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

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 a great tool, but I think the classical models don’t always respond to these types of questions.

Tell us a bit more about the community you grew up in

I grew up in West London with my family, my parents and grandparents were Windrush generation, and my dad was a fiery Jamaican preacher. My mum was very much a part of the ministry as well. We were part of a small church that began because my grandparents, when they first came over, they weren’t accepted into the mainstream church, which is the story of many of the Windrush generation.

There was a strong Caribbean culture around the area when I was growing up, that all got mixed in with the pre-existing English culture, like having Yorkshire pudding as well as rice and peas and chicken at Christmas.

my parents prayed for us every day, twice a day, every single day, without fail, entrusting us to the Lord

What was it like when you were growing up round there in terms of racism?

I don’t remember much explicit racism towards me whilst I was growing up. My parents, experienced a significant amount of racism when they arrived in the UK – people wanted to touch my dad’s hair and teachers had very low expectations of my mum at school, those sorts of things. But I grew up in a very diverse area so it wasn’t like that for me. I only kind of became more cognizant of racism when I went into the world of university, and I was literally a minority there.

What was the way that faith shaped life in the home and your family?

It was very full on. Most days in the week we were doing something churchy, something devotional. I think it was partly a response to the experience of coming to a new country and being excluded. Prayer was so central in my family’s life because of what my parents dealt with in coming to the UK. I remember in devotionals my dad would often read things like epic battles where God takes up the cause of his people where God defends the oppressed or the minority or the marginalized. Then when I went into apologetics and I heard some saying: ‘I don’t like the God of the Bible because he commits genocide’ and I was like, what this? This was never an objection for me. And so I’ve had to learn, and I understand why it is an objection for some people.

What do you think the influence has been of your parents on you in terms of your faith and outlook on life?

A very high view of Scripture. When we used to have family prayers, my dad would say, bring my Bible for me. So we would get this massive King James Version Bible. And if you put it on the table, and the table was dirty, he’d say no no, clean up the table, and we’d have to make sure the table was clean because it’s God’s Word. The message was clear - when you open the Bible God is speaking to you through the Spirit, and the Bible is alive with God’s Word.

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That has really helped me, because I think now we’re in a space of growing progressive Christian views, almost a Christian humanism, there’s syncretism going on. In that context, it’s great to be able to anchor myself to Scripture.

What about some differences? Obviously there’s big cultural differences between your experience and that of your parents.

One of the main differences was that in my parents’ culture and experience a lot of apologetic questions were simply not asked. When I got into apologetics and was exposed to a wide range of objections to the Christian faith it gave me more of a cumulative picture as to why Christianity is true.

Also, maybe ironically, although my church was completely black congregants, we never talked about that, we never talked about race. Today, millennials like myself and Gen Zers want to know about how ethnicity factors into our faith. There was a tension with the black church spiritualizing everything, and not being part of political or activist conversations, because we would trust in the God who was the God of Joshua etc. Whereas now, I think particularly with 2020 happening and all the protests there is a desire to think about how ethnicity and diversity isn’t erased in Scripture or in God’s story, actually, it’s celebrated.

So, your parents’ generation weren’t political with a capital P in terms of getting involved with politics in the country or activist in terms of speaking out against social injustice but were they practically active in the community?

For sure yes, my dad died in 2018 but he was always counselling other men, people knew they could come to him with questions and issues and he would always help. So yes it wasn’t an activist house in the political sense but it was very much an activist house in terms of helping people in need in the community.

If you could thank your parents for one thing related to your spiritual journey. What would it be?

I would thank them for their prayers. They prayed for us every day. We lined up at the school door, at the front door, and my dad would lay hands on each one of us and pray for us every day. Every night when we’d go to sleep, you’d be sleeping, you’d feel this hand on your head and hear your parents praying. So, on top of all of the family prayer and Bible studies we were doing, my parents prayed for us every day, twice a day, every single day, without fail, entrusting us to the Lord. So, I thank them for showing me what it means to pray and pray without ceasing, to pray when the situation doesn’t look good at all and to trust God, so yeah, that’s what I thank my parents for most.

Clare Williams-Sarpong is a speaker and tutor at The Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics (OCCA). Her work focuses on questions of race, justice and culture. She was previously a teacher and has an English degree from the University of Oxford, master’s degrees in leadership (2012) and culture, diaspora and ethnicity (2021) from the University of London and is currently studying for a PhD in sociology.