Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009).
[7] https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/another-england/a-brief-history/racism-and-resistance
[8] Christian Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
[9] Maddy Fry, “Bishops pledge swift action to combat racism in the Church of England,” Church Times, 3 July 2020, https://www.churchtimes. co.uk/articles/2020/3-july/news/uk/bishops-pledge-swift-action-to-combat-racism-in-the-church-of-england.
[10] Harriet Sherwood, “Religion: why faith is becoming more and more popular,” The Guardian, 27 August 2018, https://www.theguardian. com/news/2018/aug/27/religion-why-is-faith-growing-and-what-happens-next.
[11] Natan Lerner, The UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 238–239.
[12] “Minority communities in the time of COVID and protest: a study of BAME opinion,” HOPE not hate, 19 August 2020, https://www. hopenothate.org.uk/2020/08/19/minority-communities-time-covid-protest-study-bame-opinion/.
[13] Sam Corbishley, “UK police say they are ‘appalled’ by George Floyd death and call for justice,” Metro, 3 June 2020, https://metro. co.uk/2020/06/03/uk-police-say-are-appalled-george-floyd-death-call-justice-12798761/.
[14] Susan Ratcliffe, Oxford Essential Quotations 5th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

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Let me breathe!

by Natasha Godfrey

Let                         me                                     breathe,
Let me be who I was meant to be
Created in the image of God
Let me                                                                            tread freely,
As the spirit leads me
Let me breathe…

My friends, when I approach you emotionally exhausted;
attempting to speak to you of my pain; why do you react as though
YOU are the afflicted one? Why, when I am afforded this small
window of opportunity to express to you the impact, the trauma,
the symbolism of the knee, do you dismiss my story with “Ah yes,
but All Lives Matter, surely?”

Of course, All Lives Matter, but we are in a crisis and I simply want
you to hold the space, see my face and feel this moment. But you
won’t let me breathe.
And I know that you’re exhausted too…
But
Whilst I have a
Moment
To speak freely…
Let me breathe,
Let me sing my tune and burst forth into song
O afflicted city that I am
Lashed by storms and not comforted
Let me sing, for he has promised to build me up with stones of
turquoise, my foundations with sapphires, my battlements of
rubies, my gates with sparkling jewels.
But you wrestle with your flesh,
Like Jacob fighting with head knowledge
Over a heart issue
As you try to decide whether my life matters,
Whether my presence is a moral or a political issue.
But the issue is that your indecision dehumanises me,
And your default position confirms how much of a stranger I am in
this strange land.

Let me breathe,
Let me shout it out aloud and not hold back
Let me raise my voice like a trumpet and declare to God’s people
their rebellion and to the house of Jacob that racism is a sin.
Look!
Do you not perceive that God is doing a new thing?
This is our new normal!
Things will never be the same.
Forget the “good old days”
It was only “good” for some
For when you required a song
Our Windrush pioneers
Invited, yet rejected
Could not sing
In harmony
Because the melody was way off key…
They were put on hold
Told to
Wait for resources
Yet simultaneously
They were pushed out onto the frontlines
With little protection.
Told to fend for themselves
As they endured long hours
For       MANY YEARS
70         LONG                  NHS         YEARS of generational exposure
400 years
Of injustice, exploitation, and abuse
And over
Over that time, we dropped like flies
Disproportionately
From this global infection
That is systemic and unjust
A make-believe social construct!

So, in this hour
The Almighty commands that we
Fast our greed and loose the chains
Decolonise the false narrative of white supremacy
And untangle the lie
Untie the cords of the yoke
To set the oppressed free
Of systemic ties
That bind
So that WE can ALL breathe…
THEN our light will break forth like the dawn, says the Lord
And our healing will quickly appear
THEN our righteousness will go before us
And the glory of the Lord will be our rear guard
THEN when we call,
He will answer…
Here am I
Let me breathe so that I might be
Like a well-watered garden,
Like a spring whose waters never fail.
For I too am called to rebuild the ancient ruins
And raise up ancient foundations.
I too redeemed
Am called
To be a Repairer of Walls, a Restorer of Streets with Dwellings…
AND I will not come down until thy kingdom come
But you must let me breathe
Because, dear friend
The truth is
You cannot live without me.

© Natasha Godfrey, 2020

About the author

Natasha Godfrey is an actress, writer, auto-ethnographer, theologian and educator with an MA in theology and transformative practice. She uses her lived experience in a performative context as an educational tool. She also works part-time as coaching and mentoring co-ordinator for Church of England in Birmingham.

