Whiteness, Patronage and Bourgeois Respectability in the Methodist Church: The Fernley-Hartley Lecture, 2021

Methodism has an enviable record for social and theological radicalism.¹ Methodism’s incorporation of Arminianism, Social Holiness, Connexionalism, and the affirmation of experience as a criterion for assessing revelation in this tradition has done much to develop a radical form of ecclesiology that affirms equity and social justice.²

I have been shaped by this tradition and I wouldn’t be the person I am without this Methodist-inspired model of formation.³ I am a cradle Methodist. I have been loyal to it, even though it has not always been loyal to me.

This presentation seeks to illustrate how this radical tradition has not seen immune from the stain of White supremacy and concomitant forms of White entitlement and exceptionalism.

As a cradle Methodist, I know that there are things about Methodism that are not replicated in other traditions. Our commitment as a movement to social holiness, underpinned by a belief in all-enveloping and transformative nature of grace – prevenient, sanctifying and assuring grace – that human beings can be more than the limitations of our bounded identities and the social locations in which we born and are often constricted,⁴ is one that has seen Methodism at the heart of some of the greatest socio-cultural and political movements in British history. It can be argued that the birth of the British trade union movement owes more to Methodism than it does to Marx, given the witness and example of the Tolpuddle Martyrs.⁵

Our anti-racist credentials can be seen in the fact that we were the first denomination to appoint a Racial Justice Officer and we invented ‘Racial Justice Sunday’.⁶ And yet the uniqueness of the social and theological vision created by John Wesley and his many successors has to be balanced with an all-enveloping world of Whiteness in which White exceptionalism and White normality is taken for granted. Methodism, despite its own particular narrative, our tradition nonetheless, has been a part of Christendom. When John Wesley inadvertently created this movement of the people called Methodists, let us be blunt and honest about this, he never had someone like me, a Black man born of Caribbean migrants in mind. When the modern conception of Methodist came into being at Union in 1932, once again, people like me were not in evidence; we were not at the table when the plans were hatched for a new united Church, bringing the various strands of Wesley’s inheritance together. Once again, it was White people making and executing the plans. We take for granted the White nature of such forces of history, to such an extent, that we rarely give them any thought. And yet, as I will show, that history and legacy have specific and particular implications as we consider how to be a more justice-orientated, inclusive and diverse body, more so than the Legal 100 of White men who once ran the Wesleyan Methodist Church. We may have moved beyond such constrictions of patriarchy, but I would still contend that a magisterium of White people, duly elected and appointed to prominent posts, still run Methodism under the aegis of a neo-colonial ethic of Whiteness, as surely in 2021 as if it were still 1821, let alone 1921.

Christendom represents the larger context in which Christianity emerged at the dawn of modernity and the expansion of the world beyond the narrow parameters of Europe.⁷ The development of European empires across the New World, in which the Christian Church participates, represents the conflation of political and ecclesial power. Whilst Methodism is never a great player in this, and indeed, John Wesley is to be commended for never being an English nationalist, undoubtedly, our tradition, nonetheless, benefits from and is a part of this larger religio-political world of White power.⁸ Christendom has given the Church historic epistemological power.

For three-quarters of her life, the Church was the primary institution that helped to define truth and the rationale for what it meant to be human. This allied to the belief in the ‘Divine Right of Kings’ creates a synergy between the Church and political power that reinforces the epistemological weight of ecclesial authority.⁹

Willie James Jennings’ long-awaited sequel to his highly influential The Christian Imagination seeks to explore the ways in which Whiteness has become the template on which notions of truth, belonging, acceptability, mastery, control and what is seen as normative are based. Theological education and broader Western Education has been dominated by ‘Whiteness’.¹⁰

In his latest text After Whiteness, Jennings critiques the phenomenon of Whiteness, arguing how the conflation of European mastery; White male, colonial power; and the internalisation of notions of White superiority becomes the means by which knowledge and truth is developed. Whiteness is not about the epidermis of those who are racialised as White.¹¹ Rather, it is the whole edifice of reality and how we even discern what is normality and how particular ideas and practices emerge and under whose gaze and imprint notions of truth are discerned and developed.

