QVSR Annual Lecture 2024

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This lecture was delivered at the Queen Victoria Seaman's Rest on 17th October 2024 as the Annual Rev David Roe Memorial Lecture, by the President of the Methodist Conference, Rev Helen Cameron.

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 Bearing the truth and building truth telling communities

Facing “what is”

James Baldwin, the American writer, poet and social critic spoke of the need to build a nation capable of bearing the truth and of the need to build truth telling communities in his unfinished book Remember This Housei, which reflects on race in America by tracing the lives and assassinations of his three friends Malcolm X, Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr. In this work Baldwin asserted,

“Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced”.

I would want to assert that the beginnings of forming a truth bearing community who can witness to “what is” requires a willingness to face those things which discomfort us, challenge us and even de-stabilise what we have, in our privilege, become accustomed to. Faith communities in particular need to be encouraged to engage with those parts of their tradition which encourage bearing witness to what is and to develop the capacity to discern, nurture and encourage truth bearing as communities who gather around shared values, practices and beliefs. Facing “what is” rather than living an illusion is vital. The consequences of failing to deal with the truth, with facts, objectivities and evidence are significant and we have seen signs of what it means to present “alternative truths”, to construct a post-truth narrative, to take refuge in conspiracy theories, and to construct our own truths which fly in the face of the valid experience of others. Such modes of being lead to a more divided and polarised existence.

In the Hebrew Scriptures in Isaiah 1:18 we find the phrase

“Come, now, let us reason together”.

This portion of the Hebrew scriptures, a text both Jewish and Christian faith communities regard as influential, describes God inviting the people of Israel, through the prophet Isaiah into a conversation about right living. This conversation is one based on reason, honesty, transparency, and truth. The prophet says to Israel, using the legal vocabulary of judges and the courts, that God wants the people to “argue it out” with God, to enter into the kind of discourse as a community that results in the disclosure of the truth. The truth which the prophet is seeking to share with the people is that change is possible in the lives of women and men. Changes in people, in their practices, their values and behaviours can be so complete and thorough that for the prophet the change can be expressed in terms of the change of something red (the colour of the blood of sacrificed animals) into something white (the colour of snow).

In Christian scriptures we can read the account of the ruler Pilate’s examination of the itinerant preacher Jesus after his arrest. Pilate asks Jesus, “What is truth”?ii Jesus does not answer. Christian faith communities believe and trust that there is an objective truth revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. For many others truth claims cannot be viewed as objective but only subjective and deeply contextual. Some wish to live in a post-truth society where nothing can be objectively asserted and we are offered instead, alternative truths to choose between. Such a world of complete subjectivity potentially denies the reality of lived experience and material existence of those outside our group, tribe, and country. To construct the world in this way is to polarise and make those who think differently to us, “other”.

Proactive Truth Telling

In 2015 the Methodist Conference published a report entitled, Courage, Cost and Hope on the Past Cases Review of 2013- 2015. This review of its historic safeguarding cases aimed to review all safeguarding cases documented or known about since 1950. The objective of the Review was to identify the Church’s historical response in each case to ensure that responses were safe, compliant with legislation and policy for the state and the Church and to review that responses made were pastorally appropriate. If remedial action was required this was implemented and the Review was keen that lessons learned about any necessary changes to practice or developments were made in order to ensure that safeguarding work within the Methodist Church was of the highest possible standard. What is significant about this review is that it was put in place voluntarily and pro-actively rather than in response to high profile cases or poor public reputation. It was a moment of pro-active truth telling and because at that point record keeping was poor and patchy, the review process relied on ministers, lay employees and church members exploring their memories of events and sharing those with others. It was a considered response, rather than a reaction, which sought to identify action points which would result in culture change and in its 23 recommendations identified changes in practice which would bring this about. Such a worked example can potentially

lead us to an important discernment of how we might become those who can tell the truth, bear witness to truth for others, be those who can look critically at an organisation they are part of, belong to, find their identity in and step back and say

Who are we? Whose are we? How are we experienced by others? Where does privilege and power reside in this organisation and who are the quieter voices and how do we enable their being heard? Evaluation and reflection are therefore two key responses which can lead to change by organisations and groups facing “what is” experienced by others in their engagement with us.


