Apology or angst?

On 24 March the Archbishops of York and Canterbury will lead thousands of Christians, including our own Bishop of Dorchester, through London in an act of repentance for the Church’s part in the history of slavery. But does the Church of England need to apologise for its past? Tim Dakin, General Secretary of the Church Mission Society, gives his view.

The public debate on slavery is focused on whether cities like Bristol and Liverpool, which grew rich on the trade, should apologise for their murky past.

The church has become part of the discussion ever since it emerged into public knowledge that 18th century slave-worked plantations were owned by ecclesiastical bodies, and the Society of the Propagation of the Gospel owned slaves who were branded with ‘Society’ on their chests.

The C of E General Synod voted in February 2006 to apologise for the Church’s part in slavery. In so doing, many Christians, and non believers, will be encouraged to feel the Church has done nothing for the past 200 years.

The reality has always been more complex. Professor Lamin Sanneh in ‘The Church mission Society and World Christianity, 1799-1999’ asserts that, ‘In the early 19 century in Freetown, Sierra Leone, the CMS had launched the Christian movement as an international, ecumenical and cross-cultural force for antislavery and as the ally of the dispossessed and the outcast.’

On this reading the crucible of the anti-slavery movement gave birth to an important development in the world Church and its global mission. Therefore, we should be celebrating the way in which the anti-slavery movement began to forge mission as a ‘human rights imperative, based on the validation of those tainted by the slaver’s shackle’ as Sanneh puts it.

For pioneering anti-slavery Africans like Samuel Ajayi Crowther, Christianity meant a commitment to justice that didn’t reduce things to black and white.

He was anti-slavery wherever he found it, and if African chiefs were oppressing their people and acting unjustly and themselves using slaves, that problem had to be tackled every bit as much as the colonial slave trade.

Crowther didn’t roll over and accept what offended his Christian values of justice, yet he was commended for his humility and promotion of harmony. While he would later be humiliated by racist missionaries, Sanneh says, ‘The British flag was perceived locally by victim populations as a symbol of anti-slavery…

‘Accordingly, the settlers agreed to have a European missionary join them as a partner, not as an overlord.’

Neither Crowther nor CMS has a history of unclouded glory, and any note of self-congratulation is entirely inappropriate. But the Abolition Bicentenary events should focus on the legacy of anti-slavery as well as slavery.

We can celebrate the birth of ‘the Christian movement as an international, ecumenical and cross-cultural force for anti-slavery and as the ally of the dispossessed and the outcast.’ – a calling which we continue to strive to live up to as worldwide family of Christians, and which we continue to undermine through negligence, through weakness and through our own deliberate fault.

Our acts of repentance at the Bicentenary need to focus less on our historic guilt than our contemporary inability to turn away from the sin of turning people into commodities, and to campaign for the liberation of all trapped in current forms of slavery.

In slavery and the fight against, Church and State showed both their worst and their best. But we can take inspiration that at its darkest, messiest, most implicated and corrupt, the Church produced something great – the sin is that we have forgotten we are part of this liberating movement and have become enslaved ourselves in the image of being an enslaving movement.

People may say, ‘The Church can’t talk because it was just as bad as anyone’, But the Church can talk. . Though it was, and is, just as bad as anyone else, it instigated a movement that, fraught with human failure, instigated liberation. Dare we live up to this precedent today?

Tim Dakin is General Secretary of CMS.This article first appeared in the the CMS magazine ‘Yes’, January - April 2007.

What are your views on this issue? Is your church or group organising an event to mark the bicentenary? Email us at door@oxford.anglican.org or leave your comment below.