28 June 2014
Back to the Bible, forward to the world: Inaugural address of the Methodist President
In his inaugural address as President of the Methodist
Conference, the Revd Kenneth Howcroft spoke of the "desperate need"
for the Church to "speak biblically to serve the present age." He
encouraged Conference representatives to turn outwards to face the
world with renewed self-confidence in their Methodist
identity.
Addressing the opening of the annual Methodist Conference in
Birmingham, Mr Howcroft spoke of the challenge of communicating the
Gospel in contemporary society, saying; "We seem less and less able
to speak the languages of the people and cultures round us. We seem
less and less steeped in the language and stories of the
Bible."
"But God has not finished with us yet!" he added, urging people to
celebrate all that Methodism is and could be.
"We are a Methodist people on pilgrimage. We are communities of
very different people, sometimes multi-cultural and sometimes
multi-national, connected together in what we call a 'Connexion'.
We come together in small groups and communities to help each other
explore the grace of God. We gather round the bible and the table
in order to discover the presence of Christ amongst us in word and
sacrament. We encourage each other and watch over one another in
love. What we have in common is that we all recognise our need of
and dependence on the grace of God: the God who loves us before we
know it; who saves us through Christ when we do not deserve it; who
sanctifies our thoughts, feelings, intentions, words and actions
through the Spirit working within us when we are unable to do it
for ourselves; who comes to us, is made real for us, nurtures and
guides us through various outward and visible and, therefore,
sacramental signs."
The full text of the address follows:
What are we Methodists for?
People outside the churches often show that they do not know the
answer to that. Once upon a time it was easy: we were the people
who, as Colin Morris once somewhat unkindly put it, could be
caricatured as saying "If it is fun, we are against it. If it is a
lot of fun, we are very much against it. And if it is whoopee …..
we will write to the Methodist Recorder about it!". Now, though,
people are not clear about what we are against, still less why we
are against it - either because they do not understand, or because
they are just not interested in what we are for.
People from other churches often do not know what to make of us,
either. They do not know where to put us on the Christian spectrum.
Sometimes they just seem politely puzzled. Sometimes they ask. "Are
you like Lutherans? Reformed? Baptists? Pentecostalists? Anglicans?
Roman Catholics? Orthodox?". To which the answers are in some
respects like those of that character in The Vicar of Dibley "Yes,
yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And no".
We are and we are not like those others. But we are also
characteristically ourselves - even these days, when an increasing
number of us are not born and bred as Methodists or Methodist by
conviction; when many of us are perhaps Methodist because it
happened to be the nearest church where we liked the music, or it
was the first church where the coffee was drinkable. Yet even these
days, you can still walk into a group of people and often just know
that they are Methodist. It is almost indefinable. It is not just
the level of noise, or the almost idolatrous regard for committees
and the proper storage of tea cups (and I have always said that a
major part of discipleship is being prepared to drink tea and be
bored for Christ in meetings!). It is something more.
So, what gifts do we Methodists bring to the party? What are we
for? Maybe part of the problem for other people is that we are no
longer clear about the answer ourselves (although the General
Secretary's coining of the phrase "A discipleship movement shaped
for mission" has got some of us thinking and arguing about the
question again).
Once upon a time, though, we had an answer. It said that the
Methodist Church "… ever remembers that in the providence of God
Methodism was raised up to spread scriptural holiness through the
land by the proclamation of the evangelical faith and declares its
unfaltering resolve to be true to its divinely appointed
mission".
No. Please. Don't glaze over. I know that sounds complicated and
old-fashioned. It comes from a time before any of us were adults,
even our distinguished predecessors in these presidential and
vice-presidential roles here today! It is from the Deed of
Methodist Union 1932, when our current Methodist Church in Great
Britain was formed out of the main churches into which the original
Methodist movement in this country had splintered. Bear with me for
a moment as we look at it again. Because it is still the basis of
our Church, our Conference, our Connexion. Yet do we still 'ever
remember' what it says? Do we know what our 'divinely appointed
mission' is? And do we still have an 'unfaltering resolve to be
true' to it'?
What we are meant to remember is that we have been 'raised up' by
God. Who we are, what we do and what we are for is not a matter of
our own whims or choice. We are not a voluntary association of
people in that sense. Rather we are a group of people called and
made by God. The choice we have is whether we freely and gratefully
respond to the grace of that calling.
