Â鶹Éç

Good morning. As someone training for ministry in the Church of England, for the last few months I’ve been waiting for the new Archbishops’ Anti-Racism Taskforce report. It was published on Thursday and it outlines the reality of institutional racism in the Church of England and calls for urgent cultural changes. It happened to come in the same week as a Â鶹Éç Panorama documentary on the same themes. I watched clergy share damning testimonies of their experiences of racism in the church, including at the theological college where I study.

When we’re confronted with collective failure – collective sin – the temptation that many of us feel is to create distance between ourselves as individuals and the wider accusation. The urge is to say that we weren’t present, that we didn’t know, that the incidents don’t reflect the whole. The church is adept at this kind of distancing. But this misunderstands how our bodies work. We’re constantly made and remade by the things we consume, by the spoken and unspoken cultures we inhabit. And as communities we carry these stories with us.

The Apostle Paul described the church as the body of Christ. For Christians, the visible witness of Christ in the world stands and falls on the health and work of the collective whole. If one part of the body suffers, the whole body suffers with it. When a body self-harms, by some members rejecting or abusing others, the whole is damaged. This is as much true for a nation state as it is for a local parish church. The Taskforce report is subtitled ‘From Lament to Action’: perhaps we have begun to accept the harm racism has done, but we haven’t yet made a decisive move toward transformation.

So how can a damaged body be transformed through action? The political philosopher Hannah Arendt describes action as emerging from the freedom humans have to make something new and unexpected. We can break away from what went before. But this freedom is conditioned by our shared humanity – for our action to be meaningful, it must be done openly, with others, as part of a community of memory. For my community – for my church – and, indeed, for any of us – to move from lament to action, we’ll need to see ourselves as we really are; members of a wider body, a plurality, both carrying stories of suffering and gifted with the grace to make something new.

Show less