A Luta Continua . . . (The Struggle Continues): Memoir of a Sometimes Radical Christian

By David Arthur Haslam and Richard D. Harries

From battling apartheid to saving the environment, fighting racism to urging tax justice, and Sunday preaching to visiting the sick, this book tells the story of nearly fifty years of active church ministry. The writer has ministered to congregations in three English cities, traveled to five continents, sometimes with his congregations, and engaged in the major dimensions of Christian mission today.
The story begins in the late sixties, at the Fourth Assembly of the World Council of Churches. Chapters cover the struggle against apartheid, the Program to Combat Racism, the rise of Transnational Corporations, local ministry, the challenge of climate change, movements against racism and caste discrimination, and the growing campaign for tax justice. Each chapter ends with a reflection on a theologian who has influenced and encouraged the author. They range from Dietrich Bonhoeffer through Gustavo Gutierrez and Ann Morisy to James Cone and Tissa Balasuriya.
The book mixes experiences of the local and global, congregational life and international engagement. It offers a sweep of concern and action, enlivened by humorous incidents. Readers will gain insight into how broad contemporary ministry can be, and how the churches can still make a contribution to bringing God's peace-with-justice to today's world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Jul 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781498236065

David Arthur Haslam

David Haslam is a Methodist Minister who has worked in three UK cities, and has been an Executive Committee member of the Anti-Apartheid Movement and Vice-Chair of War on Want. He was a founder of End Loans to South Africa, Transnationals Information Exchange, the Dalit Solidarity Network, and Methodist Tax Justice Network, and Secretary of the Churches' Commission for Racial Justice from 1987 to 1998. He was awarded an MBE for services to community relations.

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A Luta Continua . . .

(the struggle continues)

Memoir of a Sometimes Radical Christian

David Haslam

foreword by Richard Harries

A Luta Continua

Memoir of a Sometimes Radical Christian

Copyright © 2016 David Haslam. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Resource Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199

W.

8

th Ave., Suite

3

Eugene, OR

97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978–1-4982–3605–8

hardcover isbn: 978–1-4982–3607–2

ebook isbn: 978–1-4982–3606–5

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

This book is dedicated to those who have accompanied me on the journey, those who have felt some of the pain, and those who have inspired me, many of whom appear in the text;

to Warren Bardsley, John Benington, Inderjit Bhogal, Sarah Cooke, Michael Fielding, Gary Hall, Olwen Haslam, David Read, David Winwood, and Rob van Drimmelen, who helped me with my memories—any errors of course are my own, age ensures there will be some;

to the kind and supportive congregations of Stoney Stanton Road (Coventry), Wimpson and Nursling (Southampton), Harlesden, Herne Hill, and Christ Church East Dulwich (London); to friends and comrades in the Anti-Apartheid Movement, Transnationals Information Exchange, the Churches Commission for Racial Justice, the Dalit Solidarity Networks, the Alliance of Radical Methodists, the Christian Socialist Movement (now Christians on the Left), the Transition Movement, the Tax Justice Network and the World Council of Churches; to my older children Sara and Dominic, and especially to the younger generation who follow, on their own particular paths—Maisie, Jacob, Caspar, Thea, and Martha

I am also grateful to my editor Matthew Wimer of Wipf and Stock, who believed in the book enough to publish it and then patiently answered endless queries about the process.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Late Sixties—Upheaval and Inspiration

Chapter 2: The Struggle against Apartheid

Chapter 3:The Battle for Development

Chapter 4: Local Ministry—Coventry, Southampton, and London

Chapter 5: Seeking Racial Justice

Chapter 6: Caste Out!

Chapter 7: Radical Christianity

Chapter 8: Our Precious Planet

Chapter 9: Tax Justice—Now!

Chapter 10: The Political (and Theological) is Personal

Bibliography

Foreword

In 1982 I gave a number of talks at the multi-racial Cathedral of St Mary in Johannesburg when the saintly and courageous Simeon Nkoane was Dean. Whilst there I had the opportunity to meet a number of key leaders in the struggle against Apartheid and on my return to the UK wrote about my experience. It was then that David Haslam contacted me and invited me to be Chair of End Loans to South Africa (ELTSA) the main campaigning organisation that focussed on the banks and their role in propping up Apartheid.

