Coat of Many Colours

‘Before me was a great multitude ... from every nation, tribe, people and language.’ (Revelation 7.9)

Sunday 9 February is Racial Justice Sunday, an ecumenical observance that began in 1995 following the murder of Stephen Lawrence. It is a day that calls for all Christians to be involved in the struggle for racial justice because racial justice is everyone’s business. I did wonder whether I was the right person to write this blog as a white man, but so often it is people of Global Majority heritage who are expected to carry the burden of arguing for racial justice when it is indeed everyone’s business whatever our own heritage.

The penny dropped for me when an African Caribbean friend shared with me a copy of an address he had given in the 1980s. I had recently finished Azariah France-Williams' book ‘Ghost Ship’ about racism in the Church of England. The stories in the book were much the same as the stories my friend was telling forty years earlier. Nothing appeared to have changed. No wonder he was left feeling jaded and weary.

Living and working in communities where I have been in a visible minority for much of the past 25 years, I have become more conscious of my whiteness. That isn’t in any way to say ‘I know what it’s like’ for others. These things are complex and, as a man and a religious leader, I found that, more often than not, I was automatically given respect and listened to. In that sense, my experience did make me more aware of what Peggy McIntosh would call my ‘invisible knapsack’, containing the maps and passports, codebooks and instruction manuals, that have enabled me to navigate a world that is designed by and for people like me. My whiteness is part of who I am, it isn’t something I can or want to change, but it is something I want to be more conscious of, especially in terms of how it might impact my interactions with others who may or may not share that racial identity.

My research into living with religious difference has been unavoidably intertwined with questions about living with racial difference. It has opened my eyes to some of the lived experience of those who were shunned by white congregations when they arrived in the UK from the Caribbean or from India and, as Christians, simply wanted to attend a local church. It has given me a desire to speak less and listen more, especially to people who do not share my layers of privilege. I want to listen to their stories and, where I do have any influence, encourage others to listen too.

God’s kingdom is like a ‘coat of many colours’. The Bible tells the story of a God whose intention was to create ‘a world full of riotous difference’, as theologian Letty Russell has described it. Pretending we are colourblind or ‘all the same’ only favours the dominant group in practice, and it undermines the vibrant diversity of the world as God intended it to be. Our ‘riotous difference’ is God’s gift to us. We can learn so much more because we are different, but when our systems and structures benefit some more than others, it is vital we all wake up to the injustice and together work to create a more racially just and equitable society for our children and grandchildren.

Resources I have found helpful:

Azariah France-Williams, Ghost Ship

Chine McDonald, God is Not a White Man

David Olusoga, Black History for Every Day of the Year 

Anthony Reddie, Is God Colour-Blind? 

Letty Russell, Just Hospitality

Chester Diocese is holding a Racial Justice Sunday service. Details can be found here.

More information and resources from Churches Together in Britain and Ireland can be found here.

A prayer for Racial Justice Sunday

Merciful God,
you are righteous and love justice:
stir the hearts of your people that,
rejoicing in our diversity,
we may repent of the wrongs of the past,
and, by your grace, seek the peaceable kingdom of your Son,
      our Saviour Jesus Christ,
who lives and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.