BAME Anglican

I was at the 7 th Annual Wigan Diggers Festival last weekend. This was my third time at the event. I enjoy the energy of these events, seeing politically active people is always a pleasure. However as a black person I feel like an oddity, dont get me wrong the festival is run by progressive, lefty, anti racist people. I share those political ideologies, but of late I have noticed how spaces such as this are almost always white. I am black, feminist, anti racist, lefty and Christian, I am an outsider in each of these groups because I don’t fit the norm of any of them. None of these groups are exclusive, far from it they are welcoming and all of them want to make a difference. However there are too many unspoken things which have caused us to alienate people we would like to reach out to. In left anti racist groups I am excluded on grounds of religion. My Christian faith is assumed to be at odds with liberal groups whose atheist worldview sees me as a brainwashe...

A while back we were talking about how to reach out to BAME people in church. I said it would be nice to organise events that celebrated blackness and included black people in the daily services. After a minute of silence someone said ‘we can celebrate Eid with the local Muslims to improve race relations’.  Most of the white people in the room looked pleased with themselves, the only other person of colour and I looked at each other rolled our eyes.   We were specifically asked about race not religion and the issue of inclusion of BAME Anglicans. Islam is not a race and the religion is not confined to race or ethnicity. All people of colour are not Muslim either. BAME Christians live under a constant gaze, we are asked to prove our credentials at all times. The church often becomes a checkpoint where we have to display our documents to prove we are who we say we are. Our allegiance is always suspect. I worship in a church with white neo converts, they ...