The archbishop of York has committed the Church of England to racial justice, saying the past week has been a “watershed moment” with the conviction in the US of George Floyd’s killer and the airing of a BBC television documentary that exposed racism in the church.
Stephen Cottrell, the number two in the church’s hierarchy since last year, said he was determined to make the C of E into a diverse organisation that clearly condemned and confronted racism.
“It is a gospel imperative for the church of Jesus Christ to oppose racism in all its forms, to prophetically call for racial justice, and to challenge the white hegemony which so often still controls the narratives of the world. Racism is a sin. Like all sin it must be confronted with a call to repentance,” he said in his presidential address at an online meeting the church’s synod, or general assembly.
Cottrell said it had been “sobering and shameful” to be confronted in a Panorama documentary on Monday with the C of E’s “own institutional racism and a number of shockingly specific instances where sisters and brothers in Christ have experienced racism in the church”.
The programme reported that some C of E clergy and employees had been made to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) after complaining of racism.
Cottrell said he and Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, had this week ordered that NDAs should not be used “except in the most exceptional circumstances, and then only to protect the victim, not the reputation of the institution.”
Significant cultural change would be implemented after a report containing 47 recommendations was published on Thursday by an anti-racism taskforce set up by the archbishops, he said.
Cottrell, whose predecessor, John Sentamu, was the most senior black clergyman in the C of E, described himself as “a white man who has been on a long journey of learning, and still has, I’m sure, some way to go”.
He recalled working as a ward orderly in a hospice in the 1980s, as the only white man on a team of “amazing black women”. He witnessed the “horrifying, persistent, degrading drip-drip of demeaning racism”, which had radicalised him.
The C of E owed some of its members an apology, he said. “But most of all we owe it to the nation we serve and to the God we love … [to] commit ourselves to change.”
