The United Church’s anti-racism and equity officer, Adele Halliday, is unhappy with our thinking of sins or evil as black or dark, and goodness as white or light. It hurts and is damaging to the soul. The Bible is full of such imagery, of course, but we should try to read such passages “through an anti-racist or racial justice lens”, and we must remember that “Biblical writers themselves had their own biases.” As I am sure you realise by now, Adele Halliday has no bias at all.
I have been going through my well-worn copy of Lord of the Rings and replacing “Dark Lord” with “D**k Lord”. I like to do my bit.
Read it all here. I should warn you, gentle reader, that the article does assume Adele’s gender and repeatedly refers to zir has “she” and “her”. Upsetting I know: please write to The Anglican Journal to voice your complaint.
Adele Halliday still remembers conversations from a church she attended years ago. The congregation constantly associated whiteness with purity and goodness, and darkness with evil. They talked about people being “washed white” from the blackness of sin.
Language is an important part of Christian worship traditions, whether in Scripture, song, liturgy or prayer. But when this language is unexamined, the result can be alienating—or worse, perpetuate longstanding prejudices, Halliday says.
At the time, Halliday says, “I didn’t feel I had enough personal power to speak up and say, ‘Can you please stop saying this, it is hurting me, it is damaging to my soul.’” Eventually she “voted with [her] feet” by leaving and joining another worshipping community. “But for some people it means leaving [church] completely.”
Halliday is the anti-racism and equity officer for the United Church of Canada, and has been working at the United Church’s national office since 2004 in various capacities, though always related to anti-racism or inter-cultural work.
The United Church’s work on these language issues is based in its anti-racism policy, developed in 2000, Halliday says. One major focus is discouraging the use of “dark” or “black” as synonyms for evil, and words like “light” or “white” as equivalent to goodness.
An international interfaith commission has called for an end to violence against and criminalization of LGBTQ+ people and a global ban on conversion therapy.
FOR SOME TIME now several diocesan bishops within the Anglican Church of Canada have been allowing – and even sometimes personally performing – same-sex marriages and have authorized liturgies for such rites. They have based their right to do so on a Memo issued in June 2016 by Chancellor David Jones Q.C., the top legal advisor to the Primate.
Bishop Susan Bell has authorized for use in the Diocese of Niagara an interim rite to enable clergy to better respond to the pastoral needs of transgender, non-binary, and gender expansive parishioners.
The Diocese of Toronto is embarking on a comprehensive plan to address racism and bias in the Church. The plan, which will be launched in January, will include listening sessions, antiracism and anti-bias training, the formation of a strategy group, and the raising up of volunteers to lead training workshops. Bishop Jenny Andison, the diocese’s Diversity Officer, says the plan will build up capacity in the Church so that it can begin to dismantle the barriers that are preventing it from reaching all people with the good news of Jesus Christ.
Bishop-elect Anna-Lee Greenwood said it was “wholly inappropriate” to present a passage of the Bible as divine support for their party.
Initially, the congregation’s reaction was, ‘Why?’