Whiteness has rarely been acknowledged in any intellectual discourse. It has always been the proverbial elephant in the room. Jennings illustrates how Whiteness became conjoined with patriarchy and colonialism to unleash an ethic of mastery, self-sufficiency and control as the defining elements for what constitutes notions of development and progress.

Jennings’ work, which is aimed primarily at theological education,¹² distils the means by which the production of knowledge and pedagogical insights on the craft of ministry have been informed by coloniality and Whiteness. Jennings is clear that this analysis is not about White people per se. Rather, it is the intellectual underpinning of a set of theo-cultural constructs, systems and practices that govern how theology and education operate, which inform our ways of being and its resultant praxis.¹³

In moving into an understanding of Whiteness as not simply about the epidermis of those ‘racialised as White’, Jennings is illustrating how this is better understood as the wider conceptual and practised template that defines truth, acceptability and belonging. The best way I would describe this rethinking is by use of a long-held analogy. Historically, liberation theologians saw White supremacy as analogous to ravenous sharks that patrolled the ocean seas preying on weaker, smaller fish.¹⁴ The problem with this analogy was that most ordinary White people are not metaphorical sharks. Most do not burn effigies of burning crosses into lawns or are violent towards non-White people, either physically or verbally. Yes, White supremacy does exist and has a long litany of actions that have manifested themselves in the body politic of many nations across the world, but this largely is not the province or the ethical stance of most ordinary White people.

Scholars like Jennings et al. are now arguing that Whiteness is not the shark but the very sea itself. That is, the whole world in which we live has been shaped by Whiteness and the ethic of control and mastery, which grows out of European expansion and colonialism.¹⁵ The world in which John Wesley was formed and through which Methodism came into being was one that was shaped by the all-enveloping ethic of Whiteness. Wesley, to be sure, was a more enlightened exemplar of the nature of Whiteness in his eighteenth epoch than many of his contemporaries, but he, nonetheless, was immersed in a thought world that always assumed the superiority of Whiteness over other forms of epistemology, in which hierarchy and power often go hand in hand.¹⁶ If most White people are not metaphorical sharks, they are, nonetheless, the beings that are most advantaged by an all-enveloping world of Whiteness. And whilst not all Whites will experience a marked sense of immediate cultural, political or social benefit from being White, not one White person is systematically, systemically and procedurally disadvantaged as being designated as such. To cite a close Black friend, ‘We wake up as Black people faced with innumerable challenges from being born in this skin. White people wake up also with innumerable challenges but being White isn’t one of them’.

Social science scholars have often spoken of a ‘hierarchy of credibility’. This refers to a ranking of intellectual power in which people’s accounts of truth are attested to according to their place in social and ecclesial hierarchies.¹⁷ So, bishops are more ‘reliable conveyors of truth’ than priests, who in turn are more reliable than laypeople. Educated laypeople are more reliable than uneducated ones.¹⁸ My essential dictum on defining ‘power’ has always been ‘who can get something done if they think it should happen?’ This is often linked to their place in the hierarchy. Formal learning, qualifications, authorised training, social networks, patronage and metaphysical ordination and separation all contribute to developing hierarchies of credibility, in which some people are recognised as being reliable conveyors of truth and others deemed less so.

The hierarchy of credibility dominates most social institutions and is based on the conflation of intellectual mastery and knowledge acquisition, which then leads to issues of power. The critical question that I want to pose is how the Church deals with a hierarchy of credibility when we assert that in the economy of God’s Kingdom, ‘the first shall be last and the last shall be first’.¹⁹ In all truth, in contemporary Methodism, one might well argue that the first shall be first and the last will be patronised and told how important they are, whilst we simultaneously ignore everything they have to say.

