Evaluating the Committee for Minority Ethnic Anglican Concerns
by Revd John Root - July 2021
Reprinted with kind permission from John’s blog ‘Out of Many, One People’
As it is set to be replaced by a new Racial Justice Directorate, John Root takes a considered look at one of the major outcomes to have emerged from Faith in the City
The Committee for Minority Ethnic Anglican Concerns (CMEAC) was set up as a development of the recommendation of the Faith in the City report (1985) for a Commission on Black Anglican Concerns ‘to enable the Church to make a more effective response to racial discrimination and disadvantage, and to the alienation experienced by many black people in relation to the Church of England’ (Recommendation 8, p 361). The recently published Lament to Action report suggests that CMEAC be replaced by a Racial Justice Directorate as a standing committee of the Archbishops’ Council, of which the Directorate’s chair would be a member. (Note the change in terminology over time, as the much-controverted ambiguity over who is being referred to by the term ‘black’ was replaced by the more wide-ranging ‘minority ethnic’).
It is appropriate therefore to evaluate CMEAC’s response to the two connected areas identified in Faith in the City: ‘racial discrimination and disadvantage’ on the one hand, and the ‘alienation experienced by many black people’ on the other. The energy behind Lament to Action was a built-up sense of frustration at the failure of the Church of England to be an effectively multi-ethnic body – highlighted by the absence at senior level of minority ethnic bishops, and of a low (though growing) number of minority ethnic clergy. Apparently then CMEAC’s aim for over three decades to overcome ‘racial discrimination and disadvantage’ in the church had not been achieved, nor had black people’s alienation been sufficiently assuaged for substantial numbers to come forward for ordained ministry. It also needs asking to what extent actual black/minority ethnic church members were ever aware of CMEAC or saw it as a means of enabling them to have a greater sense of identification or participation in the Church of England.
An inappropriate structure?
In reviewing CMEAC’s history the frustration noted above is one clear feature, with successive reports being produced bewailing the lack of progress made towards CMEAC’s twin objectives, followed by dismay and apology from church leaders but with little apparent consequence – thus Lament to Action’s listing of 150 Recommendations produced between 1985 and 2020, given visual force by the high pile of documents produced by Clive Myrie in April’s Panorama documentary. It is worth asking whether this morale-destroying, macabre dance of complaint and apology without consequence was structured into the system: CMEAC created a ‘voice’ for minorities, to be responded to by a presumably ‘non-minority’ establishment. The result has been that race is not on the church’s mind, except when it is on the church’s mind; there has not been continuous, organic, relationally close awareness. Rather we have a history that illustrates Patricia J Williams’ comment about black people ‘ricocheting between invisibility and hypervisibility’ (in ‘Seeing a Colour Blind Future’, 1997). My blogs on developing church strategies (9, 14/01/2021) and clergy training (22) highlight past invisibility.
The black voice/white establishment structure was likely to ensure an adversarial rather than a collaborative outcome. Over the past sixty years an adversarial understanding of ‘race’ has tended to predominate, shaped partly by the oppositional conception of society inherent in Marxism, with ‘black’ voices seen as contesting white hegemony. Such thought patterns were influential in the drafting of Faith in the City, and have come very strongly to the fore with the emphasis of Critical Race Theory on race as being primarily about how power is exercised within a binary conception of the powerful and the powerless. But the validity of such a pattern needs examining.
One remarkable feature of modern Britain is that the right-wing political party has a very high level of minority ethnic leadership and participation, over against a left-wing party that is still overwhelmingly white (despite Dawn Butler having been strategically placed at Jeremy Corbyn’s right hand during Prime Minister’s Questions). So, the party that has not consciously sought to represent minorities has done so, whilst the party that has consciously sought to be their voice has failed. As regards a very different context, it is possible (though probably unprovable) that the most ethnically integrated organisation in the country at grass-roots level is the Jehovah’s Witnesses – sharp clarity of focus generates strong inter-personal unity.
Behind this I believe is an important though neglected theological issue: that collaboration based on the conviction of our unity both in creation and redemption is primary, rather than giving first emphasis to a view of human society as riven by unequal access to power. This is not to deny that power can be and very often is abused, but rather that such abuse is most likely overcome when focused on the collaborative pursuit of a common goal, as opposed to beginning with a basically adversarial framework. The furore over the Sewell Report was essentially because it commended a collaborative not adversarial perspective.
In this respect Lament to Action’s placing of the chair of the Racial Justice Directorate in the Archbishop’s Council is an important and healthy step, ideally enabling the Church of England to think with one mind and speak with one voice, rather than an ‘outside’ voice pleading/complaining to an ‘inside’ power base.
This may fit with my subjective impression – which I acknowledge needs testing – that at the level of many parish churches and in the setting of collaborative multi-ethnic parish strategy, minority ethnic people feel at home, accepted and able to minister. Rather tensions arise higher up the institutional chain where the focus is more on abstract issues of quotas, rights, and ‘justice’, and the spectre of being in an adversarial context inhibits the exercise of spontaneous human love and ease of relating.
It is worth exploring how far the ‘outsider’ status of CMEAC has shaped, and I would say, distorted its emphases.
Concern with dioceses rather than the parishes.
It is indicative of CMEAC’s approach that the reflections of its first director, Glynne Gordon-Carter (in ‘Amazing Journey’ 2003, pp 153-7), conclude with a series of recommendations to dioceses, but none to parishes. Similarly, whilst part of CMEAC’s brief has been to communicate good practice and it has produced ‘A Good Practice Paper for Dioceses’ (2001) nothing similar has been produced for parishes. Yet it is in the parishes that things happen or do not happen in the Church of England, and it is only through having a majority of its urban parishes as centres of multi-ethnic welcome, vitality and mission that the Church of England can have a lasting impact on our society. Dioceses can have an advisory or exhorting role, but little grass roots impact.