“Let Me Breathe” was commissioned for and performed at a “Courageous Conversations” webinar on 10 July 2020 (hosted by the Revd Dr Sharon Prentis and Bishop David Urquhart). This was a step toward meaningful dialogue around racial inequality and injustice, highlighted by the death of George Floyd and subsequent protests globally.

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“How rich the Kingdom of God is!” – an interview with Dupe Adefala

James Butler talks to Pastor Modupe Adefala

Dupe Adefala spoke to CMS pioneer MA lecturer and assistant coordinator James Butler about her experiences of racism in the UK.

Dupe studied her MA with us at CMS. We knew she would have an interesting perspective to bring to this issue of Anvil and so I connected with her over Zoom one evening to have a conversation and to hear about her experience as a black Nigerian woman following God’s call to come to live, work and plant a church in the UK.

James

Dupe, I wondered if we could start with your story of how you came to be in England and to be the pastor of Word Fountain Christian Ministries.

Dupe

Well, I’m originally from Nigeria. I was born into a Christian family, an Anglican family; we loved God, and over the years in Nigeria we went to church. My mum was particularly involved in the church. My father was not that active but his brother and children were. I’m from a polygamous family and that has its own dimension of living. I married into a Muslim family; my husband was a Muslim (although the family was not actively practising). In Nigeria, it’s not uncommon to have Muslims in the family or as neighbours.

Before we came to England I worked as a bi-vocational pastor with a church in Nigeria; I trained and was ordained as a pastor there. I came to the UK with my husband and children in 1998 to take up a role as a project accountant with a company in Wantage. We’ve lived in Oxfordshire since then. In 2002, I took up a project accountant role in Oxford University and I’ve worked in some other multinational companies.

In 2002 we planted a church, Word Fountain Christian Ministries, in Oxford with two other families. In the last four years, we’ve developed two other branches that are also growing and we trust God for them. Word Fountain has people from many African nations, not just Nigerians (Cote d’Ivoire, Uganda, Cameroon, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya). I serve the church in a voluntary capacity. In 2010, I took up sessional chaplaincy at the immigration removal centre near Oxford and ended up as the manager of religious affairs before the centre was closed in December 2018, all by his grace.

James

So you started the church with some friends? What caused you to plant a church?

Dupe

A prophetic word spoken over us in Nigeria that our relocation to the UK was more about mission than economics – that God was sending us to the UK. I came to the UK in 1990 for a company board meeting at their headquarters. This was two years after I gave my life to Jesus. I came to the UK with tracts and Bibles in my suitcase in anticipation of coming to the country that brought Christianity to Nigeria and being part of what God was doing there. After my official meeting, I would go to Oxford Street and hand out tracts. I was like an alien to everyone that I tried to give a tract to. After my 10-day visit, I just wept in my spirit at the airport and groaned. What happened to the United Kingdom? I didn’t have much understanding of contemporary mission work and the state of Christianity in the UK. I felt in my heart that there was something that God wanted me to do, but how was he going to make it happen? I did not know.

On that flight back to Nigeria – the Lord orchestrated it – I sat beside a pastor of another big church in Nigeria. I was sharing my frustration about trying to hand out tracts on Oxford Street and how I was rebuffed and he just told me that the UK is a is a mission field, and that he’s been coming regularly with other ministers to come and see what God would have them do in the UK. He told me that I should not give up, that God has a plan for every nation and that at an appointed time revival will break out. I believed and that sort of comforted me. But whether I would have a part in it or not, I didn’t know until 1997. In that year, an opportunity arose for me to come to the UK as a highly skilled migrant with my family. That’s another testimony on its own. I just believe it was God at work because he saw the groaning of my heart. We moved in December 1998.

James

You arrived four years before you started the church, so did you attend another church before then?

Dupe

Initially we attended Jesus House in London. Jesus House was the Redeemed Christian Church of God church plant in London. But the commute was a lot, especially because we had young children. By the time we got back on Sunday, got ready for school and work on Monday, we were very tired. So we started going to the local community church. We were part of that church and then we heard another church plant was starting in Oxford, Living Faith Church, so we started with that. But we didn’t find rest in our spirit until Word Fountain started. We just had a burden for the mission that God had called us to.

We were the only black family in that church in Wantage. And so God began to link us up with other people who were having the same burden and we started praying about it until August 2002 when Word Fountain Christian Ministries started by the grace of God.