I have lost count of the number of times I have sat in Methodist meetings, both as a lay disciple and more latterly as a member of the Connexional team, and heard people at the front representing White authority speak about Methodism being ‘non-hierarchical’.²⁰ And yet the existence of the ‘hierarchy of credibility’ speaks to an enduring rank of power that is connected to human subjectivity that is often mapped onto social location and social status, which in turn is often shaped by a surreptitious form of Whiteness. In effect, Whiteness provides the unseeing platform on which notions of normality and all that we assume to be axiomatic are based. It is why, anecdotally, I remember that a former Connexional Equalities, Diversity and Inclusion Officer asserted that it was only in the roles where there existed an external form of objective criteria that could not be skewed (Finance, ICT (Information and computer technology), and Human Resources) that there was any substantive semblance of ethnic diversity in the Connexional team of the Methodist Church. In areas where the Church itself could create its own internal subjective criteria for knowledge and expertise, White people invariably get the jobs. At the time of writing, the Connexional Evangelism and Growth team, for example, consists only of White people!

I worked for three and a half years in the Connexional team, serving in the Learning Network and in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, I was the only (and I have put the following words into capitals for emphasis), BLACK BRITISH-BORN PERSON WHO WAS RAISED IN THE METHODIST CHURCH OF GREAT BRITAIN SERVING IN THE CONNEXIONAL TEAM. What seemed commonplace for White people was you are born and baptised into British Methodism, you go to Sunday school, Youth Fellowship, then possibly university, maybe the Methodist Society at university, then possibly lay ministry in one’s local Church, serving in lay discipleship roles. Then, for many White people, service in Connexional ministry, for some, work in the Connexional team. For some, candidating and serving further, as a presbyter or a deacon – but not if you’re Black and even more so if you are British born. At one point in the Learning Network when I worked as a Ministry Development Officer, there were more White South Africans who had migrated from Southern Africa to Britain serving in the Connexional team, and the Learning Network in particular, than Black British-born people like me. As I once opined to a friend,²¹ ‘It seems easier to get a job in the Connexional team if you are a White person from Bloemfontein, than if you are a Black person from Bradford.’

The issue for me was not simply that this was demonstrably the case; it was the fact that when it was brought to the attention of the so-called ‘White powers that be’, no one cared enough to do anything about it. Imagine if lay White working-class people born in Britain had no expectation of ever serving in paid Connexional posts? Imagine the scandal that would entail? Yet, repeated attempts to have this issue addressed by the Methodist Church floundered on a well-worn diet of White complacency and polite refusals to do anything substantive. In the time I spent in the Learning Network, it was not uncommon to find myself as the only Black person in the room.²² And yet despite this demonstrative fact, no one ever noticed that all the people in the room were White. So, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, there was as little in the way of ethnic and cultural diversity than one might have expected to see in January 1965, the year in which I was baptised in Prospect Hall Methodist Church, in East Bowling, Bradford, West Yorkshire.

Willie James Jennings’ latest work explores both the historical formulations of the phenomenon of Whiteness as the construction of Western knowledge claims to truth, as well as its framing in terms of what constitutes ministerial practice. Working from an interdisciplinary perspective as a practical theologian, I am reminded of an earlier, more tentative exploration into the development of Christian teaching, learning and pedagogy that arose from my initial doctoral studies back in the late 1990s.²³ In that work I was concerned with questions of Christian formation and what constitutes the norms of learning and discipleship as they are constituted, socially, culturally and theologically. British theological life is underpinned by a culture of patronage, in which there exists a ‘Theology of Good Intentions’²⁴ that identifies and supports the people who cohere to a socio-cultural set of established norms.²⁵

These norms are predicated on ‘Whiteness’, maleness, middle-class Oxbridge education and bourgeois socio-cultural norms. This ethic of patronage is one in which White subjects were schooled and encouraged and is often juxtaposed with Black marginality, where our presence often is more by accident than design.²⁶

Central to this historical development is one of a creaturely, client-based ethic. So, knowledge and truth is hierarchical and is conferred by means of authority figures – all ecclesial bodies have some form of ‘magisterium’; in our case, it is the annual Conference. We have historically argued that the Connexion is not a synonym for hierarchy because the Connexion means all of us; Connexionalism speaks to our interconnectedness through local churches, circuits, districts and Connexional bodies. And yet, how often is Connexion now a means by which we speak about hierarchy, especially, those officers based in Methodist Church House, 25 Marylebone Road?

