The ARCHBISHOP’S Anti-Racism Taskforce has released its report proposing to tackle widespread racism in the Church of England following BBC Panorama’s programme in which staff claimed they were paid off to “buy their silence” after complaining of racism.

Published this week, the From Lament to Action report warns that a failure to address the institutional racism found the in the Church could be the “last straw” for many people of UK Minority Ethnic (UKME) or Global Majority Heritage (GMH) backgrounds and lead to “devastating effects” on its future.

The report sets out 47 specific actions for different arms of the Church of England to implement across five priority areas including participation, governance, training, education and young people.

“This is the culture change that is required if the Church is to live up to its mandate of being a body where all the gifts of all its people flourish to the full, for the benefit of the church as a whole, the nation of England and the greater glory of God,” they said in a statement.

“Decades of inaction carry consequences and this inaction must be owned by the whole Church. 

“A failure to act now will be seen as another indication, potentially a last straw for many, that the Church is not serious about racial sin.”

The nine-strong group was set up in autumn 2020 with an action plan to prepare groundwork for a longer-term Commission on Racial Justice and review previous reports on racism. “In our work as the Taskforce, we have considered 25 reports from the mid-80s onwards with a total of more than 160 recommendations,” the taskforce explained.

“Since then, the Church of England has considered motion after motion, debate after debate, yet we still find ourselves in the position where – throughout our life as a church – the flourishing of UKME and GMH Anglicans is hard to discern.”

On the BBC’s Panorama, former Church race-relations adviser Dr Elizabeth Henry  claimed that some staff members had to sign non-disclosure agreements after complaining about racism. She left her position last year after seven years in the job, claiming that she felt “disillusioned.”

Michelle Delves, who also featured on the programme, is of mixed heritage and enrolled at Durham Bible college Cranmer Hall. She spoke of how she felt as if she “landed on an alien planet” during her time there. She also claimed that she was frequently ignored and treated differently, and that when she complained, felt no-one was listening to her.

The proposals included in the report already outline new approaches to shortlisting and interviewing candidates, and the appointment of full-time Racial Justice Officers (RJOs) in every diocese.

However, when questioned on whether they were planning to support black people, Revd Arun Arora, Vicar of St Nicholas, Durham, told The Voice: “There’s a sense of the Church of England needing to establish a credible voice to speak into racial justice and part of what we see our report doing is laying the groundwork for that.

“We have seen a number of issues – whether in Covid, stop and search or experiences of black women in maternity wards in the NHS – there’s a list of those issues that the church needs to have the credibility to speak to and to regain its prophetic voice and to be able to do so from a position of justice.”

He went on to acknowledge that the church’s history with racial justice has been “chequered,” but that ‘prophetic nature of what the church can do, both in calling itself and others to action, that’s the vision that we are holding.”