Facing frailties and fears

Those who identify as Christian want to believe that human beings are made for goodness, that people grow best and flourish most in the provision of truth-filled, stable, positive learning environments and from the encouragement and trust of others. But faith believers also know that human beings learn, are shaped and formed by separation, loss, failure, conflict and contestation. It is too easy to say that such challenging or painful experiences automatically enable flourishing – sometimes they just lead to sadness and sorrow. Human growth and development, transformation, and even flourishing is possible in the face of sorrow and grief if evaluation of, and reflection on the demanding experience is part of the response to the pain. The wound of the loss and sorrow will always remain in the soul but the landscape of the new world in which the wound still exists can be shaped and enlarged around the wound so that its dominance and prevailing influence is diminished. Resilience can be found and borne in the face of considerable adversity if attention is paid to what we find difficult and if frailties and fears are faced and acknowledged, and if there is reflection and self-reflexivity about the experiences faced. Resilience in our communities becomes possible when people have a developed and inner life resourced by a vision of a future which is better and different. Truth telling and bearing witness to what “is” rather than what “we might wish it was” is vital in forming human communities which can bear truth even when unpalatable, respond to it, be changed by it and through that change the world.


Truth telling, truth forming, truth bearing communities

Experiments in witness to truth

In asserting the importance of truth telling for faith communities, it is just as vital for the development of society based on and formed by ideas and creativity. It is important to acknowledge how often faith communities fail in their witness to “what is” and on occasion, are very poor witnesses to truth. The pervading culture of faith communities can be a hierarchical, clerical, defensive, opaque and unsafe one for the weak and vulnerable. Those giving evidence to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) on behalf of the Church were clear that this was the case in some places and contexts but not always and not in every situation. The Church of England and the Methodist Church, for example, have both been clear that culture change was necessary regarding its safeguarding practice. Public statements from both churches have been clear that culture change is required, as is humility and a willingness to address unsafe practices and provide an accountable ministry of the ordained and lay.

It is important to acknowledge then that the faith community’s life of witness and truth bearing cannot be a static thing. Rather, this life is found in constantly changing local experiments in witness to truth, in each challenging and changing location and context in which the faith community finds itself and, in each generation, and dominant cultural context. Such renewal of thinking and ideas and creativity is integral to health and well-being of individuals and communities.

Witness is local and particular

The witness to truth of a faith community therefore is always local (even if the media of communication available to us now increasingly stretches our understandings of locality or community). It always involves a specific group of people, and is found authentically in their distinct patterns of action and speech and relationship. Witness always takes place at a specific moment of time. It is always particular; it is always concrete. It is always changing. It is constantly being reformed, one might say, just as the Church, or any other faith community, is. Witness is something that particular people at particular times and in particular places try – and sometimes fail at, and try again. There can be, if we are relaxed and not anxious, a playful and creative aspect to the trying out of different approaches and strategies. It would help us as faith communities to ask what is the difference between an experiment and a failure when we are seeking to communicate with others about our ideas, plans, our hopes and our openness to all that the future might hold.

Truthful witness might be said to consist of constantly changing experiments in witness to the divine life in each location in response to the insights of previous experience and knowledge of the context. Peter Mandelson always denied mistaking mushy peas for guacamole in a Fish and Chip shop in Hartlepool during an election campaign, but as a story about dislocation of the “metropolitan elite” visiting the North-East during an election campaign, it is treasured as a story by northerners who are used to being marginal and so were amused by the discomfort of those who found it hard to interpret a context and culture that they were less familiar with.

Witness as improvisation

A kind of experimentation or improvisation might be called for in which one discovers what works and what does not work primarily by doing it: by trying it out, carrying on, and falling over, and picking oneself up, and trying again. It is playful improvisation when play means meaningful and purposeful thought and behaviour that has patterns to it but no prescribed or pre-determined outcomes. Play permits not-knowing; a safe uncertainty where “yet to be” is a position which can be held with integrity.

For faith communities witness to the truth in every age is a matter of improvisation: of trying things or ideas out, risking failure, seeing what can be done with the resources that are actually to hand rather than in some ideal world where we could have whatever resources we needed. It is the kind of experimentation where whatever is borrowed from elsewhere has to be adapted to local circumstances, so that there’s no guarantee that the results will be the same here as they were elsewhere. It is the kind of experimentation where the particular strengths and weaknesses of the people involved make all the difference.

Loveday Alexander, Mike Higtoniii and others including Samuel Wellsiv have all reminded us that the witness of the truth bearing community is also witness that is called to show in this particular place we are located at this time, the same truth, the same love, the same divine life. It is not simply a matter of improvisation for the sake of improvisation, but of faithful improvisation – of finding out how to say the same thing or exploring the same idea in a different language, in a different context, to different people. It is about speaking of faith in and through loving actions that are credible, compelling and attractive not in order to draw others in but rather to ease our ability to live and move and bear witness wherever we go. Such a way of living espoused by a faith community might be expressed as witness “as we go” rather than the imperative “go and witness” which the Christian faith tradition has identified as , “The Great Commission”.

