But what can I do? A beginner’s tool kit 1: knowing

[I’ve been wanting to write this all week, but our marking deadline was today…] Plenty of White British folk like me have this week been asking—but what can I do? It was a question I first asked myself seriously after watching the events in Charlestown, VA, in 2017. This post is a beginner’s tool kit, written by a beginner of almost three years’ experience, for beginners with even less, in the hope that it helps someone. This post is about knowing—knowing how to begin to understand white supremacy. I plan to add a couple more on ‘doing’ and ‘giving’ soon. This is specifically for people in the UK churches, and began from wanting to take seriously several conversations with Black British church leaders who expressed some concern/dissatisfaction with/over an assumption that the narrative of Black life in the UK could be simply assimilated to the US narrative. I was looking for a theorised account of oppression similar to the ones I knew about gender and sexuality, but wanted to honour the concerns of my Black British sisters and brothers, and so find an indigenous British version. I certainly don’t pretend to be an expert, but this is what I have found to be most helpful in the past three years of looking: 1. Know about The first task is to understand the reality: the history, cultural realities, and the facts of racial oppression, in UK culture and in the UK church: 1.1 History: David Olusoga, Black and British: A forgotten history (2016) is the best place I have found to start; it was based on a TV series, which I haven’t seen, but which I assume is equally excellent. I don’t know a good book covering all the history of Black Christianity in the UK, but Israel Olufinjana’s various studies of reverse mission offer interesting and varied snapshots. 1.2 Cultural Studies: Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (2018) is the single best text I know here. this is just a must-read; in brief and simple chapters, she explains whiteness, and how it affects so much else. Looking backwards in history, the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies is seminal here. Almost anything by Stuart Hall is worth reading, but if you only pick one text, Paul Gilroy’s There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The cultural politics of race and nation (1987) is the one to go for. Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy collaborated on a photo-journalistic essay, Black Britain: A Photographic History (2011), which is powerful and profound. 1.3 Church life: Ben Lindsay, We Need to Talk About Race: Understanding the Black experience in white majority churches (2019) is a brilliant and accessible introduction 1.4 Theology: I suggest you start with Anthony Reddie—he’s written loads, and there aren’t any bad ways in that I’ve discovered, but perhaps Faith, Stories, and the Experience of Black Elders (2001) is the place to start, maybe followed up by the collection he edited with Jagessar in 2007, Black Theology in Britain: A reader. These aren’t better than the rest, but they are broader, and so invite you into an overview which his many other writings fill out the details of. Robert Beckford is probably the next step–half a generation back in time. God of the Rahtid: Redeeming Rage (2001) is probably the way in. 2. Know: If the texts above are about informing the intellect, what follows is about addressing the heart. Art is key. Art speaks personal truth in personal ways. I list here material that I have found helpful in offering some sort of a window into what it actually feels like to be Black and British. (If a Black British person invites you to hear their story, that is a precious gift, and should be honoured as such, and will be better than most of this; but you cannot demand of your Black friends and colleagues that they open their hearts and wounds to you, and so art is important.) 2.1 Poetry: We are living in a golden age of British poetry, and immigrant and cross-cultural poets are probably leading the way. For those of us in Scotland, our national Makar, Jackie Kay, is the key voice, reflecting on experiences of immigration and adoption; Vahni Capildeo explores the identity of the immigrant profoundly and beautifully; Imtiaz Dharker brings the perspective of a subcontinental and Scottish heritage–one of her book blurbs describes her upbringing as ‘Muslim Calvinist’; Derek Walcott is of course one of the great Anglophone writers of the C20th, and his exploration of Caribbean life under the shadow of the memory of the British...

