Who is in the room and how does that shape the conversation?

I was reflecting further on the recent “Lesson learnt” Symposium on the Church and COVID and it struck me that one of the main lessons presented to us was unstated but highly visual for those who had eyes to see.  You see, as I looked at my fellow panellists and as I watched the feed of questions coming through, recognising familiar names it struck me that we were all white, mainly middle aged, arguably middle class and primarily from conservative evangelical contexts.  Indeed, not only were all of us from the UK but we were speaking from an even more narrow, English context. 

I wondered how the conversation would have been affected, transformed even if we had some different voices in the room. What would have been the impact of some female voices, what contribution would the Black churches have made to our thinking? How would we have been helped, challenged, rebuked, encouraged if we had heard from church leaders in other countries, particularly non-western contexts.

Part of my wondering was the suspicion that there might have been a level of group think.  Even though there were a couple of us on the panel who took slightly different positions on some things (I think it’s fair to say that the FIEC leadership landed a little differently to Christian Concern and The Christian Institute) essentially we nodded along to basic presuppositions which didn’t go unchallenged. In fact, I think that a significant proportion of our differences were down to mishearing one another.

Different voices may have challenged presuppositions -including mine.  Different voices may have resulted in a change of emphasis and tone.  For example, I wonder how believers from persecuted churches would react to hearing English believers describing minor acts of COVID non-compliance as “attending an underground church”? Would we even make such statements if others were joining in.

I wonder too if the emphasis might have changed a little.  Everything we talked about in the symposium was worthwhile and important but my reflection would be that we mainly focused on questions to do with public policy, protest and philosophical theology.  We didn’t really get to grips with any exegesis. We alluded to Biblical principles and passages but no-one stopped to say “what does the passage actually mean”?  And whilst all of those things had pastoral implications, we did not really follow through and get into the meat of the pastoral “so what”? 

This matters because I suspect that a lot of the issues that came to the forefront and were exposed by COVID were already present prior to the pandemic, they just did not so obviously affect so many people. Not only that but the same issues are still present now and will continue to be but may be slipping below the surface and becoming less visible again.  Specifically what I mean is that the pandemic highlighted the challenges of isolation and of loss of aspects of embodied interaction because we all experienced them and so we had to do some things about it.

I raise this point not as a criticism of the event or to diminish the contributions of us as panel members.  It’s not that the voices heard weren’t valid or useful it’s that there are voices that haven’t been heard yet.  This challenge applies not just to things like COVID but to the wider conversations we have within and between churches.