Dear Editor,
I was saddened to read the letter from David Batty. With respect, it misses the point. Young UK-born black Christians are culturally British and are not at home in their parents’ culturally African or Caribbean churches. But in white-majority churches they find their distinctive experience and perspective is not heard or valued.
May I signpost readers to Ben Lindsay’s book We Need to Talk about Race: understanding the black experience in white majority churches (SPCK, 2019); Felix Aremo’s podcast on https://co-mission.org/podcast/building-truly-diverse-gospel-communities-podcast/; and a conversation with Duncan Forbes, Felix Aremo, Gabby Samuel, Efrem Buckle and Donna Thomas found on http:// duncanf.blogspot.com/2020/07/why-do-we-need-to-talk-about-ethnicity.html.
There is one word for assuming (usually unthinkingly) that a black person is not culturally British, and that word starts with R and ends with M. That’s tough to face but until we all (especially white Christians) engage with it, we will not grasp this era’s opportunity to model the Kingdom of Christ where there is neither Jew nor Gentile (Gal.3.28) and the truth makes us free (John 8.32).
Yours sincerely,
Paul Lusk Whitstable