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Prosopal presence: our current conundrum

When we meet online, are we meeting ‘face to face’? My colleague Elizabeth Shively gave us an excellent sermon this morning in our series on 1Thess.; I won’t repeat what she said (its on our church FB page, and well worth the watch), but before she began my attention was caught by a word in the reading. Throughout the letter Paul expresses his regrets that he is absent from the Thessalonian believers, his longing to see them, and his eagerness for news of them. In 3:10 he prays ‘Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you face to face’ (NRSV) ‘May see you face to face’ translates τὸ ἰδεῖν ὑμῶν τὸ πρόσωπον; it was the word πρόσωπον that caught my eye (I was following the reading in the original, as I usually do); it’s a word I’ve thought about a lot. Paul made a similar point , using the same word, twice, in 2:17: ἀπορφανισθέντες ἀφ᾿ ὑμῶν … προσώπῳ οὐ καρδίᾳ, περισσοτέρως ἐσπουδάσαμεν τὸ πρόσωπον ὑμῶν ἰδεῖν… (‘…separated from you—in person, not in heart—we longed … to see you face to face.’ NRSV) Here, there is a contrast between being with them ‘in person’ (πρόσωπον) and ‘in heart’ (καρδίᾳ), reminiscent of 1Cor. 5:3 ἀπὼν τῷ σώματι, παρὼν δὲ τῷ πνεύματι (‘absent in body [σώμα], present in spirit [πνεύμα]’), as well as the same expression of desire to see facially [τὸ πρόσωπον]. How does Paul’s urgent longing to be re-united with the Thessalonian sisters and brothers relate to our enforced absence from each other today? The Corinthian text is easy: we are apart bodily without question, and together in spirit, without question. The Thessalonian ones are more difficult. πρόσωπον is more difficult, as already the translations from the NRSV above indicate: does it mean ‘face’ or ‘person’? Well, yes; the semantic range stretches at least that wide—see the historical note at the end of this post. But in this linguistic imprecision our current experience of church fellowship sits: many of us, at least, are seeing the faces of our sisters and brothers through video conferencing; we are talking, interacting, so there is some real togetherness, some experience of coming together for worship and fellowship. We are not bodily present, however, and so we are not fully personally present to each other. We are living in a grey area in the middle of the semantic range of the word πρόσωπον. Paul longed to be with the Thessalonians prosopally; did that mean just seeing their faces, or bodily presence, or what? Of course, these are not distinctions he could have made; lacking videoconferencing solutions, bodily presence was necessary to seeing faces. Almost everything he talks about longing for in the letter is achievable in online meeting: he wants to pastor them, to observe and interrogate their growth in faith, to be able to correct error, to offer exhortation and encouragement. All of this is possible online. In the end, however, is the instruction to ‘greet all the brothers and sisters with a holy kiss’ (5:26); there comes a point where bodies matter. If Paul could have met with the Thessalonians over Teams or Zoom, he would have jumped at the chance, I am sure; he could have heard of the answers to his constant prayers, and offered the encouragement and advice he longed to give—but he would still have wanted to kiss them. I don’t think many of us need to be told that our online gatherings are sub-optimal; kissing may not be quite our culture, but hugging might be, and singing without question is; we want to be together bodily. But Paul in Thessalonians certainly reminds us that what we have is not nothing; we can meet face to face, after a fashion, we can hear of each other’s faith, and offer encouragement and counsel. We are not simply apart, though we are scattered. If we are to be church well through this time, I suspect it will be in part by reflecting seriously on the limits, but also the possibilities of this grey prosopal space we are now meeting in; perhaps thinking about Greek semantic fields can help us with that? Historical note: [This is all from memory, as I am separated from my library…] πρόσωπον is a very difficult word to translate, and visibly changes meaning over time. In earliest extant usage (Homer), it referred fairly simply to the face; from there, it came to be the term for the mask an actor in a Greek drama would wear, from which sense another meaning of ‘character’ (in a play), and so ‘actor in a narrative’; from this the sense of...