I was quickly struck by a number of qualities which have characterised David’s involvement in a whole range of issues. First, the drive and energy to take initiatives. Where there is a justice issue that no one seems to be doing much about, or where a particular focus is lacking, David has taken steps to start something. Secondly, the energy and willingness both to organise and carry out a great deal of the necessary detailed work himself. This might include writing well informed letters to Chairmen of banks, to Ministers or Ambassadors, or in the case of ELTSA making sure we all had a £1 share in Barclays Bank, and that we attended the AGM to raise questions about their policy on South Africa. Thirdly, a dogged persistence in pursuing whatever issue in the face of all opposition or indifference. Others might flag or fall away but David would remain obdurate. If he was faced with any disappointment there would be a characteristic Oh well, before he refocussed on the issue in hand and the next steps that had to be taken. In all this it has not been personal position or publicity that have mattered, but the cause.

A glance at the chapter headings of this book reveal the very wide range of key issues, international, national and local, with which David has been and continues to be engaged. Most recently there are the Dalits, the former untouchables, of whom there are as many as 300 million in the world, mostly in India, who experience terrible caste-based discrimination. They also represent one in four of the world’s poor. On every indicator, violence against women, poverty, lack of justice in the judicial system, and sheer humiliating rejection, they suffer disproportionately. Caste discrimination remains one of the great continuing scandals of the modern world.

Not surprisingly David has both written on this and remains active in seeking to end this system. He remains one of the great campaigners of our time, combining an uncompromising moral insight into injustice of many kinds with determined, persistent and detailed work in order to achieve at least a measure of change.

Richard Harries

(Lord Harries of Pentregarth is an independent cross-bench peer in the House of Lords and a former Bishop of Oxford)

Abbreviations

AAM Anti-Apartheid Movement

AGM Annual General Meeting

ANC African National Congress

ARM Alliance of Radical Methodists

BCC British Council of Churches

BID Bail for Immigration Detainees

BNP British National Party

BVI British Virgin Islands

CCME Churches Commission for Migrants in Europe

CCRJ Churches Commission for Racial Justice

CCSA Christian Concern for Southern Africa

CDP Community Development Project

CDSG Churches’ Dalit Support Group

CERD Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination

CERN European Council for Nuclear Research

CIS Counter Information Services

CRRU Community and Race Relations Unit

CTBI Churches Together in Britain and Ireland

CWME Commission for World Mission and Evangelism

DfID Department for International Development

DNA Deoxyribonucleic acid

DPS Diploma in Pastoral Studies

DSN Dalit Solidarity Network

EABC Europe American Banking Corporation

ECCR Ecumenical Council for Corporate Responsibility

EIRIS Ethical Investment, Research and Information Service

ELTSA End Loans to Southern Africa

FCO Foreign and Commonwealth Office

FMLN Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front of El Salvador

FSLN Sandinista National Liberation Front of Nicaragua

FTSE Financial Times Stock Exchange Index

GDP Gross Domestic Product

GW Gigawatt

ICCR Interfaith Centre for Corporate Responsibility

ICRICT Independent Commission for Reform of International Corporate Taxation

IDSN International Dalit Solidarity Network

IUF International Union of Foodworkers

JACEI Joint Advisory Committee on Ethical Investment

JDC Jubilee Debt Campaign

MFSA Methodist Federation for Social Action

MTJN Methodist Tax Justice Network

NCADC National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns

NCDHR National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights

NGO Non Governmental Organisation

NHS National Health Service

NJM New Jewel Movement

OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

PCR Programme to Combat Racism

REEP Race Equality in Employment Project

SWAPO South West Africa Peoples’ Organisation

TEV Transition Evesham Vale

TIA Theology in the Americas

TiB Theology in Britain

TIE Transnationals Information Exchange

TJN Tax Justice Network

TNC Transnational Corporation

UN United Nations

URC United Reformed Church

WCAR World Conference Against Racism

WCC World Council of Churches

WoW War on Want

Introduction

What would Jesus do? was a popular bumper sticker, especially in the United States during the 70s and 80s—often sported by folk some of whom did not always have a very challenging view of the answer. It is however a good and basic question which every Christian should constantly be asking, although never easy to answer in the complex world of the twenty-first century. Reaching the fiftieth year, or a little more, since reading Paul Tillich’s The Courage To Be, from which I date my journey of radicalisation, has caused me to ask that question afresh, and ask also whether the way I have sought to answer it in Christian ministry still holds good. It is being asked in a context in which the type of radical Christianity which I have espoused, including the theological undergirding, seems to have gradually declined as the churches, certainly in Europe, have shrunk, aged, and mostly become correspondingly more cautious.