James

One of the things that I’ve been reflecting on is that I don’t have a great deal of experience of being somewhere where I’m in the ethnic minority, certainly not in the UK. I wondered if you could tell us a little about the experience of being in the minority in a majority-white context.

Dupe

When I started my job in Wantage, I went into the company’s email distribution list, and I quickly dropped an email to introduce myself to the first name I saw that resembled mine. Twenty or 30 minutes later a lady ran up to me to hug me. I could see that she was delighted to see me. We chatted and she really supported my family settling into the UK. She was an engineer and she is still very close to us. There is a longing within each person for a kindred spirit!

What is the feeling of being in the minority? I would say that I’ve probably enjoyed positive discrimination because of the companies that I worked with. I believe I’ve always had favour with the managing directors and the top echelon of employers. I attended Queen’s School, Ibadan (an all-female school). I never really had issues about being in the minority. I think there was a bit of toughening up that was done in me. We were nurtured as people, not as girls. When I came into the workplace I didn’t have a sense of being a second-class citizen in whatever form, and that stood me in good stead.

Being in the minority in the UK is not just about colour, but language, culture, etc. The richness of who you are doesn’t come into play. When it’s just you, you’re always trying to lean towards the majority. There is that pull. But you’ve just got to own your own ground or be lost in the crowd.

James

Can you give some examples?

Dupe

Yes – for example, intonation and language. When I speak, people ask, “Pardon me?” And sometimes it’s you being lost in the conversation – “What are they saying?” –and I may find it difficult to understand the question I’ve been asked. You begin to doubt yourself and question whether you really meet up to the standard. It’s those issues that I needed to deal with.

I didn’t have any problem with people not pronouncing my name very well. At least they make an effort. But sometimes you’re not sure whether it was a form of microaggression. Between 1998 and 2000, some scam messages would come through the fax machine, and some colleagues would collect those fax messages and put them on my table. I didn’t read any meaning into that. But with the benefit of hindsight, I realised that people were tying Nigeria to the foreign scams. Because I was the only Nigerian in that department, they put them on my table. I don’t know who did it; I just binned them. I felt someone was trying to say something to me in ways that I didn’t understand. But by and large, I had faith in those who came to Nigeria to recruit me.

I was given an official house to live in and an official car by my employer. I did not know the gesture was exceptional for a migrant. This was against the backdrop of Britons and other foreigners working in Nigeria as expatriates (not immigrants). Their perks included official accommodation in choice locations, cars, drivers, etc. I thought I was on the same level playing field as an expatriate. However, when my role was made redundant, I realised I was really a migrant or immigrant. It was painful. I had to fight for my final entitlements with the support of a local Citizens Advice.

So at work you’re dealing with all that and you’re expected to deliver to very high standards. You go to church on Sunday and you’re still in the minority. I think for us as a family, we had to catch up with the songs, the sometimes icy relationships, etc. With the benefit of hindsight, the pastor and the leaders of the church tried their best to help us settle, but I don’t think we also understood the dynamics of what was going on. My husband didn’t feel settled into that church. For example, there was a day when he came home and said, we are not going to that church again. I asked, “Why?” He explained that he could not understand why people who we would have seen at church would just ignore us in the town centre. I really couldn’t understand that myself. We thought of church as brotherhood. We are brothers and I don’t need to reintroduce myself to you again outside of church. But we found out we had to reintroduce ourselves outside of church. It was just not as welcoming as one would expect it to be. We considered going back to London to the Nigerian community, but the distance was too far for us and it wasn’t right for the family. Spiritually we wanted to feel at home in the church where we lived. I’m sure that our children had their own experience as well.

James

What are your reflections on all that has been happening since the death of George Floyd and the prominence of the Black Lives Matter movement?

Dupe

I will say that the George Floyd incident was a rude awakening to the racial fault lines in our communities, and it really made one think about how much people have had to contend with because of their colour. For us as a family it became an opportunity for our children to tell us what they experienced that they didn’t tell us before. We would not have believed the stories if they told us at the time, I think. One that stuck with them was when we moved to a new neighbourhood from Wantage to Grove. There was a particular day we came out of the house to the car, and someone had written on our car, “Go back to your country”! We didn’t take it seriously, we just cleaned it off. Our children just felt that was not OK; that it was nasty.