Just as God – the ‘Creator’ – reveals truth by means of authority figures hierarchically to those who are deemed ontologically superior ‘Creatures’ – so knowledge and acceptability is conferred on others, that is, lesser Creatures – who are deemed trustworthy to be repositories of and custodians of this truth.²⁷ Hence, forms of validation of authority is by means of selection, discernment and training.²⁸ The fact that Methodism does not officially believe in an ontological difference between differing sets of people within a hierarchical structure does not mean that we still do not practice it in actuality.²⁹ We have declared racism a sin in our Conference reports³⁰ and stood solemnly in silence in our annual Conference to bear witness to our desire to be implacably opposed to racism, and yet our Connexional officers and senior positions are so steeped in Whiteness, I wonder if a deliberate policy of apartheid couldn’t have the effect of a more complete and cynical whitewashing than what is presently the case in contemporary Connexional British Methodism, under a seemingly more benign regime of equalities, diversity and inclusion.³¹

Discernment and training for ordained ministry is often overlaid by metaphysics – what some scholars called ‘pneumatological pedagogy’,³² where the Spirit guides human activity and knowing in order to reveal the truth of God’s desires. The operative question is, how do we assess what the Spirit is revealing when collective forms of discernment are enacted on candidates for authorised forms of ministry? This takes us back to the ‘hierarchy of credibility’ once again and top-down forms of intellectual power. Who gets to decide what is dictated by very human power, which we believe is verified by God. That is, the fact that all forms of revelatory knowledge are undertaken in time and space by human beings means that interpretive processes are of immense importance, as much so as the ideas and notions of truth we believe are being revealed in the first instance.³³ Because the ethic by which ministerial candidating, followed by theological education and ministerial training, is shaped by the wider intellectual and cultural frameworks of patronage, via a hierarchy of credibility, those wishing to be inducted into the existing norms (i.e. join the club) must convince others of their fitness to do so.³⁴

After Whiteness demonstrates how the coloniality of Whiteness finds expression in the outworking of patronage in which patriarchy and hierarchical forms of epistemology are coupled with concomitant notions of mastery and self-sufficiency in order to dictate who is accepted and is acceptable and who is not.³⁵ Applying Jennings to the bourgeois processes of discernment and the selection of ministerial candidates in the British system of theological education is to reminds ourselves of the respectability politics that drenches the whole enterprise within a preferential option for middle-class White people as the norm.³⁶ In this regard, our processes are the antithesis of the radicalism espoused in the iconic work of the late great Marcella Althaus-Reid and the liberative praxis of ‘Indecent Theology’.³⁷

British theological education, operating largely under the aegis of the patronage of the Church of England, as it is constituted within the framework of ‘Common Awards’, is, in many respects’, the antithesis of Althaus-Reid’s notion of the ‘indecent’. It is an exercise in the neo-colonial rubrics of bourgeois acceptability politics. Common Awards arose out of the concerns of the House of Bishops and Ministry Division of the Church of England to provide a centralised curriculum for theological education and ministerial training. It was agreed that the academic oversight of the curriculum would be held at Durham University.³⁸ Common Awards is the normative framework for Anglican ministerial training and many of her ecumenical partners who work with the Church of England in theological partnerships, including the Queen’s Foundation, where the bulk of Methodist ministerial training takes place.

