A Hung Church

Dear David and Nick

A Hung Church

Well, I am so glad you managed to get that situation sorted out.  After all, you would not want the country to go ungoverned for too long (unless you are a convinced anarchist).  As Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister I watched you stand in the Downing Street garden, elegantly clad and sporting your different blue and yellow ties.  This seemed to be the only jarring note.  Perhaps you need a coalition tie.  What would the design be?  Blue and yellow stripes seem to put across your message more clearly than mixing the two to produce a shared of green in my opinion.I must say it seemed odd to me that parties who denounced coalition as a bad idea (though embracing it is Scotland and Wales and even making it compulsory in Northern Ireland) soon sought coalition partners once the reality of a hung parliament hit home.  It certainly kept the political analysts and the 24-hour news channels excited, almost to the point of hysteria though the financial markets and almost everyone I know managed to stay calm  It seems that you will have to live with a hung parliament at least for a while, but take hear; some of us belong to a hung Church.Jesus may have prayed that his followers would be one so that the world might believe (John 17:21) but it just does not seem to have worked out that way.  We all know that there are different denominations and that although many of us get along better than we used to (just like you Conservatives and Liberal Democrats?) there is no immediate prospect of us all getting together to the point where we are doing the religious equivalent of wearing exactly the same tie.  Even if we could somehow resolve all the differences and reconcile all the denominations that have arisen since the sixteenth century we would then still have to look east to the Orthodox and a much older division between Christians.  Ecumenically speaking, we are a hung Church.Denominationally, we are no less a hung Church, a hung United Reformed Church.  There are some issues on which we just can’t seem to come to one mind.  In recent years the URC has had impassioned debates about human sexuality, to the point where exhaustion set in and we moved on to other matters.  We have to perform a tricky balancing act to respect the views of those who see infant baptism as acceptable and those who are committed to the practice of believer’s baptism.  One of the Elders Meetings in this pastorate (no names, but they know who they are) could tell you that discussing this issue touches upon deep feelings.  On Holy Communion, the three congregations of this pastorate even have different policies and approaches concerning the presence of children at communion and the presence of alcohol in the communion wine.The truth though is that we are not a hung Church so much as a “hang-together Church”.  In other words we are not defined by our differences but by what we hold in common; that we live in God’s world (Psalm 24:1); that even when the world has gone wrong God puts things back together again though Jesus Christ and our task is to share that message (2 Corinthians 5:19): I doubt if the current coalition will be around for anywhere near a s long as the United Reformed Church has managed so far but if your define yourselves by ideals and policies you share, one that benefit the nation and the world, rather than your differences that will generate party and sectional self-interest you might  just hang together for a while yet.Look forward to seeing how the new tie idea works out. 

This entry was posted on 31/05/2010 at 10:07 am and is filed under Uncategorised. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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