It was in reading Tillich, and then Bonhoeffer, while studying chemistry at Birmingham University, that I realised there was a different way of being Christian, which involved much less dependence on the literal truth of the Bible, and a much wider approach to the social, political and economic realities with which we are surrounded. Tillich saw God as the ground of our being, which helped removed the spatial requirement of a God up there which my scientific training had rendered increasingly difficult to believe in. Bonhoeffer’s faith led him not only to help set up the Confessing Church in 1930s Germany, but to participate in a plot to assassinate Hitler. As well as writing The Cost of Discipleship he also explored the fascinating idea of religionless Christianity, although he could still say as he went to a martyr’s death, this is for me the beginning of life.¹ These initiated for me the start of an understanding of mission and evangelism as being about the transformation of the world into the kind of place, society, community, kingdom, which God (however we understand that Word) wants it to be.

The context of my Birmingham studies was also formative, in that I lived for three years in Methodist International House, initially sharing a room with three African students when I had hardly ever met an African before. Having to adjust to living with so many different cultures during that period was fine grounding for my work in the various fields of race relations in later years. It included multicultural football in the back garden on Saturday afternoons, an event of great excitement and hilarity which occasionally caused the neighbours to phone the police thinking a riot was breaking out. Another element of my learning then was membership of the university Methodist Society, at a time when there were dozens of Methodist students in Birmingham. Along with our house groups, Sunday speaker meetings and evening worship there was the Methsoc football team, often thought to be a pushover by the rather macho teams of the various University departments, who had a much larger pool of talent to draw on. Whether it was the power of prayer, or the commitment and determination that comes from being Jesus-followers, I am unsure but on one occasion we only just lost 2–1 to the Chemical Engineers, who prided themselves as cocks-of-the-walk in the football pecking order. They commented afterwards they had expected to win by at least ten against the Methodist Society.

Our sturdy centre-half (when there were such things) was a physicist, Keith Barnham, who later went on to obtain a PhD in nuclear science and head to CERN, the great nuclear research organisation in Switzerland. After a few years in that industry however, with its inevitable overlap with the military and their interest in nuclear weapons, he turned to seek less potentially dangerous forms of energy, of a renewable kind, and more of that in chapter 8. It was here however that I came up against an ongoing choice which has continued through my life, to put it succinctly, church or politics? Should I stand in my final year for Methodist Society president, or as a chemistry student representative in the Student Union? In a final year I could not do both, so I went for the Union. From time to time in my ministry people have asked, sometimes with feeling, why didn’t I go into politics. My answer was that you need an even thicker skin to go into politics than you do in the church, and I am not sure mine was thick enough.

I was not a very good chemist, and in fact while completing my degree, I felt a call to the Methodist ministry. It came partly from outreach work with the Methodist Society, including Sunday School teaching in inner-city Ladywood and youth work on an outer Birmingham estate, and partly prompting from friends, including Ann, my then best mate’s non-churchgoing girlfriend. It has been an extraordinarily privileged life. It has also led me to believe that the church—and the world—urgently needs the kind of radical Christianity that continually asks, in the context of the Torah and the prophets, whom Jesus would have known so well, "What would Jesus do?" And this continues to be asked in an increasingly unequal, unjust, and violent world, in which the rich get ever richer, and in which our future is increasingly threatened by the abuse of our environment. I was comforted to note in my old newspaper cuttings I was raising the latter issue even in the 1970s. More on my theological training shortly.

Perhaps first though, just a few biographical snippets, those who are not family or old friends could skip the next three paragraphs. I was born in Southport, on the Lancashire coast, where my parents had gone to live partly to escape the bombings in and around Manchester. My father’s family came from Middleton, one of the old cotton towns where, when I first visited as a child, from the top of the hill on which stood the parish church, you lost count of the towering mill chimneys after forty. I was told my grandma had gone to work in one of those before she was ten and, as a result, had a very limited education. My Lancashire grandad had died when he was quite young. Called up towards the end of the 1914–1918 war he had been subjected to a medical examination in which he had been left without clothing in an unheated room for several hours. This caused him to catch pneumonia, from which he died. As he had not been on active service there was no pension, and my grandma was left to bring up three small children with no income. Hence my father left school quite early, despite his headmaster’s entreaties, he needed to earn to help keep the family and eventually went into the cotton business. In 1940 he became a conscientious objector, perhaps not unrelated to what happened to his father, and worked in the fire service for the duration of the war. When he sought to return to his post in the cotton trade it had been taken by someone who had avoided war service, so he responded to the call for teachers in the immediate post-war years, and spent most of a year of my early childhood absent from home during the week while undergoing his training.