In its early days the Committee focussed on visits to dioceses. My impression is that it had little impact through its London diocesan visit, nor was it reasonable to think that a small team visiting a large, complex multi-ethnic diocese for a few days could have a more perceptive understanding than do the clergy who have been ministering there long term. It was a mistake that the Research and Statistics Department 2007 survey ‘Celebrating Diversity in the Church of England’ took as its base diocesan statistics from a cross-section of parishes, rather than statistics from particular parishes. Anglican churches differ drastically in both size and ethnic composition. Agglomerated diocesan figures obscured those distinctions and produced generalised diocesan profiles, whilst giving little opportunity to explore what lay behind the different outcomes between congregations.
Even so, at a diocesan level there were significant divergences. In terms of minority ethnic participation London diocese was notably the most effective, with its proportion of minority ethnic members mirroring very closely that found in the overall population – the more impressive because London is home to an unusually high proportion of people of other world faith backgrounds. This is especially significant because the diocese’s approach to ethnic diversity has been quite moribund, and in particular the statistics showed it having the worst proportion of minority ethnic clergy to minority ethnic church members of any diocese in the country. This would appear to indicate that the diocese’s effectiveness was not based particularly on the commonly advocated prescription of greater numbers of minority ethnic clergy. Rather such effectiveness is most likely explained by the diocese giving more attention to recruiting missionally minded clergy, and laying emphasis on each parish producing its own mission action plan.
Admittedly there are speculative elements to this argument, and the 2007 diversity monitoring was not followed up with the scrutiny that was owed to it, but prima facie it would argue that emphasis on the shared goal of a parish’s mission creates greater minority ethnic participation than consciously addressing ethnic diversity.
Focus at the wrong level.
The reasons for focussing on dioceses rather than parishes may be that they are both more visible and more biddable. Dioceses are sufficiently high profile to be susceptible to doing the right thing, including pressure to attend to racial diversity, or to being shamed if they fall short. By contrast parishes operate well below the radar, whilst the clergy freehold has given clergy considerable immunity against outside pressure. Along with this, or perhaps because of it, there has been a past tendency in Anglican pastoral strategy (thankfully now changing) to treat what clergy actually do in their parishes as peripheral, yet if change is to happen it must happen in parishes first.
But as we have noticed CMEAC paid very little attention to shaping what goes on in parishes, nor has it given much attention to the training of parochial clergy; such that thinking about ‘race’ and racial awareness has slipped off the syllabus under CMEAC’s watch. Instead its concern has been on increasing the number of minority ethnic clergy, and then senior clergy, or minority ethnic membership of Synod. But contrary to the signs of pomp and authority around the episcopacy and around Synod, their potency is very much dependent of the numbers, finance, and ordination candidates generated in a myriad of parishes. It is here that the Church of England either succeeds, as to a degree it does with older black people, or it fails, as it does with younger people, especially Caribbean-background men, or people of other faith backgrounds. Amongst these latter groups especially, the evidence of Christian vitality is found amongst Pentecostal and/or diasporic churches.
CMEAC has focussed the Church of England’s attention on race to be centrally about increasing the number of minority ethnic clergy. The result is that we are rather like a football team that, having discovered that getting a corner can often lead to scoring a goal, thereafter makes the mark of its success how many corners it wins rather than how many goals it scores. This focus on a worthwhile secondary goal (more minority ethnic clergy) at the cost of attention to our primary goal (parishes that are helping substantial numbers of people to become followers of Jesus) will always in the long term lead to an enervated and ineffective church. In this respect CMEAC’s focus on racial justice whilst giving very little impetus to cross-cultural mission and evangelism was always doomed to be self-defeating. Separating the two in our discourse about race will always weaken us. Whilst the Ouseley Report on the Diocese of Southwark made worthwhile points it was notably feeble in its understanding of evangelism. Yet it is this coyness about evangelising that has created the situation that we actually find ourselves with – a predominantly elderly, female, middle-class white church.
For the future.
It is good that the Racial Justice Directorate will be located in the centre not the periphery of the Church of England’s policy making; and it is good that over the last decade we have become much more on the front foot as regards strengthening local church life and evangeling. Hopefully the directorate will give attention to both the ethical and political issues of racial justice and the inseparable need to address minority ethnic alienation through helping facilitate pastoral and evangelistic effectiveness.
In an article concerning CMEAC that I wrote in the Church Times ten years ago I suggested there was a need for the following ‘competence enhancing initiatives’:
motivating young people of all backgrounds to be trained for multi-cultural ministry;
mounting substantial courses to help ordinands and clergy develop the necessary competence;
developing channels to share good practice;
facilitating access to minority-language liturgical, pastoral and evangelistic resources;
providing a linking service for people seeking and places needing multi-cultural ministries.
These are still needs to be met. Only if such fairly straightforward matters are attended to will alienation from the Church of England be sufficiently overcome for us to address with conviction racial injustice first within the church, and then our communities and national society. CMEAC may not have felt called to pick these matters up, but if no-one else does then the recent dismal narrative is unlikely to change.
John Root is a retired clergyman, helping at St Ann's Tottenham. He was for thirty years vicar of a church in Wembley, which started two Asian language congregations. Before that he was vice principal of Ridley Hall, Cambridge after curacies in Harlesden and Hackney. He has taught church history, and also lectured part-time in early colonial history. His wife is from a Malaysian/South Indian background, and they have one son. He enjoys music with one foot in the American South, and following Liverpool. He blogs on issues of church and race at 'Out of Many, One People'; accessed at https://johnroot.substack.com/