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March 2010
Dear
friends,
Do
you believe these headlines from 12th February?
“Methodist
church 'prepared to go out of existence'” (Daily Mail)
“Leader signals end of Methodism” (The Independent)
“General Synod:
Methodists
likely to merge with Church of England” (The Daily Telegraph).
The
Methodist
Church
is on its way to rejoining the Church of England in a historic move.
“Methodists
declare 'we're ready to merge' with Church of England” (The Times)
Ruth Gledhill, The
Times Religion Correspondent, went as far as to say, “The
Methodist
Church
is prepared to be absorbed by the Church of England if that is the price of
unity,
Britain
’s most senior Methodist said yesterday.”
So where does all this come from and what’s it all about?
After many years of
conversations the Methodist Conference and the General Synod of the Church
of England met separately in July 2003 and agreed that for the sake of the
mission of Christ’s Church the time was right for the two churches to draw
closer together. They recognised
that the long term goal was for ‘full visible unity’, but that such a goal would
be a long time in the future. As
part of the process of drawing closer together they agreed to
sign a Covenant in the form of a set of affirmations and commitments.
This was to be undertaken in: ‘a
spirit of penitence for the human sinfulness and narrowness of vision that
has contributed to past divisions, believing that we have been impoverished
through our separation and that our witness to the gospel has been weakened
accordingly, and in a spirit of thanksgiving and joy for the convergence in
faith and collaboration in mission that we have experienced in recent
years.’
Since 2003 a
Joint Implementation Commission has been meeting to address the issues
contained in the Covenant and to encourage joint initiatives, including
projects like the ‘Fresh Expressions’ programme.
Locally, we have been encouraged to explore the implications of the
Covenant with our partners, in our case this has meant working more closely
with
St Thomas
’s and Salisbury URC. [The
United Reformed Church is an observer in the whole process]. As
part of the ongoing explorations the President and Vice-President of the
Methodist Conference, Revd David Gamble and Dr Richard Vautrey, were invited
to address the Church of England’s recent General Synod and the Archbishop
of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, will be addressing the Methodist
Conference in July.
David Gamble and Richard Vautrey used the
opportunity at the General Synod to state that the Covenant relationship
between our two churches was a “serious,
deeply committed relationship” and “not
an irrelevant extra”. Responses
to the challenges of the Covenant should therefore be driven by a desire for
mission. David went on to say
that, “Within God’s overwhelming
gracious covenant relationship with us and with our churches, we are in a
covenant with each other. For
better for worse, for richer for poorer, but always for the gospel.”
As Methodists the word ‘covenant’ has a deep meaning
within our worship and our understanding of discipleship and so Richard
shared the Methodist Covenant prayer with the General Synod.
David went on to explain that Methodists approach the Covenant with
the Church of England in the spirituality of that Covenant prayer. He
then continued: “So when we say to
God ‘let me have all things let me have nothing’, we say it by extension
to our partners in the Church of England as well. We
are prepared to go out of existence not because we are declining or failing
in mission, but for the sake of mission. In
other words we are prepared to be changed and even to cease having a
separate existence as a Church if that will serve the needs of the
Kingdom.”
Does this mean that we are about to return to the Church of England
or cease to exist as Methodists?
Having read the full text of
the President and Vice President’s address to the General Synod (copies
available from the Steward’s Vestry) I am somewhat amazed by the newspaper
headlines, which go far beyond anything that was even hinted at.
For an experienced religious correspondent,
Ruth Gledhill’s comments in The
Times are frankly astonishing and are certainly putting words into David
Gamble’s mouth! On a practical
and theological level there is a great deal of debate that needs to take
place before our two churches could move towards any visible unity scheme.
However,
David Gamble has raised a deeply significant issue for us – what it means
to be a church. Methodism’s
roots are as a movement committed to mission and therefore the link he makes
with the Covenant prayer should be a constant reminder to us when we
complain that as a church we are being ignored by the world!
However emotionally attached we may be to our buildings, our way of
being a church, our worship, our expressions of faith - all that is
secondary in comparison to our commitment to Christ and his gospel.
Maybe as we journey through Lent we need to ask ourselves where God
is leading us and what we are prepared to give up for the sake of the
Kingdom.
Every blessing,
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February 2010
Where
was God in
Haiti
's earthquake?
Once again a natural
disaster has made people ask questions about the nature of faith and even
more fundamental ones about God. Henry
Makori, a journalist working in
Kenya
, had this to say in an article for the Catholic Information Service of
Africa.
