"From Lament to Action" to Lament

The dear old Church of England really is the gift that keeps on giving when it comes to providing silly initiatives and headline-grabbing gimmicks. The Archbishops’ Council is soon to consider proposals (From Lament To Action), leaked to The Spectator, that it might impose quotas of ethnic minority clergy and bishopric appointments, ensuring non-whites are much better represented, with the report’s authors suggesting 30%.

Where all these black and Asian candidates will be coming from, I do not know. Positive discrimination might mean well, but it is deeply patronising to people of colour, for it assumes they themselves are not quite good enough to persuade a panel to appoint them. If only they had a little nudge in the right direction from the benevolent white people at the top. It ignores the age-old concept of calling or vocation. Few do, or ought, to enter the ministry for reasons other than God’s call. The very notion of creating arbitrary ratios of white, black and brown faces to run a church is quite appalling.

Furthermore, The Times reports that Anglican dioceses are conducting audits to catalogue who is memorialised in their 16,000 churches and 42 cathedrals, after calls were made to remove offensive monuments, especially linked to people associated with the slave trade. The very idea that sinners might be mentioned on brasses and stones inside churches seems to have taken these clerics by surprise. Still, I am curious to see if the removal of memorials will be followed by the demolition or sale of churches which were paid for by these dead generations.

The draft document calls for the Church of England to “acknowledge, repent and take decisive action to address the shameful history and legacy”. I have been calling for this for most of my adult life: that it would repent of appointing gospel-denying liberals as its bishops, that it would clear out all that Anglo-Catholic clutter from its altars, that it would stop pandering to worldly wisdom and preach God’s truth and grace to a dying world. These terrible crimes are probably not what the Council and its report are likely to be considering.

If hard-pressed vicars and church wardens are not already excited at the prospect of being forced to interview people because of skin colour, they can look forward to a new “online module for anti-racist learning programme.” That sounds like an enjoyable few hours; the time will just fly by.

Thank God, I am a dissenter.

Image by Ana Gic from Pixabay