We’ve had the opportunity to talk about how the children felt or were treated at school. We would go into school as parents for parents’ evening and the teacher will just tell you, “Your daughter has been this” and “Your son has done that”. But it is only now that the children were telling us, “Do you know this happened? Do you know that happened?” I will give an example. The teacher showed this film Roots at school and my daughter had a different take on the film. She spoke up as best as she could to say that the impression the teacher was giving was not correct. Some of her classmates thought that Africans lived on trees and things like that. So she felt in herself the need to speak up and say, “No, I didn’t sleep on trees, my family don’t sleep on trees.” But the teacher felt that she was aggressive.

As the only black girl in the whole school, she took every opportunity to give the “other” narrative – the other side of the story. Like we said, a single-sided story is not helpful. She was considered aggressive and was even punished at times. She was involved in one or two fights just trying to express herself and dignify who she was. We’ve come to terms with such themes painfully. Very painfully. I have had to apologise to my children. My children believe I’m pro-authority by nature because if you come home and tell me, this person did that to me, I’ll say, “What did you do?” I believed is all about cause and effect. So we’ve had to process some of these very emotional scars.

Whether it’s from the church or from the community, we just felt that if it was hostile, it is not a good experience for anybody. The mind does not process why or where anything happened, it is about what happened.

My daughter also reminded me of an event on the day I came to my current job. My daughter had met me after work to travel home together. I’d had a good day and we were walking towards the car park. Someone was driving out and she challenged both of us why we were walking towards the car park. “Why are you coming in here? This car park is for band whatever.” I told her my band and she apologised and left. I felt that because I’m a stranger, it was a legitimate challenge. But my daughter said, “No, it’s because we are black. If you are white, and you are walking towards a car park, nobody will ask you, ‘Why are you doing that?’ Can you see the microaggression?” And I said, “Wow, is that really why?” The awareness has been heightened, even the occasions that I did not consider before. Black Lives Matter has helped us to really process our experiences and we are still processing them.

We still talk about some of the experiences through the lens of racial fault lines, not just for us, but so that we can help others as well. We can’t go back to those experiences, but we can help others as we go forward. We can educate, not just the black, but also the white as to how things play out and the implication on social cohesion. So I believe it’s been a lot of learning and a lot of repenting and even crying sometimes. That was my experience.

James

How has it been being a pastor, both supporting and pastoring people who are having these kinds of experiences?

Dupe

Because of the lockdown we’ve had more virtual connections. I do not think at Word Fountain we’ve had to talk about racial issues. However, there have been conversations at various meetings and on social media. My understanding is that many black males feel muzzled and are made to feel as if they don’t belong. They feel undermined as far as their skills and their ability to contribute to society is concerned. So it is about building up their confidence, encouraging them and championing the fact that it’s not going to be like this forever. The implication for younger black males is enormous. They feel that they have no face, say or place in the wider society because of stereotyping.

A good number of people feel that the attention given to racial conversation is just the “flavour of the month” effect. We need to work to get into a more sustainable, positive landscape when it comes to racial conversations and engagement. Because of that bias, many in my community do not think it is worth their time and they believe is just lip service, a box-ticking exercise. Some would rather avoid the conversation and dismiss it as, “That’s the way it’s always been – nothing is going to change.” Some have come to a fait accompli where they say, “We came into their country, they can do to us whatever they like.” They feel it is not worth wasting their time on because there’s not going to be radical change.

So we tend to hear the negatives, and that actually amplifies what people would have overlooked before. Every act of microaggression becomes amplified. We need to find ways of engaging, across the board, with education. My community needs some education, and I believe the white community needs education as well. My fear is that we may not achieve that long- standing and sustainable change unless we have honest conversations and begin to understand the roots and truths of the issues.

We have been focusing on the young people. My daughter, my son, they’ve had conversations with their colleagues, with people globally about what they consider to be issues and how they feel that we should be going forward. But it should always be progressing. It should not come to a place where we think, “Oh, we’ve dealt with it, let’s move on.” It’s not just about policies, it’s about practice and systemic changes.

James

What would be your practical challenges to white Christians and to CMS in response to all of this? What would you like to see?

Dupe

Representation is key. Representation at all levels, not just the higher levels. To be heard, you’ve got to be seen. Culture is not formed by one person, it is a collective thing. We’re not talking about tokenism. We’re talking about vocal, visible voices in the hierarchy of the church. When I look at the education CMS deliver we do need to thank God for the efforts that’s been made so far, having a good mix of lecturers, but there has to be emphasis on getting a more representative community of lecturers and facilitators. We can’t do it by segregation; we need to move towards enculturation by integration. If we are talking about global missions, we do need the voice of every major and minor player in global missions talking about it and writing about it.