Is God
good all the time? Is God all-loving, compassionate and always acting in the
best interest of human beings, the cream of his creation? Is
every human being valuable in the eyes of God? Then
why did God allow tens of thousands of innocent people to perish in such a
dreadful fashion in
Haiti
? Is God all-powerful and in
control of everything that happens in the universe, including the dropping
of a leaf from a tree branch? Does
God know everything? Why then
couldn't he use such awesome knowledge and power to protect the people of
Haiti
?
If
there were easy answers to these questions then I’m sure they would have
been expounded after other disasters, and particularly after the Tsunami of
2005. In a world that cries out
for certainties, scientific explanations and rational thought the idea of
mystery, and more profoundly the mystery of God, presents a difficulty.
Natural disasters do not discriminate in the people they
affect and amongst the dead in Port-au-Prince were Archbishop Joseph Miot, a
Roman Catholic priest with a long-term commitment to helping the poor, and Hédi
Annabi, head of the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti, described by
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as a ‘true citizen of the world’ and a
‘mild man with the heart of a lion’. At
the same time others who had gone to help found themselves in the spotlight,
like Carmen Michalska a 36 year old nurse from
Scotland
who was described as ‘the Angel of Haiti.’
Carmen was part of the rescue team who found Wismond Exantus alive an
incredible 11 days after the tragedy when he became the last survivor
to be pulled alive from the rubble. Being
the smallest team member, Carmen was chosen to crawl 13 feet through a tiny
gap in the wreckage to give him water before he was saved.
If Carmen was described as an angel, then it must be
because others saw God at work in her actions, which is part of the answer
to the question, ‘Where was God in
Haiti
’s earthquake?’ The huge
outpouring of generosity and love across the world for the people of
Haiti
is also surely a sign of God’s Spirit at work, as is the courage and
selfless acts of many of the rescuers. However,
that’s not how the outspoken
American televangelist Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting
Network, saw it when he asserted that the cataclysmic earthquake that struck
Haiti occurred because the
Haitian slaves swore a pact with the devil to free them from French rule
(over 200 years ago). Others
have also suggested that this was God’s punishment for sin, a comment I
find not only horrific, but blasphemous.
The God
we see revealed in the life of Christ, whose extraordinary love we see
poured out on the cross, is one who stands alongside those in greatest need
and suffers with them. And in my
mind I have an image of God buried beneath the rubble holding the hands of
those who were trapped, shedding tears with those who were bereaved,
encouraging the rescuers in their darkest moments and challenging us to face
up to our global responsibilities.
One of the ironies of the
rescue operation in this desperately poor country was the use of the
‘high-tech’ specialist equipment which can detect the faintest of noises
to within a few metres and the presence of carbon dioxide to find survivors
rendered unconscious. Here was the
image of the world’s most advanced resources being used to rescue the last
remnants of life set against a backcloth of despair, not just of the last few
days, but of hundreds of years.
Haiti
was once one of the richest islands in
France
's empire, but only because it imported 40,000 slaves a year to maintain its
800,000 African work force whose conditions were atrocious - average life
expectancy 21 years. When
independence came in 1804 the cost was the payment of enormous reparations to
France
which lasted until 1947, funded by huge loans.
Historian Alex von Tunzelmann, sums up
Haiti
by saying that it “has had slavery,
revolution, debt, deforestation, corruption, exploitation and violence.
Now it has poverty, illiteracy, overcrowding, no infrastructure,
environmental disaster and large areas without the rule of law.
And that was before the earthquake. It sounds a terrible cliché, but
it really is a perfect storm. This
is a catastrophe beyond our worst imagination.”
Perhaps
we should ask why it is that one country should suffer so much, but let’s
not blame God for the suffering or the fact that we have not listened to his
voice in the cries of the poor. Maybe
the real question is why it has taken such a catastrophic event to wake up the
world to the plight of
Haiti
.
A
closing thought from the Irish rock star, Bono, who had this to say at the 54th
Annual National Prayer Breakfast in
Washington
,
DC
in February 2006:
“God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes
where the poor play house…
God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child
with a virus that will end
both their lives…
God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war…
God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives,
and God is with us if we are with them.
Every blessing Malcolm Hickox
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December
2009
Dear friends,
As we approach the end of another year I’ve been
reflecting on a number of the anniversaries that have taken place during 2009.
