I grew up hearing stories from my grandad of his idyllic childhood in Jamaica. They were a stark contrast to the wet and windy Manchester, where we were living! He also told me about the racism he experienced in Britain during the 1950s and 60s. However, he told these stories with little evident bitterness, emphasizing how ‘comically’ ignorant people were back then and how he had been able to work hard and make a good life for himself here. It is only now, as an adult, when I recall his stories of having to sleep in phone boxes because landlords wouldn’t rent to a Black man and being asked if he had a tail like a monkey, that the true horrors of what he experienced registers.
I carry my colour from my grandad’s genes, which has affected the way I have experienced life here. I have experienced some of the racism he experienced, although far less overt. School playground name calling, low expectations from teachers and being treated with suspicion in airports were just some of my experiences. I have also inherited my grandad’s positive and hopeful outlook. Sure, sadly racism still exists but times have changed. Overwhelmingly, people think diversity is a positive thing and want people treated with respect and dignity whatever their background, race, religion or culture. There is no way we would want to go back to the way ethnic minorities were perceived and treated in the bad old days of my grandad’s time, however, this summer’s racist protests and riots have challenged that perspective.
I have lived in other parts of the world where to be a minority is to live in fear and as a second-class citizen, but for the first time, I felt I might not be safe or belong here. I felt fearful as establishments were burnt out in my current home city of Belfast and people were attacked simply because of the colour of their skin. I wondered how far it would escalate. I now avoid certain areas and I wonder how many people might be looking at me thinking I am not part of their vision for a British future.
This raises within me another struggle, and that is with my feelings toward my White-majority church. It is a place I have been welcomed and served and have felt supported and encouraged to grow in my own gifts and ministry. However, when I was feeling fearful and alone as the violence raged around our city the silence was deafening. A prayer meeting was held for peace and when the unrest had died down our minister spoke from the pulpit addressing and clearly condemning what had taken place.
However, I had been longing for something much more personal. Someone to simply ask how I was and for me to be able to share my heavy heart with. This has left me trying to deal with my disappointment towards those I felt should have been a source of comfort and reassurance in my hour of need.
But at the same time, I want to apply grace and compassion, understanding that the absence of action by my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ is not a reflection of an absence of caring, but perhaps a lack of awareness or understanding of what they could or should say.
I have addressed this with a couple of individuals who have expressed regret. I also recognise that some of my experience was simply down to the lack of shared life and community in a large middle-class church which means people are often not aware of what each other may be going through at any given time. I know the church leadership is aware and is seeking to address this.
"I had been longing for something much more personal. Someone to simply ask how I was and for me to be able to share my heavy heart with."
In the midst of all this, I choose to trust and believe God at His word; “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him.” (Romans 8:28, NIV). I love Him, and others, and so what good may come in and through me as I process and respond to what I have experienced?
I have identified 3 things. Firstly, I am committed to my church family. However, that does not mean that I won’t share with my spiritual family how I feel. Family should be a safe place to share our joys and struggles. It is because I want to see my family grow and be in a community of belonging that I want to share my insights into how we might stand in solidarity with and gather around one another as people from different backgrounds, in times when they are affected by abuse and discrimination because of their cultural heritage or ethnicity.
Secondly, the Lord has been searching my own heart and revealing my own blind spots. I do a lot of work with asylum seekers and refugees and during the attacks and rioting to some tiny extent, I could identify with what they must have gone through – to be so fearful. And so out of hope for the future, they fled and left behind all they had and all that was familiar to cross oceans and borders in search of refuge.
It was heartbreaking to hear an Iranian brother who had moved to Northern Ireland share how wonderful the past few months had been as he had felt safe, settled and hopeful for the future for the first time in years. However, against the backdrop of the riots and in their aftermath, now once again he was feeling afraid that he might not be welcome or safe here. I felt a level of empathy which I hadn’t before. I want to turn this deeper empathy into a greater determination to welcome and be a friend to those seeking sanctuary here.
Finally, the deep darkness of the night makes you crave the light of the coming dawn all the more. I am now convinced more than ever that our nation and its people need to experience and embody the good news of Jesus in all its fullness. The good news that on the cross, at great cost, Jesus has destroyed the barriers of hostility and hatred between people and established a new creation, His church.
We realise and witness to this wonderful truth when we form intercultural churches where people don’t live alongside each other in silos where their suspicions, fears and prejudice go unchallenged, but rather in deep relationships of humility, vulnerability and mutual honouring, bound together by the cords of God’s love, and in the process we are transformed, individually and collectively, into who it is the Lord desires us to be.
Communities which celebrate diversity and strive for unity in submission to and the worship of our one shared Lord and King. This is the present and future hope we offer our warring and fragmenting world. This is the ministry of reconciliation we are to devote our lives to.
"Jesus has destroyed the barriers of hostility and hatred between people and established a new creation, His church."
