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Feature
Collaboration and new opportunities
Colonel Jenine Main provides an update on the work of the Racial Inclusion Working Group
AS regular meetings continue for the Racial Inclusion Working Group (RIWG) the energy and enthusiasm for finding ways for greater racial inclusion within The Salvation Army remain high.
AWARENESS VIDEO
The group is working with SISTAD (School for In-Service Training and Development) to produce a video to raise awareness of how people from various ethnic and cultural backgrounds – other than white British – feel embraced and fully included into the fellowship of Army settings, and how we can become even more inclusive. This will hopefully be released in February 2023.
INCLUSION MISSION ADVOCATES
We are keen for people to be aware of and apply for the new volunteer role of Inclusion Mission Advocate. If equality of opportunity and inclusion is important to you, then you may thrive as an Inclusion Mission Advocate, championing equal opportunities, promoting positive attitudes and identifying
RIWG members Major Marjory Parrott (Swadlincote) and Major Beverly Baker (THQ) Jennifer Laurent-Smart and Major Jonny Smith on a racial inclusion discussion panel
behaviours that need to evolve and the associated training needs.
As an Inclusion Mission Advocate, you will be passionate about inclusivity and promoting positive relationships and practices among different and diverse groups. You will work across your allocated region supporting, raising awareness and championing equality and inclusion, ensuring that marginalised and minority experiences are understood and diverse voices heard.
Find out more about becoming an Inclusion Mission Advocate by emailing racial.inclusion@salvationarmy.org.uk.
LISTENING SPACES
The Racial Inclusion Working Group has also been exploring and developing the use of listening spaces, which are safe environments with trained facilitators where people can share their thoughts, lived experiences and concerns, so that these can lead to positive transformation and change. This was tried in practice for the first time at the recent Intercultural Mission Conference, with a listening space led by Assistant Corps Sergeant-Major Jasper Meda (Croydon Citadel), Captain Lizette Williams (Felixstowe) and Recruitment Manager Sarah Ladipo.
by Ron Thomlinson with the Rev James Macfarlane
JIM, I had reason to dig out my old copy of CS Lewis’s A Grief Observed, and, while searching for something totally unrelated, I came across a paragraph I had underlined and dated 27 February 1977: ‘Images of the Holy easily become holy images – sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it himself. He is the great iconoclast.’
Being hopelessly dyslectic, I’m pretty sure that back in 1977 I didn’t know what ‘iconoclast’ meant. I certainly didn’t recognise the word 45 years later. To my amazement, an iconoclast is ‘a destroyer of images used in religious worship’.
I found CS Lewis’s statement so exciting I sent it to Wim, a Dutch friend. That was a huge mistake: Wim paints icons! His latest icon (pictured) is of Saint Thomas of India, traditionally seen as the person who brought Christianity to the Indian subcontinent. The painting took him two years.
In his reply, Wim quoted the words of a Jesuit pastor to me: ‘Everything you see here is beautiful. But it is not the real thing… It only tries to reflect something so good that we will never be able to comprehend.’
Mercifully, my faux pas did not damage our friendship. Like Wim, many of us are constantly looking for another image of God: the old, cherished images of the Eternal have become threadbare, inadequate, unsatisfactory. Those fossilised images no longer scratch where our spirits itch.
For Wim, the deeply spiritual discipline involved in painting icons renews his image of God. But Jim, is there hope for the rest of us who even make a hash of painting by numbers? Does God actively shatter the picture I have of him, as when Jehovah, the warrior of the Old Testament, becomes ‘Our Father’ in the New? And who guides me into new truth?
RON, an icon is the symbol of God’s power ever at work in the lives of human beings. We know that icons, such as the Army flag, the mercy seat and crest have, in the past, helped focus our devotion. But might God also destroy Army icons when they have passed their best before date? There is a destructive side to iconoclasm. Think of the great cathedral in St Andrews lying in ruins because the reformers did not like statues.
Yet iconic change can be positive. For all of us, faith, at first, is simple. That deceptive simplicity has in it a germ of growth. Faith begins to think and reflect. In the silent places of life, in prayer and meditation, it transforms into a philosophy, as profound as any held by a Plato or an Aristotle. As well as trusting in God, we also think about God. Can traditional icons show faith developing in this way? Think of the red shield now being used alongside the Army crest. Can icons adapt to change? Of course they can.
I recently saw a Palm Sunday icon that delighted me. All the traditional images were there: Christ on the donkey;