Deep learning

All these local experiments in witness and truth bearing, our faithful improvisations, live by our capacity for learning new ideas. Improvising is something we can learn to do, and then learn to do better. Because we are called to faithful improvisation to witness that truthfully shows people the divine life we are called to, we are each called to learn to know God more deeply. We believe that we have to learn the heart of our faith more deeply because we are called to improvise witness to it than we would do if we were simply called to repeat it. Repetition can be sustained by rote learning, or by the kind of learning that simply hoovers up text, song, ideas and then regurgitates.

Higton suggests that improvisation, on the other hand, requires deep learningv. It requires the kind of learning where one becomes viscerally familiar with the way one’s faith articulates what is connected to what, what depends on what, what can be bent without being broken, and what is brittle. It demands that we learn what we can and can’t get away with, what we must cling to and what can be discarded as unhelpful accretion. There is, I believe, nothing frivolous or careless about trying things out playfully, not being discouraged by failure, being willing to try things out. However, learning for the sake of being equipped for improvisation is deeper learning than learning for the sake of business as usual. The wells of ideas deep enough to resource and sustain a truth bearing community need to be dug deeply and thoroughly. We go on unlearning and learning, being broken and remade, doing and being undone, dying and rising continuously. This is our vocation as truth bearers and receivers – to be learners.

It is 50 years since the Methodist Church ordained women as presbyters. I am the 10th woman President of the Conference. There was one female President for each decade for 40 years and then 6 in the most recent decade. I was asked by the President of Malta what we have learned. I replied that it is important not to stereotype. Those 10 women are as different from each other as the 100s of men who have held the office. The Church has learned to trust women as leaders. They have convictions about relational leadership, they are not solitary heroes wearing capes and wearing their underpants on the outside. The Church has learned, in the immortal words of the poet Maya Angelou, “don’t trust a naked person when they offer you their shirt”. We cannot lead others unless we also know how to follow;


Attending to Other Witnesses to truth

The learning that effective truth telling witness demands of us therefore also involves deep attention to the great cloud of witnesses alongside and among whom we now witness. We learn truth from those who have witnessed to that truth before us and around us. In fact, we can only understand truth through the individual witnesses and communities of witness to it that we encounter.

We have to learn how to embody truthful witness to the same reality ourselves. There is no manual to download but there is history, reason, experience and tradition treasured by and interpreted by a diverse set of witnesses.

So, we are invited to study together in community, to learn in each other’s company to read contexts, people, events together. We are inspired to truthful witness, enabled to imagine witness, and disciplined in our witness, in our encounters with the witnesses who speak to us in literature, history and the tradition. We need therefore to be those who are in love with literature and text, history, reason and tradition, critically engaged with these, familiar and literate with them, able to interrogate as well as learn from what has gone before. “Always keep a novel on the go”.

Building communities capable of bearing the truth and acting on it cannot be a static thing. Rather, life and truth is found in constantly changing local experiments in witness and truth bearing, in each challenging and changing location and context, and in each generation and dominant cultural context. Privilege shifts and must be critically engaged with, again and again.

Witness in action

It is all very well to talk in grand terms about faith communities as truth bearing communities, as if this witness to truth were something obvious and visible when one takes the whole community in view, and looks at its life as a single fact. But the witness of the faith community is always the witness of specific people in specific locations, working out how to be witnesses here and now: how to live here and now, as people called to be holy, as people called to witness to truth in particular ways with particular people, using particular language and carrying out particular acts.

We learn from past generations, from their history of experiments in embodied witness to God’s gracious love in a whole series of contexts. Their experiments, as ours are, were always fallible, sometimes terrible, occasionally glorious, most often something of a mixture, but they were always experiments in embodied witness to the divine life, and we are able to learn what our witness might become by sitting at their feet rather than dismissing their contribution.


Faith communities and cultural appropriation

We sometimes say that we stand on the shoulder of giants in order to express that sense of discovering truth by building on previous discoveries. We need to be those who, as well as attentive to text and tradition, experience and reason, can be attentive to the truth bearing witness of earlier generations, attentive in a way which is willing to gaze on what went before, to honour the core values and be willing to critique, re-visit, dismiss and adapt as necessary. So we need to honour the tradition, the rock from which we were hewn but not be too deferential to it. Faith communities, if they are bold enough to look unflinchingly at their legacy will see faith sharing globally as inextricably linked with colonialism.

Attitudes inherited unquestionably from positions of privilege are passed on with faith sharing as though faith and cultural attitudes are indivisible. Examples of such unholy alliances between faith sharing and cultural appropriation can be seen in many locations of British colonial domination. The roots of such an alliance are to be seen in the treatment of Indigenous Aboriginal people over many decades and continue in the present. On 13th February 2008 at Parliament House in Canberra the Prime Minister of Australia Kevin Rudd made an historic statement acknowledging the truth and reality of the experience of many Indigenous Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as belonging to the “the stolen generation”. The moment of truth telling concerned many indigenous Australian children who had been forcibly removed from their families and placed into “out of home care”. Their names were changed, their identity lost and their culture and heritage denied.

