Clare Williams: ‘I thank my parents for showing me what it means to pray and pray without ceasing’

Apologist and speaker Clare Williams-Sarpong reflects on the changing experience of the black community in the UK and, within that, the place and power of Scripture and prayer in family life

Clare, tell us who you are, what you’re doing now, and how it comes to be that you’re doing that.

So I’m Clare Williams, I’m a Christian speaker who loves evangelism and apologetics; I love presenting a credible case for the Christian faith. I’m also doing a PhD in Sociology, and I do other bits and bobs in terms of training and things like that. So it’s a bit of a portfolio at the moment. I used to be a secondary school English teacher, and I was an assistant head teacher in my last post, but God, changed up my plans and I really love what I’m doing now.

One of your foci is ethnicity and the questions being raised by especially, the black community, can you say more about that?

When I left my teaching career, I trained with the OCCA, the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics, and they took me on board as a fellow Junior speaker, and it really strengthened my faith. But I also found that sort of classical apologetics models, didn’t address the cultural questions that come from my community. In the black community people ask whether Christianity was only introduced to black people through slavery, and that’s a very felt objection within my community. Those questions matter to me, because I think apologetics is ……