This leads to the second thing: the narratives. I do not think my community write enough. The black community seem to be more involved in the practice than the narrative. There are not enough black theologians contributing to or even challenging the current narratives. I do not think we should just be given this space for political reasons, I think those spaces need to be earned. The danger is that my community will want to create its own class of educators and simply do the black versus the white, whereas we should be looking at integration, we should be looking at walking together, we should be looking at facilitating together, standing side by side and making Jesus the focus.

Thirdly, my concern is for the next generation. I believe an institution like CMS can develop level playing fields for the next generation to facilitate that integration. And the earlier we do it, the better, so that the next generation of apostles, prophets, evangelists, teachers and pastors can take the theological lens to look at what we do and why we do it. If we don’t, the next generation will remain polarised. It doesn’t have to be big numbers: 10 people in the next generation who are interested in making this thing happen with CMS, just facilitating and amplifying their voices. That’s what I’m looking for – a model of what is possible. But it needs to be created intentionally. We should seek to recruit people who will shape things and are concerned enough to make a difference.

So three aspects. Representation, narratives and the next generation. And then maybe we can look at the literature. The book selection needs to expand. I’m not just talking about CMS, I’m talking about the curriculum of universities and theological colleges. There are some very good literary contributions from the BAME community, and they need to be allowed to have a space.

James

Thank you; these are really important challenges. As you say, we have been working on diversifying our teaching and reading lists on the pioneer training at CMS, but there is much more that we need to do. You were talking about racial fault lines and polarisation; perhaps you could say something about the fact that we tend to have white churches and black churches and fewer mixed and diverse churches. What’s your feeling about the way forward there? And have you seen any ways that steps can be made forward in those kind of conversations?

Dupe

I think it is important that it is a natural process. There are some initiatives that are bringing us together. Love Oxford is a very vibrant gathering of Christians that’s been taking place for some time now. It has been championed by St Aldates. And the pictures are colourful – it’s what the church should be. That just tells us how rich the kingdom of God is. How rich the kingdom of God is! This is richness that we need to begin to build upon.

There’s a difference in the music, but I believe that some people are finding common ground now. In the black churches we can preach for 40 minutes while in the white church 10 to 15 minutes is considered OK. In the black church we can typically stay in church for two hours or more. Two hours is modest! Three hours, four hours… White churches don’t see the reason for such long services. So we need to challenge ourselves. Where is the balance? Is there a way that would not just satisfy us but will also please God? Then there are different beliefs about the manifestation of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Some will say it’s OK to speak in tongues. Some will say no, speaking in tongues is for private, for edification. There are real issues about the theology.

I believe both sides need to be praying. We should be dependent on God, the owner of the vineyard to help us to see our excesses and our inadequacies on both sides. We need to own up to the fact that neither is perfect and we need to begin to hear God together. There must be something that God wants to say to us that will bind us together with a cord of love that is not easily broken. I don’t think it is something we can force feed or make happen. But we need to be prophetic in our conversations. Not condemning or undermining but trusting God that there is a gift from the white church that the black church needs and there are gifts from the black church that the white church needs. It is pictured in Rev. 7. We are the multitude from different nations, with different languages, and I think it’s time we begin to rehearse that picture. We hope and pray for the unity of the faith as Jesus desired.

James

Dupe, thank you. Thank you for sharing so honestly and openly. You said when I first contacted you that you hadn’t experienced much racism, but I find it a little shocking to hear all your stories and what you have experienced. They may not be extreme examples, but they are really painful to hear and I recognise my own guilt as you speak. I think what you have shared helps us to open our eyes to the suffering and discrimination around us every day. And thank you for reminding us of the hope-filled vision of God’s Kingdom, of every nation praising God together.

Dupe

Thank you. I believe the more we talk, the better we heal and the better we become – because someone has said it is not what we’re going through, it is what we’re becoming that really matters. I pray that the conversation will be redemptive. And that’s something I say to my children. How can we allow the redemptive grace of God to help us in this journey?

I want to thank the Anvil team for holding this conversation and I look forward to reading what others are saying. God bless.

About the interviewee

Pastor Dupe Adefala is a wife to Bode Adefala and a mother of three biological children. She stewards a church called Word Foundation Christian Ministries, based in Oxford, where God has called them to raise a people of inheritance (matured sons of God). She is also the current president of International Ministers Fellowship (UK chapter), a non-denominational, living and living network of ministers of the gospel. She is the managing chaplain at a UK prison, where she leads a multifaith team of staff and volunteers, and is the author of the book The Mysteries of Marriage. She is a lover of God and of his people.

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