Rector's Letter

Dedham Vicarage

July 2025

Dear friends,
 
I hope this finds you well – on the cusp of summer holidays and time enjoying God’s good creation with family, friends and loved ones.
 
At the end of this month, the Church of England remembers William Wilberforce, Olaudah Equiano and Thomas Clarkson and their efforts to abolish the slave trade in the then British Empire.  Olaudah Equiano is possibly the least well known of the three, but he grew up abroad (likely in southern Nigeria) and was himself a slave and traded several times before buying his freedom and ending up in London, where he became one of the leading figures of the abolitionist movement at the end of the 18th century.
 
Thomas Clarkson was the son of a clergyman who grew up in Cambridgeshire.  After his undergraduate studies in Cambridge, he met many abolitionists who were Quakers and Nonconformists (Protestants other than Anglicans).  He began lobbying parliament in aid of the abolitionist cause and, through this, came in contact with William Wilberforce.  Wilberforce was an independent MP for Yorkshire and an Anglican, one of the first Anglicans to take up the abolitionist cause.  He was driven by his evangelical faith to do so and was blessed, three days before his death, to witness the fruit of all the abolitionists’ labour as Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.
 
Christian opposition to slavery originates from the teaching found right at the opening of the Bible in Genesis 1:27: “God created mankind in His own image, in the image of God He created them; male and female He created them.”  The argument being that if God has endowed each and every human being with the immense dignity of bearing His image, then we should not denigrate fellow image-bearers by treating them as ‘property’.
 
It would be easy to think that slavery and human trafficking are issues of the past, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.  Today, organisations like Stop the Traffik (https://stopthetraffik.org/) continue the legacy of Wilberforce, Equiano and Clarkson in highlighting the magnitude of the present evil and seeking, like these leading lights of former days, to bring it to an end.  I commend their work to you!

Best wishes,

Phillip

Revd Phillip Young