This month our theme is 'Loving One Another' and part of that is celebrating our differences. Neil Masih, our Intercultural Mission Enabler, has interviewed four people from our diocese from different backgrounds about their experience of being part of the Church of England. This week's interview is with the Revd James Sampson-Foster, curate at St Andrew's, Rugby.
What are the joys of worshipping in the Church of England?
In a word – diversity. The greatest strength of the Church of England is its mission, its unfulfilled aspiration, to be the church for all those in England, whoever they may be, and wherever they come from. Within this vision, I have found such joy worshipping next to people who I would never have met save for a shared love for Jesus. It is within these encounters, which occur across every kind of earthly divide, that the transcendent love of God is discovered, hearts are transformed, and strangers are knit together into one body.
What are the challenges/barriers and how do we overcome those?
But this joy comes with challenges.
In Christ, God has broken every barrier down. In sin, we have rebuilt them. In each generation, the church has wrestled to understand the height and depth of God’s love. From the early church which questioned whether Gentile believers needed to adopt the customs of the law, the Church has always suffered from a lack of imagination of how to welcome the other. The Church of England is no exception to this - having too often insisted on placing an unwritten set of cultural rules and behaviours – a new law - upon those who have sought welcome in our churches.
And at times this has been painful.
As a mixed race person from a council estate in the church, I have often felt like I haven’t been seen. That I have had to work hard so hard to fit in.
It is a strange thing to say – but some of my most painful experiences in church have come from times when I have fitted in. Times when people have come up to me to tell me that I do belong.
Times when people have said to me ‘James, I never think of you as black’, ‘James, I keep forgetting that you’re not white’. As though those things are compliments. As though those things mean that I belong.
Because I had learned the unwritten rules of how to behave in church – because I fit in – my colour had become invisible. I had become invisible.
And because I did fit in, my well-meaning friends had shown me through their compliments, that on some level, my brown body didn’t fit in, but that through learning to fit in, I had become an honourary member.
There are no honourary members in the body of Christ. We are all full members of the same body, because we share in the same bread. And that body is made of bodies of many colours. Bodies made by God, loved by God and seen by God.
Looking forward what is important to hold onto in your faith and what do you wish to cultivate?
In my faith, I am learning to see differently. As a church, we all need to learn to see differently. To see as God sees and to embrace as God embraces.
The scriptures tell us that all people are made in the image of God. By seeing one other, truly, we behold that image.
By truly seeing one another, we are renewed by the blessing that we are to each other. By truly seeing others, we give to them the dignity that truly being seen confers. We emulate that same God whom Hagar called the one who sees me.
We must always keep our eyes open to truly see others. Truly seeing people’s struggles, their history, their pain. Truly seeing people’s gifts. Truly seeing each other not in monochrome, but in glorious technicolour.
Truly seeing people like me, not as an honourary white man, but as a brown man, created and beloved by God in the colour he made me.
If we learn to see like that, we shall all be blessed.