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On not having closed our churches

Language matters. It matters more in how it is heard than in how it is meant. If we want to communicate certain things, then disciplined use of language can help us, because it will improve the chances of what we want to say being heard, rather than being misunderstood. There was a time when we British Baptists would not have thought of calling the building we met in for worship a ‘church’. We knew that the church was the congregation, gathered together by God, covenanted to each other before God. If the church habitually met in a particular building, we called that a ‘chapel’. ‘Church,’ we once understood, meant people, saved by grace, making expansive vows to each other because God has called us together. ‘Chapel,’ we used to know, meant a building, where the church can conveniently congregate. [This is for us Baptists—and of course for others, although I do not presume to identify those traditions that would be happy to be defined by this point—other faithful followers of our King Jesus will disagree, and so will define things differently.] This old, almost lost, tradition, seems important just now. Our chapels are closed, but our churches are alive and active, and doing wonderful Kingdom work, spreading the gospel and doing justice. Perhaps this present strange season will teach us that there was value in the old language: we should not identify ‘chapel’ and ‘church’ because the former is incidental to us, the latter the definitive core of who we are. Our chapels are closed—and, on Sundays in particular, that is a great sadness to us, because we long to gather together for worship. Our chapels are closed, but our churches are open and active. Announcing the gospel, however they can; serving the needy; comforting those who mourn; praying for the needs of the fellowship, the community, and the world; living out the call of the Kingdom. For us Baptists, our chapels are closed, but our churches are open and alive and active; the one is an inconvenience; the other a vital gospel...

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On ‘Kitchen Table Eucharists’: a plea to my Anglican friends

It is, to my regret, nearly ten years since I last joined in worship with the small fellowship at Hawkshead Hill Baptist Church in Cumbria. My memories of the fellowship are warm; my memories of the building in which they meet, and of the garden behind it, are vivid. The building is an ancient cottage, registered for worship in 1709. There is no historical record of what changes were made as it was registered for worship, but very probably the kitchen table was the only table, and so became the place where the Eucharist was celebrated for those people. The Baptists had begun in Hawkshead in 1678, at a time when the Church of England was aggressively devoted to persecuting anyone who would not worship according to its formularies (even though then, as now, it could not agree on what its formularies actually meant). I know the Baptist stories; others will tell the Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Quaker, Catholic tales—and the stories that do not fit into any of these denominations. In my tradition, John Bunyan was famously imprisoned for his Baptist faith; Elizabeth Gaunt was burnt at the stake in public for hers, denied the customary ‘kindness’ of a quick death by strangulation before the spectacle. I could add scores of other names from my own memory, people who I have read and studied, whose faith and courage I have learnt from, whose piety has formed my own; people who are my mothers and fathers in the faith. I could add tens of thousands of names if I had reference to books. The persecution was savage and widespread. It was also systematically prosecuted and vocally encouraged by Anglican clergy and bishops. Although a measure of toleration came with the Glorious Revolution in 1689, the Clarendon Code (which, inter alia, forbade meetings for prayer of more than five people unless they were reciting forms from the 1662 BCP) was not fully repealed until well into the nineteenth century. When William Dennyson of Hawkshead registered his cottage as a meeting place in 1709, it seems clear that memories of persecution were still fresh. The building carefully appeared, from the street, to be still a cottage, and did so until 1876, when the present ecclesial-looking windows were installed. In the garden a baptistry was created by a clever damming of a stream, and then shrubs were grown to conceal its site, and the path that led to it. When we were last there—and today, I assume—you could walk the garden completely unaware of the baptismal pool, until someone showed you the carefully-pruned branches that needed to be pushed aside to open the path down. Hidden sacramental spaces are a common theme of Christian persecution; normal domestic paraphernalia are repurposed to allow worship to happen. For one example, a kitchen table often becomes the site of eucharistic celebration. The phrase ’kitchen table Eucharists’ seems to have become, in the last few weeks, the chosen sneer of a number of Anglicans angry at their Bishops’ guidance, revised yesterday, on clergy not entering their churches. I have no view at all on that guidance; I know that my understanding of ‘church’, and ‘sacred space’ is simply different from my Anglican sisters and brothers. I am concerned, as others have been, about the denigration of domestic space implied by this sneer, and by the gendered implications of that. I am at least as much concerned by the implied criticism of the faith and practice of our persecuted sisters and brothers around the world right now, who find the kitchen table the only eucharistic site available to them. Most seriously, however, I remember William Dennyson, John Bunyan, Elizabeth Gaunt, scores of others I could name, tens of thousands whose names I could discover—and at least as many again who are nameless. For nearly three decades they celebrated the Eucharist on kitchen tables, in Hawkshead and across England, because Anglican bishops and Anglican priests were active and aggressive in having them thrown into jail, or even burnt alive at the stake, if they did it anywhere public. For over three centuries they, and their co-religionists, were prevented from celebrating the Eucharist as they might have wished by oppressive laws, pressed by the Anglican establishment. I am not an Anglican and I do not live in England; the policies of the Church of England are no business of mine. But for office-holders in that denomination to denigrate ‘kitchen table Eucharists’ is for them to trample once again on the faith and lives of people who, through reading, I have grown to know and love, people who, at their predecessors’ hands, were extensively persecuted, people of...