My mother was born in Hove, in Sussex, but moved around quite a bit as she was the daughter of a minister in the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion. This was an eighteenth century breakaway from the Church of England, whose clergy had become upset at the Countess opening private chapels on her estates and using them to preach the kind of evangelical theology also espoused by the Wesleys. My mother’s father moved around 1914 from Sussex to care for a congregation on the borders of Suffolk, where my mum was brought up, and then to Middleton, which is one of the few Huntingdon chapels remaining. His manse was a few doors away from the family home of my father, and in due course he and my mother fell in love. My maternal grandmother had moved by now to West Norwood in London, and so they were married there in the Chatsworth Baptist church in 1940. I was born in 1942 and my sister Kate in 1947. Strangely, fifty-six years later I became a Methodist minister in Herne Hill just a mile or two away from the Chatsworth church, and my mother spent the last part of her life in a church residential care home close by. It seems often that what goes around, comes around, to quote a common Caribbean saying.

I spent some fairly idyllic childhood years on the edge of Southport, with the Southbank Road Methodist Church the focus of our spiritual and social life, the woods and fields in easy reach, and schooling first in a Church of England primary and then at King George V grammar school immediately opposite our house. This meant if I hurried I could get out of bed when the bell started to ring and still be in school on time. At fourteen we moved back to Middleton, I was shoe-horned into Manchester Grammar School, and from being a star pupil in King George’s rapidly found my place somewhere in the lower half of that rather prestigious establishment. The move also led me to become a lifelong Manchester United supporter, although I have been unable to get used to paying large sums for comfortable seats, having started out watching the Busby Babes, stood on the terraces for a shilling.

In this book I seek to spell out a faith journey which has given me nearly thirty years of that mixture of joy, frustration and surprise which is local church ministry, with eleven years in a national church position. Theologically it has led me to believe more and more in less and less, as Bishop John Robinson put it long ago in Honest to God. However theology has informed me along the way, and at the end of each chapter I offer a short reflection on one (or more) of the theologians who informed and inspired me as I travelled. My first focuses on Paul Tillich, below. I should also add that friends who have accompanied me along this road have suggested that earlier drafts lacked insight into how I managed to sustain commitment through apathy and sometimes opposition. It has not been an easy ministry, for me or those close to me, I make some reference to this in chapter 10. There have been times of doubt, anxiety and even despair. What has most often sustained me is those who—in far more vulnerable situations than mine—have exemplified commitment, courage, and hope. More of that as we go.

Paul Tillich

The Courage To Be was a series of lectures given by Tillich in 1952. It drew on many earlier philosophers and theologians, including facing up to the challenge of Nietzsche, from whom he draws the concept of courage. He addresses anxiety, a crucial topic for the thinking student facing fundamental questions about the faith they thought they had, and explores the anxiety of meaninglessness, guilt, and despair. Such anxiety becomes general if the accustomed structures of meaning, power, belief and order disintegrate.² Such structures can help control anxiety by providing a containing system of courage by participation in some form of human institution, which could for example be the church, which at its best, can be that container. Tillich goes on to speak of the importance of the collective, though there is danger here, as exemplified by Nazism, Fascism and totalitarian Communism. A lesser danger is democratic conformism where individuals simply follow the crowd in their pattern of daily life and thought. Pete Seeger immortalized this in the song Little Boxes.

Tillich then moves on to explore Courage and Individualization, or the courage to be as oneself. He notes that neither in Roman Catholicism or Protestantism was there any provision for individualism. However as a tiny part of this vast universe we need self-affirmation, we need courage in the face of our insignificance. We need also to live with anxiety and doubt, and existentialism will enable this, it asserts that man is able to transcend, in knowledge and life, the finitude, the estrangement and the ambiguities of human existence.³ Tillich then points to the need for the courage to be both as a part and as an individual, and that this emerges as an outcome of the divine-human encounter. He quotes Luther who had faith in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, and proposes that one could say that the courage to be is the courage to accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable.⁴

This last quote is heavily underlined in my ancient copy, signifying how formative this idea was, along with the concept of absolute faith. Says Tillich, "Faith is the