‘I can’t breathe.’

Ten months after George Floyd’s murder sparked Black Lives Matter protests, how might we lament together, seek healing, and find hope for a unified witness?

It’s time to stop perpetuating the idea we have to choose between believing ‘Black lives matter’ or ‘all lives matter’. Time to move past the tired binary of systemic injustice versus personal responsibility. Time to stop playing the blame game while nothing changes, sitting in silent collusion.

Like the prophets of old, we need eyes to see through the flames to ‘the fire that has been raging for over 400 years, consuming successive generations of Black lives’ as Leicester Cathedral Canon Lusa Nsenga-Ngoy so vividly reminds us. We need ears to hear in the riots the cries of the unheard, as Martin Luther King Jr declared a generation ago.

This is not simply someone else’s issue. As Azariah France-Williams revealed this summer in his new book Ghost Ship, institutional racism continues here at home, requiring reform among Christians so the whole UK church can truly become a place of Black flourishing.

We all agree, racism is evil and an affront to God. So how will we play our part? And what practices on our frontlines support this overdue reformation?

Chine McDonald is a writer and broadcaster on issues of race, faith, and gender – a wise guide to help us listen to and lament the church’s complicity in racism and systemic injustice, en route to repentance and peace.

Through an interactive fusion of the arts, liturgy, a prophetic address, dialogue, and personal challenge, this night is an exploration of ‘Reimagining Race?’ along biblical lines.

It’s time to come together as equals at the foot of the cross on which Christ was lynched and find healing. It’s time to discover a hopeful witness foreshadowing the racial unity-in-diversity of a world made new.

Register here

Image courtesy of The Church Times

SPEAKER:

Chine McDonald is Head of Community Fundraising & Public Engagement at Christian Aid. Prior to that she worked at World Vision and the Evangelical Alliance, including running threadsuk – an online collective for people in their 20s and 30s exploring faith and life. She read theology & religious studies at Cambridge before training and working as a newspaper journalist. Chine is a regular contributor to BBC Religion & Ethics programmes, including Thought for the Day on Radio 4’s Today Programme, and sits on several charity boards. Her second book God is Not a White Man and Other Revelations will be published in May 2021.

Header illustration by: Na Kim