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Can we celebrate an online Eucharist? A Baptist response 2: Some possible objections

I argued in the previous post that an online Eucharist could be a theological possibility for Baptist Christians. I here want to consider and forestall some potential criticisms: The need for ‘physical’ presence Do we need to be physically together to meet around the Lord’s Table? Yes, but let me interrogate what that means. Too much recent writing in this area has worked with a ‘physical’/’virtual’ dichotomy, which makes no sense. Signals in fibre optic cables and electromagnetic waves are physical realities; our shared presence together in an online—virtual—meeting is therefore a mediated physical presence. What it is not is a somatic presence; we are not together bodily. This distinction is important. There may be eucharistic practices that require somatic action; I don’t off-hand know of one, but an insistence that the celebrant must touch every eucharistic wafer for it to be properly consecrated is not very hard to imagine; a rubric that insists that every communicant must make bodily contact with every other communicant as the peace is shared is less plausible, but certainly not beyond conception. But these have not been our practices. We have been unreflectively comfortable with non-somatic physical presence, and so should be comfortable with virtual presence, because it is still physical. Mediation This granted, could we imagine a different distinction, between mediated presence and unmediated presence? Possibly, but: (a) it will not make much difference; (b) it is probably again nonsense; and (c) in any case would be a very odd thing indeed to imagine in the context of the Eucharist. On (a), we have again been demonstrably very relaxed about mediated presence—I do not recall the last time that I preached without a microphone, and for those relying on the induction loop and their hearing aid, any engagement with my sermon was necessarily mediated by technology. I have communicated at, and indeed celebrated, eucharists where some or many of those present could see the celebrant only because of projection onto a screen. Further, mediated relationships at a distance have been normal for the whole history of the church. Consider, for representative example, the medium of the letter. Mark Noll, amongst others, has argued that the Evangelical Revival was shaped, if not totally sustained, by the existence of good trade routes for sharing epistolary testimonies across the North Atlantic; in the fourteenth century, Catherine of Siena had a profound influence on the reform of the medieval church, and on Italian politics, through her letter-writing; and in the first century the letters of Paul, Peter, and John are generally judged to have successfully harnessed the medium for gospel purposes… Unmediated relationship has never been the only practice of the church, and so discussions about the adoption of new media must be comparative judgements—is this new medium better or worse than media we have previously adopted, and in what ways?—rather than complaints that mediated relationship is somehow antithetical to the gospel On (b) we need once again to think about physicality: when I recite the words of institution in a normal Eucharist I create sound waves which reach the ears of the congregation; physical mediation is a condition of all human interaction. If there is something inappropriate about mediation that involves wifi, we will need to give a theological explanation of why sound waves are an acceptable mediation when electromagnetic waves are not; I assert with some confidence that no such explanation is available. On (c): a sacrament is, following Augustine, ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’—sacraments are physical mediations of divine action. It is possible that, precisely at the point where God is mediating His own gifts through physical media, He bans us from using (certain sorts of) physical media, but it is hardly plausible, without a very compelling argument. The shared meal Some have argued that online communion is impossible because the basic reality of communion is a shared meal. There is an easy argument against this, turning on the very visible divergence of most eucharistic celebrations from anything resembling a meal, but I would rather go a different way. Many of us in the past few weeks have become used to taking social occasions into virtual space. I have encouraged my staff to continue their various coffee hours using video conferencing, and I know that other groups in my university have continued regular pub nights in a similar way. If we sit and chat together whilst each drinking a coffee, or indeed a pint, how is what is happening not a shared communal drink? (Consider that, for the pub night, everyone present could easily have ordered something poured out of a different bottle.)...

