Palm Sunday. Canning Town, East London. At 8:00 p.m., Ms. Kofi, a Zimbabwean single mother of two, put her trash in front of her modest public housing apartment. Almost immediately, a gang of white men burst into her front yard, overturning the cans, strewing garbage across the lawn and garden, and smearing dog excrement along her sidewalk. Grouping themselves beneath Ms. Kofi's windows, they shouted racist epithets and showered the building with rocks. Cowering inside at her persecutors' brutal threats, Ms. Kofi called the local police station to report her danger. A brusque, unsympathetic officer hung up on her.
Incidents like this were in ample supply during Easter Week in the borough of Newham – Britain's second poorest and most racially diverse district. On Monday, white residents scuffle, kick and punch an Asian woman. Tuesday, a young African man is stopped by police, accused of stealing the radio he's carrying, strip-searched and locked in a cell for five hours. Thursday, an African youth staying in a local hostel endures a shower of racist abuse from white youth. Friday, members of the neo-Nazi British National Party (BNP) break into an AIDS patient's home and beat him up.
On Easter Sunday, something contrary to the week's events transpired in East London. At St. Andrew's Church, an independent, evangelical congregation, 23 different ethnic groups gathered together to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the oneness of his body. While such peaceable interaction is rare outside the church's stone walls, inside them, week after week, St. Andrew's congregation visibly demonstrates the unity it proclaims. It does so in a building directly across the street from a fascist drinking club.
For Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, St. Andrew's minister, racism is "not just a theoretical issue." Sookhdeo was born in Guyana of Muslim parents, and educated in Britain, where taunting and abuse by white classmates was a regular occurrence. He converted to Christianity while in architecture college, and while he experienced some friendly fellowship among white Christians, he also encountered prejudice. After marrying Rosemary Jamieson, a white New Zealander, they dreamed of overseas missions. Mission boards, however, disapproving of their inter-racial marriage, refused them. Instead, they moved to Newham, drawn by its poverty, violence, and racial diversity.
"East London is known for its hatred," Sookhdeo explains, "but if you can love people who are very different, then you discover what the love of Christ is all about." So they established a multi-racial fellowship where people could learn how to express true Christian love.
Sookhdeo's vision of racial reconciliation is particularly audacious in East London. On Maundy Thursday morning, I talked with white teenagers, middle-aged mothers, elderly men, and blue-collar bachelors about the influx of Asians, Africans, and West Indians into the borough. A gap-toothed lonely widower sat with me on a sidewalk bench. Pointing toward the Asian-dominated garment district, he complained, "The older stores down there on Green Street used to be old English shops. Now they're all owned by Indians and they stick the clothes outside on the sidewalk. There's nothing orderly about it."
Nearly everyone I spoke with claimed their concerns about immigration were solely economic. "I got nothing against the immigrants," one young construction worker said, "but when unemployment is going higher and higher, it makes you think."
Perceived bias in favor of immigrants in the distribution of public housing is a special point of irritation. One man complained that "there's a lot of Blacks and Indians and there's not enough houses to go around for whites." An older white woman from neighboring Plaistow agreed. "The government should sort out their own people first; make sure their own people have got enough work, a place to live."
But racial prejudice also underlies some of the anti-immigration sentiment. Two white teenagers emerging from McDonalds told me that the neo-Nazis have a lot of support among their neighbors. "It's really scary," they commented, "because they're on our doorsteps. You get leaflets from the BNP every now and then – Rights for Whites leaflets and statements about what they're going to do about jobs and housing." In January of 1995, BNP members attacked a 16-year-old Asian boy walking home from school, while female BNP sympathesizers stood chanting, "Vote BNP!" and "Pakis and niggers, we're going to kill you!"
Racist attitudes like these motivated Patrick Sookhdeo to help found the Newham Community Renewal Program, an effort to promote dialogue on cross-cultural relations. A spinoff, the Newham Monitoring Project (NMP), a community watchdog group that tracks incidents of racial harassment and police brutality, was established in 1980. Volunteers staff emergency service telephone lines, answering calls from frightened victims like Ms. Kofi. The NMP also advocates increased government financial, medical, and housing assistance to immigrants and refugees.