Whilst we have a criterion that is often predicated on the tripartite norms of ‘Being’, ‘Knowing’ and ‘Doing’, with historical, spiritual, and theological markers for determining what these are, the emphasis is often on replication of existing norms by means of continuity and conformity. It is why the Church has struggled to embrace changes in the demographics of those wanting to ‘join the club’, whether such ministerial students or those in the process of theological formation are Black or Asian, LGBTQI, working class, or women. Given the aforementioned, it is no surprise that Black and other minority ethnic peoples and those defined as transgressive figures are often not chosen. Patronage ensures that ‘problematic’ types are rejected or accepted predicated on the expectation that they will conform.³⁹

In short, is Common Awards the very type of constructed artifice that cannot help but reify the tropes of neo-colonialism and the means by which subliminal Whiteness are often built into the very edifice of the corporate whole? Given the aforementioned, Common Awards has the problem of trying to effect transformative models of teaching and learning within an ethic of colonial, top-down control. Some Christian educators have always argued that theological curricula are more concerned with Christian ‘Instruction’ rather than ‘Education’, given the existing norms to which learners/students are expected to adhere.⁴⁰ How can Common Awards support a decolonised and anti-oppressive curriculum given the wider White historic, ecclesial religio-cultural, intellectual framework to which it is beholden? Whilst France-Williams is writing about the Church of England, there is a sense in which his prophetic book is an indictment on all the major historic Churches in Britain, where seeking to become a minister is about ‘joining the club’; in the case of Methodism and many of her ecumenical partners, it is most decidedly a White club, even when increasing numbers of non-White people are joining it.

The aforementioned has a number of clear problems. 1. No real transparency. 2. Power lies in the hierarchy that has the ability to represent God (the ‘Ultimate’ and the guarantor of truth) and to determine who else gets to be authorised. 3. The desire to replicate existing norms leads to persons being chosen for their ability to approximate and mimic existing norms. 4. Those who are unable to do so are rejected.⁴¹ Given the aforementioned, it is no surprise that BaME (Black and Minority Ethinic) and those defined as transgressive figures are often not chosen. Patronage ensures that ‘problematic’ types are rejected or accepted predicated on the expectation that they will conform.⁴²

The aforementioned is informed by a ‘Theology of Good Intentions’. The significant challenge that faces Methodism is one of seeking to match the rhetoric of an egalitarian and radical theological tradition with the flawed nature of its ecclesial practices.⁴³

In short, what the Church has imbibed is what in a previous piece of work I have termed ‘A Theology of Good Intentions’.⁴⁴ In using this term, I am pointing to the way in which ‘Apologetic Rhetoric’ becomes the means by which we resist any significant attempts to institute systemic justice in the life of the Church.

Namely, when acts of injustice are committed, be they linked to racism, sexism, homophobia, or disability, whether they are intended or otherwise, the kneejerk response is to apologise.⁴⁵

The apology is not in itself a bad thing, but far too often, the apology is meant to serve as a form of magic placebo that will cure all ills, simply by being invoked. That is, one apologises and that is then meant to be the end of the matter. There is invariably no serious analysis as to why the injustice occurred in the first place, let alone any form of sanction that will be invoked if this form of unjust action is repeated. It is as if the apology has magic properties in itself and will salve all wounds and ensure equity and justice for those who are wronged. What exacerbates this situation is when the victim of injustice has the temerity to refuse to accept the ‘salving balm’ of the apology (sometimes the guilty party does not even know for what reason they are apologising save for the fact that by doing so, they believe it will bring matters to a swift and timely conclusion). They then become the ‘villains’ of the piece and are then turned upon for being uncooperative.⁴⁶

Suddenly, they become the ‘bad guys’ for refusing to comply with an iniquitous framework in which they are expected to facilitate a process that leads to their silencing and continued marginalisation. I have in mind a Black student in a Theological Education Institution (TIE) within Common Awards who has faced endemic racism but yet ‘he is the problem’, not a racist system predicated on White entitlement.⁴⁷