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Can we celebrate an online Eucharist? A Baptist response 1: A positive argument

For us Baptists, I think that there are two possible ways of asserting that an online/scattered Eucharist is possible: one is obvious but bad, and one less obvious but better; both are completely dependent on distinctives of Baptist ecclesiology.

The first is the suggestion that we can have many household communions at the same time; the second the idea that we might celebrate one communion, even if we are in separate homes as we do.

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Two great Christian resources for International Women’s Day 2018

I spent a good chunk of Thursday (International Women’s Day 2018) at the launch of two excellent resources. One is the Sophia Network Minding The Gap research. This is a survey of 1200+ women in the UK church, asking them about their experiences. There was much hope in the stories uncovered, and much darkness too. My friends at Sophia were kind enough to ask me to respond to the research at the launch (my first time speaking at an event in the House of Lords…); what I said will appear on their blog soon, and I don’t want to pre-empt it here, but I do want to honour them for doing the work so well, and for their ten years now of advocating for gender justice in the UK church. The second is the Project 3:28 Database. This is, simply, a database of female Christian speakers in the UK, created in the hope that it will become big and comprehensive enough that the endlessly tedious, and always weasel, suggestion that ‘we couldn’t find a woman’ to speak at this or that conference will be rendered obsolete. I’m honoured to be able to name the people–Natalie Collins; Hannah Mudge; David Bunce; Vicky Walker–who made this happen as friends, but I also feel a tiny slice of ownership. Natalie collated the stats on Christian conference speakers in the UK in 2o13; on the back of this, a group of us got together about four years ago and asked what we could do to change things. It was one of those tables that it was an utter privilege to have a seat at: I looked around at Natalie, Hannah, Paula Gooder, Elaine Storkey, Wendy Beech-Ward, and Krish Kandiah, and wondered what I had ever done to merit being in that company. We committed to continue to publish the stats year on year, which we have (Natalie has done most of the work), with visible results. Some conferences embraced the implied challenge: Spring Harvest, for example, committed to producing their own data, and to working towards improvement. Others didn’t–I remember the day we received a formal letter from one organisation’s lawyers, the sinking feeling of what that might mean, and then the elation of realising that they were actually scared of our little collective, because we were speaking the truth in public. We dreamt at that first meeting in 2014 of some resource profiling and championing female speakers at conferences; we continued to dream and pray. We were committed to doing it well, or not at all. An astonishingly generous anonymous gift of nearly £5000 pushed us to try to make our dreams a reality; we raised a good chunk more, and Natalie, Hannah, Vicky, and David created the website we now have. We are grateful for the donor who gave thousands, and for the many donors who gave £10. The website is both beautiful and wonderfully functional, and I am hugely impressed with the way my friends have brought it to reality. I have just checked and, three days after launch, there are over 120 gifted female speakers registered. Some–Amy Orr-Ewing; Paula Gooder–are as well known as almost anyone in the UK church; others are much less famous, but are women who have something to say. I hope and pray that it will grow ten-fold or more, that there will be a mighty army of gifted women offering themselves to the UK churches to preach the gospel and to teach the faith. I hope and pray too that event organisers–from the biggest national conference to the most modest local church away day–will use it to expand their imagination of who could come and speak. It’s not perfect. I look at it already and think and pray about questions of intersectionality, about how we prevent this thing, if we can, from being another way of silencing other oppressed groups. We want all women, not just white women, not just able-bodied women, not just straight women… We will have failed if somehow our structures exclude some class of women. East of Eden and longing for the End, however, perfection isn’t available to us. All we have are our best attempts to make things a little better, and the promise that, in the redemption won by Christ and in the transformation brought by the Spirit, our best attempts might be graciously taken up by God and made into something truly significant. Could this be one such? I don’t know. I do know that at the small launch event we were joined by Veronica Zundel. I’d not met Veronica before; I discovered that she had worked back in the day with John Stott, no less, on the...

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