The moment of Rudd’s apology in 2008 was hailed as a moment of truth telling by the Australian government along with an apology, he offered for the role played by the government which laid the foundation for healing to take place. The Aboriginal and Torres Islander social justice commissioner in 2008, Tom Calma called on the Australian government to partner with Indigenous people to deal with that “unfinished business”. Sadly 15 years, later much of that business of providing an indigenous voice on key policy areas remains unfinished. The number of indigenous children removed and placed in “out of home care” has doubled since the apology was made in 2008 and is 10 times the rate of non-indigenous children. vi

Facing up to discrimination

The direct links between this case and those of the UK government’s betrayal in reneging on promises made to the Windrush generation are clear. As are the links to the issues of reparations for the involvement on the transatlantic slave trade.

We will, if we are able, learn from those around us now, who are experimenting in witness for themselves, if we can remain open and not dismissive if their witness does not look like ours. We need to learn how to witness along with them, especially when it applied to insights our faith communities have forgotten, or never learned to articulate or have failed so far to realize how important those aspects might be for us and for the world we inhabit. The Church in the UK, for example, has been revived and transformed by Christians from the global majority. However, it is yet to listen with humility or work in transformative ways to include these Christians in the structures of the organization and in senior leadership and we have no credible account to give of why this is so. Further, our interests and pursuits and indeed the Christian Church’s insistence on focusing on issues of sex and sexuality, have meant other issues which should excite us, appall us, energise and drive our faith communities to action, change and transformation are ignored and neglected. Inter-faith dialogue skills are required urgently.

A neglected truth in our society is that maternity survival rates in the UK differ depending on ethnicity. Most people would assume that maternal deaths in the UK are, although tragic and comparatively rare, a risk faced equally by all mothers. Sadly, research has shown that this is not the case. There appears to be a relationship between maternal death and ethnicity.

The link was highlighted by researchers at Oxford University’s ‘Mothers and Babies: Reducing Risk Through Audits and Confidential Enquiries’ (MBRRACE) unit. MBRRACE investigated outcomes from a range of births during 2016-18 and found that maternal death was five times more likely in black women than it was in white women.

MBRRACE’s report raised the spectre that, despite decades of progress, racism remains an institutional problem, and not something limited to the far right or ignorant chants on football terraces. The reportvii, using data from England, found that except for Chinese mothers, black mothers had worse maternity outcomes than white women. Death rates during or within six weeks of pregnancy were just eight per 100,000 for white women (and only five per 100,000 for Chinese women). Asian women had a death rate of 15 per 100,000, close to the rate for mixed-race women of 16 per 100,000. However, the rate for black women was, by a wide margin, the largest, at 40 per 100,000. This meant black women were not just five times more likely to die than white women, but also two-and-a-half more likely to die than any other ethnic minority.

Here is a clear example of the danger of the consequences of not facing up to “what is” in order to make the future safer for black women. To overcome such discrimination demands that white men and women are honest in their accounting of their own privilege as prospective parents. Maternal safety for all women should be standard as a concept and as a lived reality but it isn’t. The colour of a woman’s skin in the UK determines what kind of maternal health and outcome they can have during and after a pregnancy.

Such a truth regarding maternal health and ethnicity should be one we all know and challenge, training for all ante-natal personnel should address this discrimination and change it in order to build a just and equal society.

Truthful people and truth-telling communities

What is within us, our privilege and power (or lack of it) shapes and forms what we offer as our humanity and in service of others. We must pay attention to the inner landscape of our lives. Our hearts must be reachable and breakable. We must be truthful people who can form and sustain truth telling communities, if we cannot do this, then we become less than we were intended to be. The Prologue of John’s gospel tells us that God was born among us, “full of grace and truth” and Jesus told us that, “the truth will make you free”.



i James Baldwin Remember this House, Unfinished and unreleased manuscript. Material from this manuscript was used in the film Re/member.

ii Gospel of John Chapter 18: 38

iii Loveday Alexander and Mike Higton (eds), 2016, Faithful improvisation? Theological Reflections on Church Leadership, London: Church House Publishing

iv Samuel Wells, 2004, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics, Ada Michigan: Brazos Press

v Mike Higton, 2012, A Theology of Higher Education, Oxford: OUP

vi Calla Wahlquist Rudd’s apology, 10 years on: the elusive hope of a ‘breakthrough moment’, The Guardian, February 2018.

vii MMBBRACE Report Saving Lives; Improving Mothers Care, December 2020