Archbishop goes live on YouTube

As we report today on TimesOnline, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York have chosen the issue of slavery to make their YouTube debut.

The video, taken by Father Jonathan Jennings, Lambeth communications director, at Zanzibar during the recent Primates' Meeting, forms part of the celebrations marking the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade this year. The Church of England’s Walk of Witness takes place in London on Saturday 24 March. The following day, all churches have been 'asked' to sing Newton's hymn Amazing Grace. (I sent my own vicar an email about this, telling him the churches had been instructed to sing Amazing Grace and offering to lead it on the guitar with our Junior Church. For some reason, our little children in Kew have proven to be particularly good at singing this hymn with guitar and tamborines. Fr Nigel told me last week we could do this and introduced me to the organist, but in doing so admonished me that no-one, not even the Archbishop of Canterbury, can 'instruct' any organist in the Church to do anything. The use of the word 'instructed' was mine. The Archbishop of York's office has emailed me to point out that this was a suggestion not an instruction, and that it did not come from the churches, but the makers of the eponymous film to be released at about the same time.)

Father Jonathan says: 'The reflection was filmed at the site of the Slave Market in Zanzibar, now the island’s Anglican Cathedral. The two Archbishops were shown two small preserved slave pits, where up to 175 men, women and children were held in appalling conditions, chained and in darkness, often without food and water. Dr Sentamu spent some time at a memorial to the slaves which features some of the original chains used when the market was operating.'

In the film, Dr Williams says: 'You see there the fetters that were used for slaves, the fetters used to bring slaves in convoy, so that they could barely stand and walk, they were so closely shackled together and to see some of the real, the actual shackles that were used until really very recently in this part of the world as part of the paraphernalia of the slave trade, it’s a reminder that it really happened, it really happened not very long ago.'

He says that the instinct to enslave is still very much present in the modern world: 'It’s as if slavery is a kind of compulsion for human societies, people go back again and again to treating people as objects, as possessions, and I don’t think we can simply sit back and say ‘it’s a thing of the past and no more’. All those modern forms of slavery, economic slavery, debt slavery in effect, the slavery of sex trafficking; these things are still with us.'

Dr Sentamu says: 'I found the whole experience heart-rending … When I went outside and actually saw those figures – how slaves were tied together – and touched the actual chains that were used, I was rendered absolutely speechless. I felt I was going back in history, but I was also in the present where still slavery in some parts of the world still happens. Every person is made in the image and likeness of God, of great worth and of great value and to be treated with great dignity. In that place was almost I felt, almost like an altar where you couldn’t but take off your shoes … you were on holy ground – holy ground.'

Comments

[richard]

Slavery was commerce built upon cruelty, a compound crime.
But let the Archbishops recognize that slavery in its subtlest forms includes marginalizing the lives of people, including especially homosexuals. Pray let the Church of England -- and the Anglican community as a whole -- see the slavery component of its scriptural misreadings in that arena.

[Pat Kashtock]

Slavery is not a historical issue. It is an issue of the here and now. Men, women and children are held in chains against their wills. They are beaten, and burned, and starved, and raped -- and few are there who will seek to free them.

But we can do something to help them. Jesus came to set the captives free, and that becomes the business of those of us who follow Him. Please visit this web-page of a 15 year-old abolitionist:

http://myspace.com/lc2lc

There you will find a link for a petition to sign and some other ideas to use to help bring justice for those who have no voice and who are invisible to the rest of the world.