Clearly, our own 250th anniversary has been of great
significance for us at SMc, but what of the 200th anniversary of
Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the
publishing of his ‘The Origin of Species’ ?
Back in May we hosted a Salisbury Festival literary event with the
launch of Charles Foster’s book ‘The Selfless Gene, Living with God and Darwin’.
Like many of the ‘
Darwin
debates’ over this year it focussed on the tension between the stridently
atheist views of Richard Dawkins and the ultra conservative views of the
‘Young Earth Creationists’. Charles
Foster revelled in what he saw as the inconsistencies of both positions: on
the one hand a universe without God and on the other a belief that the
universe and all life were created by direct acts of God during a short period
between 5,700 and 10,000 years ago.
It’s frequently been suggested that
Darwin
started the process of science crushing religious belief, but the
Methodist
Church
’s theological journal, The Epworth Review, dedicated a whole issue
to the
Darwin
anniversary and its contributors took a very different point of view.
They illustrated how wrestling with the ideas provoked by
Darwin
afforded them greater insight into the mysteries of God, creation and what it
means to be human. But there is
one aspect of
Darwin
’s work that causes me great concern and that is the concept of the ‘Survival
of the fittest’, a phrase
coined at the time by Herbert
Spencer. Most of us have a
rather distorted view of this concept and of the complex nature of what modern
biologists call natural
selection. What is perhaps
easier to understand is how David Attenborough has illustrated some of
Darwin
’s ideas through his incredible television programmes, showing us the
fragility of life on earth and the precarious existence of some species.
And this is where my concern arises, because human intervention and
activity has become so intense across the planet that the ‘survival of the
fittest’ has taken on frightening proportions.
The
great creation poems of Genesis, trivialised by Richard Dawkins and taken
literally by the ‘Young
Earth Creationists’, give us a vivid picture not of scientific facts, but of
God’s commitment to the universe and of the need for harmony and respect for
life. From that perspective all
Christians should have a passionate concern for the environment, one of the
reasons why we have our ‘Creation Embroidery’ in the Sanctuary.
This is equally why the Church Council has embarked on an ‘audit’
of SMc’s activities with a view to us becoming registered as an Eco
Congregation. There is a sense in
which all churches should be Eco Congregations, which is why it was
disappointing to have so few at our recent presentation evening.
So
what has all this to do with Advent and Christmas?
Last month I wrote about taking risks, although from a positive
perspective and not with the future of our planet at stake, and I quoted
John’s Gospel, ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so
that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.’
J.3:16.
What the gospel doesn’t say is
that God so loved humankind, it’s the whole world that God loves, which
means that we cannot consider ourselves to be in a superior position above the
rest of life or above our concern for the natural world.
But more than that, it also suggests that how we treat this planet and
demonstrate our concern for its future displays something of our attitude to
God.
John’s
gospel also gives us that other great insight into God, that ‘the Word
became flesh; and made his home among us.’
J.1:14.
What we call ‘the Incarnation’
is the demonstration that God loves and values the whole of creation by coming
amongst us in the life of Jesus. And
as another part of the gospel affirms, ‘It was not to judge the world
that God sent his only Son into the world, but that through him the world
might be saved.’ J.3:17.
So here we have a picture of Jesus not just as our personal Saviour,
but as one who comes to save the whole of humanity and the whole created
order. In the words of the
apocalyptic material we have been hearing in Sunday worship, the whole earth
groans with the birth pangs of the kingdom.
In accepting Jesus as our Saviour we also accept his mission, and his
concern for the whole created order becomes ours.
However, the Incarnation isn’t just a description of the events
surrounding Jesus’ entry into the world, it has to be the pattern for our
ministry in the world. If Jesus
entered into human life as a sign of God’s commitment to us and of God’s
presence amongst us, then we too are called to enter fully into the life of
the world as a continuing sign of God’s presence through our lives.
All of which reminds me of another meeting we held at church recently
that was also poorly supported – the presentation evening on the work of the
Salisbury Street Pastors. If ever
there was a project that summed up what ‘Incarnational Mission’ was about
it is the Street Pastors, who go out in the early hours of the morning simply
to be a presence in the city centre and a channel for God’s love.
So this Advent and Christmas lets get behind the
much-loved birth stories of Matthew and Luke, the inspirational vision of John
and the kingdom urgency of Mark and allow this event we call the Incarnation
to stir us to action. In
thankfulness for the news of God’s presence amongst us let’s accept our
responsibility for caring for creation and allow God’s love to shine through
our lives in the world.
Every blessing,
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