I visited the NMP's headquarters Maundy Thursday. Sitting in the cramped front office, I listened to an NMP volunteer argue over the telephone with a bureaucrat in the local welfare department about the status of an income subsidy check for an Indian woman from Forest Gate, waiting anxiously across his desk. Plastered on one office wall, next to posters announcing "Unite Against Racism Day," was a large chart detailing the monthly welfare and housing subsidy benefits. NMP advocates immigrant's rights, and works to connect them with the benefits to which they are entitled.
That approach differs from St. Andrew's efforts. Parishioners befriend refugees and immigrants, provide emotional support, material aid, and help locating employment and housing. Chronic dependence on welfare is discouraged, and attention to newcomers spiritual needs is central. Sookhdeo says mercy outreach must be person, and criticizes the professionalization and institutionalization of social welfare.
"The Church has created institutions to do the work which we should have been doing as individuals," Sookhdeo comments. "And this takes the place of individual(s) doing good. We create structures to do good; we pay people to do good; and then we call that Christian." He adds, "the church becomes just another government department of social services."
After a short wait in NMP's front office, I was ushered back to a small kitchen area, where an employee explained the group's philosophy. NMP defines racial harassment exclusively as white versus non-white violence. While St. Andrew's continues to cooperate with some of NMP's efforts to challenge racism, Sookhdeo has some reservations about the group. He contents that black on black violence is also a problem in the borough. And he thinks racial reconciliation must involve alleviating tensions between Africans and Asians as well as between whites and non-whites – not to mention addressing hostilities within ethnic groups.
I rushed from the NMP's offices to return to St. Andrew's in time for the church's Maundy Thursday dinner. Mingling with some white parishioners, I uncovered enthusiastic attitudes starkly different from the whites I'd interviewed earlier. "It's nice to share fellowship with people who don't judge you or put you down." One young mother commented. "We're all God's children. He didn't make us all the same, but He did make each one of us."
Racial reconciliation has not been easy, though, nor is it complete. Recently, a former Indian staff member who workers among the congregation's Punjabi converts took them out of St. Andrew's and formed an ethnically homogenous Punjabi church. The same thing happened with a group of Africans a few years earlier. Julia Acott, a volunteer staff member, reports that at some church socials, different ethnic groups sit in segregated clusters.
Still, Acott and other parishioners see tremendous progress. "I think St. Andrew's has broken down barriers between different people. You see people in the church going and talking to others whom they normally wouldn't have talked to. We have to work at integration week by week, but it becomes more natural once you've taken the first plunge."
The church facilitates interracial contact and understanding through deliberately heterogenous Bible studies, by including all the different ethnic groups on the church's leadership council, and by weaving music from different cultures into its worship. Said one elderly parishioner: "With different backgrounds, you can share more experiences. We are different in color, our backgrounds are different, our traditions are different, but we are one in Christ."
Sookhdeo is convinced that St. Andrews' ideal of a multi-racial, multi-ethnic church is appropriate, especially in a place like Newham. "The reason is," Sookhdeo smiles, "that Heaven is multi-racial and multi-ethnic. And to me, the church is supposed to be like Heaven in waiting."
Amy L. Sherman is on PRISM's Editorial Board, and is writing a book on church-based inner city ministry.
Patrick Sookhdeo's commitment to racial reconciliation is equaled only by his passion for evangelism. Both concerns put him at odds with many British Protestants. Some Protestants on the right oppose the kind of racial integration pursued at St. Andrew's. Arguing that God brought judgment upon Solomon for creating a multi-cultural, multi-faith, multi-racial society, they content that God will likely punish Britain unless it becomes an ethnically "pure" nation. Some Newham evangelicals assert this position and are publicly campaigning for the repatriation of all Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus.
On the left, many liberal churchman claim to support racial justice, but their pursuit of racial harmony comes at the expense of evangelism. Since race and religion are closely interwoven, these Protestants seek inter-religious dialogue and understanding, and argue that evangelism and conversion will upset the process of inter-faith cooperation. Sookhdeo disparages such "cocktail dialogue" based on what he calls the "lowest common denominator" of shared beliefs. "If by 'good religious relations' we mean the negation of religious belief or truth," Sookhdeo says, "then we haven't accomplished anything."
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