I was recently in conversation with my friend the Reverend Jarel Robinson Brown, who was on the receiving end of rejectionist homophobic attitudes of a Black majority Methodist congregation. Reading Jarel’s forthcoming book Black, Bay, British, Christian, Queer⁴⁸ is to read of the ways in which my friend’s Black queer body has been rejected by other Black people, who have bought into and internalised the tropes and ethics of a neo-colonial form of Whiteness in which the strictures around the respectability of heteronormativity were constructed by White Victorian imperialists and not Black people themselves. Witnessing the rejection of my friend’s ministry, due to one facet of his life as if all his eminent gifts and graces were rendered null and void by this specific and particular facet, is to see the painful internalisation of Whiteness within the corporate edifice of Black Christianity writ large, to a sad and disappointing degree, in twenty-first-century Britain.⁴⁹

As I have read Jarel’s brave but never bitter words of regret, as he has re-animated his story of his calling and passion to be one of ‘Mr Wesley’s Preachers’, it is to witness the ways in which internalised racism and the tropes of Whiteness, built on coloniality and notions of acceptability for some and rejection for others, still remains a toxic residue of empire within the body politic of our nation. The was witnessed, quite viscerally, in his electronic lynching earlier this year on social media for an innocuous tweet⁵⁰, and well within British Methodism. In my previous book Theologising Brexit, I spoke of Black gay people as being identified as ‘enemies within’.⁵¹

Jarel’s Black body is not only othered because he was Black, like me, but an added layer of problematics existed when his transgressive sexuality is also included. The respectability politics replete within Whiteness construes that some people are deemed the enemy within. In the case of my friend Jarel and many other Black LGBTQI people, there remains a form of neo-colonial conscription of Black bodies within a stultifying layer of conformist respectability politics engendered by White Mission Christianity, into which both White and Black Christians have been acculturated.⁵²

In using this term, I am speaking of a historical phenomenon in which there existed (and continues to this day) an interpenetrating relationship between European expansionism, notions of White superiority and the material artefact of the apparatus of empire. This form of Christianity became the conduit for the expansionist paradigms of Eurocentric models of Christianity in which ethnocentric notions of Whiteness gave rise to notions of superiority, manifest destiny and entitlement.⁵³ Essentially, Mission Christianity, has provided the parameters within which Black bodies have been policed since the epoch of slavery remained the hermeneutical conduit that defined our respective subjectivities as being aberrant. The conservative Black Christians who othered my friend Jarel Robinson were adhering to the constrictions, placed on Black bodies by Mission Christianity, as the obverse side to the dictates of White entitlement and privilege that exists on the other.⁵⁴

On occasions, there is a type of hierarchy of ‘Blackness’ in Black communities, where some people are judged as belonging in a more complete fashion than others. There are many Black people who have been accused of not ‘really being Black’ or not being ‘Black enough’.⁵⁵ Scholars such as Michael Eric Dyson, Kobena Mercer and, most notably, Victor Anderson have challenged us to see beyond the often straightjacketed interpretations we place on Black cultural expression and lived experience.⁵⁶ Anderson, in particular, has challenged the way in which Black religious cultural critics have wanted to acknowledge only the ‘positive aspects’ of Black life and have often sought to overlook or ignore those elements of which we are not so proud. As Anderson reminds us, we cannot all be saints, heroes and ‘trailblazers’.⁵⁷

The biggest challenge to correcting ‘A Theology of Good Intentions’, however, is the process of moving beyond analysis to new systemic ways of working that seek to rethink the normative basis on which the Church operates. I have termed this ‘Re-defining the Norm’.⁵⁸ Re-defining the Norm refers to a process whereby the Church reflects critically on the embedded values and norms that govern how it undertakes its continued mission and ministry. In short, it comes down to ‘who is advantaged and disadvantaged by the ways in which we undertake our activities?’⁵⁹ Whose body and experiences are affirmed and whose are not? At the heart of ‘Re-defining the Norm’ is the necessity of deconstructing the invisible, often surreptitious power of Whiteness that constitutes the normative way in which the Church operates, often under a beguiling but dangerous aegis of ‘colour-blindness’.

A very quick example is the notion of ‘colour-blind’, ‘contextless’ stationing of presbyters and deacons in the Methodist Church. This is predicated on the fallacy that ‘all bodies are perceived as equally acceptable in all spaces’,⁶⁰ so we match people to contexts and contexts to people with seemingly little regard for the socio-political and cultural norms at play in how various bodies and people are perceived in differing settings. So, in short, this form of activity operates on the basis that ‘everyone can go anywhere’. In theory, that is true, but for many Black and minority ethnic people, we know from bitter experiences that there are particular places and spaces where we feel safe and others where we do no. The notions that ‘people can go anywhere’ is one that is reserved for educated, White heterosexual men. It is a product of an unreflective form of Whiteness that pervades how we conceive of the nature of our Church. The truth is White people can go anywhere and make themselves at home – the British empire and colonialism proves that.

It is no surprise, then, that the norm for many Methodists remains the iconic figure of John Wesley, who was an Oxbridge White man. And let us not forget that across 270 years or so, of having people involved in representative ministry, until the last thirty to forty years, most of our ministers would have fitted this category precisely – namely, educated, White, heterosexual men. Is it any wonder, then, that those who do not fit this particular norm are the ones who often experience difficulties in stationing and in the exercising of their ministry across this ‘colour-blind’ Connexion?⁶¹

One aspect of the unrecognised White template of normality that underpins Methodism can be seen in the assumptions around stationing and itinerancy.

The notion that people can be sent anywhere and indeed should be willing to do so is predicated on an unspoken, tacit Whiteness, which, when added to patriarchy and androcentrism, creates a template that suits single, highly educated, White men. They can go anywhere. That has not been the case for those who were never constructed as being part of the socio-cultural norm in the first instance. Black British-born, working-class people, often socialised and formed religiously and spiritually in safe inner-city contexts where we are numerous, often do not want to be sent to White majority areas – often as a social experiment.

So, having struggled through candidating with White majority committees, underpinned by White intellectual theological assumptions, taught predominately by White scholars, one then has to face the prospect of being sent to the type of places a world away from the contexts that shaped and formed them in the first instance, places and spaces that enabled them to candidate in the first place.

I would argue that this single factor is the key reason the majority of our Black candidates for ministry are often people formed religiously and spirituality in countries in the global South than in the United Kingdom. The comparative paucity of Black, British candidates I think speaks to realities of our internalised sense of needing ‘safe space’ in which to feel secure, which is often a reaction to the seventy years plus of systemic racism we have had to endure since the bulk of elders landed in the years following World War II.⁶²

I have served on numerous committees—at one point ten Connexional committees—and I have lost count the number of times the manifest Whiteness of the meetings has never been noted. I remember once sitting on a Connexional Candidates’ committee when a Black, working-class candidate was asked the question ‘What do you do when the candle goes out?’ Once the student could understand the metaphor—metaphors are culturally dangerous means of assessing truth given how open they are to misunderstanding or indeed deliberate misinformation— but once the student recognised that the metaphor, namely, that the candle represented God’s presence—she responded, ‘I can’t answer that question’. When pressed she asserted, ‘Because the candle never goes out. Black people wouldn’t have survived if it did’. She was turned down on the grounds of ‘theological naivety’. Nothing more to be said about that….

The policy of Supervision became operative in the final eighteen months of my time working for the Learning Network. On the numerous occasions I sat through the training process for Circuit Superintendents, my abiding thought was one of naivety (or arrogance) of a process that assumed that sitting in a mandated space and ‘spilling the beans’ on one’s ministry was one that would work for all people—well, all White people, in all truth. Black religious scholars have written at length about the nature of signifying amongst Black people, where in order to protect ourselves against the vagaries of White hegemony, Black people have created various forms of subterfuge.⁶³ Signifying is where predominantly powerless Black people use speech-actions to disguise their true feelings and intent, in contexts where they realise that ‘speaking the truth’ in the face of White hegemony will have negative consequences for those needing to hide a more authentic self. For a classic example of the antithesis to signifying, one need only think of the incendiary bombast of Donald Trump and his ability to ‘speak his mind’ without consequence. Compare his freedom of thought and action and the comparative caution of his predecessor, the first Black US president, Barack Obama. The assumption that a generic policy will have equal impact on and implications for all bodies and persons is predicated on the ubiquity of Whiteness. When most British Black people have grown up in Britaininstinctively learning to conceal inner thoughts that we consider might be viewed as transgressive, it is a massive intellectual leap to now sit in a room with a predominantly White superintendent being expected to ‘tell it all’, especially, when the cause of one’s sense of unease and marginalisation may be this very self-same, White authority figure. Only an ethic of manifest Whiteness could have invented this policy and assume its applicability to all people, irrespective of issues of ethnicity and questions of religio-cultural normativity and power.

This particular construct on which the aforementioned are made is but one example of a larger set of assumptions and norms that govern the Methodist Church and her ecumenical partners. These socio-cultural norms, predicated on Whiteness, have been in place for several centuries. In some respects, these norms may be extremely difficult to change, perhaps impossible to do so. But in simply assuming that they should remain inviolate, we sow the seeds for possible systemic injustice to continue, all the while convincing ourselves that these things are of God and, therefore, should remain normative.⁶⁴

Re-defining the Norm is necessary if the Church is going to develop a means of moving beyond the rhetoric of apology into a more determined and intentional mode of challenging injustice, be it on the grounds of ‘race’, gender, sexuality or disability, and be a site for equity and full inclusion as it hopes and believes itself to be.

The Methodist Connexion represents the collectivist, inter-dependent, ecclesial framework that symbolically equates to our expression of the Body of Christ. It should be one in which there is a substantive appreciation of difference. The Connexion must be concerned with providing opportunities for all marginalised and oppressed peoples to have their choices, preferences and identities recognised and for the existing power structures to be overturned in order that those elements can be realised. As Willie James Jennings has demonstrated, the all-embracing ubiquity of Whiteness within the body politic of our present realities, if we are to resist the false consciousness of colour-blind notions of mission and ministry,⁶⁵ British Methodism must commit itself to an acute systemic form of analysis in order to root out the surreptitious lure of embedded White privilege and entitlement.⁶⁶

The truth is White supremacy is not going to sue for peace anytime soon. The removal of a few statues – done voluntarily or removed by force – is not going topple White privilege anytime soon. My favourite White theologian working today is James Perkinson. His monumental book simply entitled White Theology⁶⁷ is one of the few texts written by a White theologian that has accepted that Whiteness is a problematic that cannot be imagined away by a few well-crafted prayers and a hearty rendition of ‘Kum-bah-yah’. Black lives will continue not to matter until the Church has the courage to stand up to White supremacy. Perhaps the present moment is the start of a prophetic breakthrough, or it may be yet another false dawn. The great philosopher and theologian Soren Kierkegaard once observed that life is lived forward but understood backwards. Ultimately, History will judge us all. The government wants us to quickly return to normal. But returning to the old normal would be the worst thing that can happen to us. One hopes that the new normal will not include COVID-19 or racism. My hope is that anti-racism and a commitment to the fundamental tenets of liberation theologies and the preferential option for the most marginalised and the oppressed, especially those living in Black bodies, will be the new mode of the new normal. This may be an unrealistic hope, but what is a people, indeed any people, without hope? I am committed to a liberative, prophetic hope. I hope that British Methodism can be and will be better in the new normal. Thank you for listening!