Now it is theoretically, of course, entirely possible that in the
18th century God called our predecessors into existence for a
purpose that no longer exists in the 21st century, and so God is
gently letting us slide out of existence again. Let me say right
now that I do not believe that this is the case. It is not that God
is refusing or just forgetting to raise us up. There may be
occasions when we ignore our calling and forget to let God raise
us. But God has not finished with us yet!
So, what is it that we are meant to be doing (and are doing in
many places and in all sorts of ways; some of them extraordinary,
but many of them ordinary, involving ordinary people in ordinary
situations, and all the more wonderful for that)? To paraphrase the
sentence I quoted a moment ago, it is about demonstrating and
proclaiming by who we are, what we do and what we say that
Christian faith in the sense of a living relationship with Jesus
Christ is good news for people.
To put that another way it is about "spreading scriptural holiness
through the land". That phrase in the Deed of Union echoes
something that goes back to John and Charles Wesley and the
earliest Methodists. In the Large Minutes of the earliest Methodist
Conferences we find:
Q. 3. What may we reasonably believe to be God's design in raising
up the Preachers called Methodists? A. Not to form any new
sect; but to reform the nation, particularly the Church; and to
spread scriptural holiness over the land.
So, a small task to begin with: reforming the nation (or, as we
should now say with regard to the areas under the jurisdiction of
this Conference, the nations). We tend not to use phrases like
'reforming the nation' these days. That may be because we have lost
confidence in ourselves and our Christian conscience. Or it may be
because we have learnt that, if we do talk like that, people will
immediately assume that we are not just talking politically, but
advocating party politics, because sadly the politics of power seem
to have become the all-controlling way of looking at the
world.
But this was true to some extent in Wesley's day as well. He often
protested that he did not want to enter political debates. Yet he
did have things to say about the state of what we would call
society. He asked whether Oxford with its University was a
Christian city. He asked a question which has suddenly become
contemporary again as to whether this is a Christian country. The
former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, recently said that
if you mean by that that the cultural and moral background of the
country and its institutions have been influenced and shaped by
Christian faith and values, the answer is clearly yes, it is a
Christian country. But if you mean that it is a nation of
believers, the answer is clearly no.
Wesley would have agreed. In his 1744 sermon "Scriptural
Christianity," he asks, "Which is the country, the inhabitants
whereof are 'all … filled with the Holy Ghost?' Who one and all
have the love of God filling their hearts, and constraining them to
love their neighbour as themselves? Why, then, let us confess we
have never yet seen a Christian country upon the earth". As the
American scholar Henry H Knight III summarises it, Wesley "..
wants evidence of hearts and lives characterized and motivated by
love. The evidence he sees points in the opposite direction: the
accumulation of riches coupled with a lack of generosity,
unnecessary wars, the slave trade, uncharitable conversation, and
lifestyles that reflect neither love for God nor neighbour."
Those things sound familiar, don't they? But changing them is
difficult. Having hearts and lives characterised and motivated by
love is not just something that happens inside a private
individual. The values and dynamics running through the
institutions and structures of society need to allow that love to
flourish and to be expressed in action. That means that those
values and dynamics, which St Paul calls the 'principalities and
powers' need to be constantly sanctified or, again as St Paul
implies, they will have a tendency to become demonic. On the
other hand, living in a country whose institutions and structures
do not prevent religious believing and godly living does not of
itself ensure that people are transformed and enabled to believe
and act in a way motivated by God's love. To extend Wesley's
comment about people's inner life and their life in organised
Methodist groups to their life in society as a whole, having the
form or structures of godliness is not enough: people still need to
seek its transforming power.
Is reforming the world beyond us now? Yes, and rightly so, if what
we are interested in is demonstrating our status, our power and our
self-importance rather than looking to co-operate with the love and
will of God; or if we see ourselves as a group that is set over
against a society that is by definition wrong, as if we were not
ourselves part of that society.
Christians have sometimes been criticised for being so concerned
with heaven that they are no earthly use, although to be so would
be a travesty of a faith which places so much emphasis on the
creation of material things and on incarnation (heavenly things
being made flesh).
A better formulation might be that we are "in the world but not of
it". But even there we need to recognise that we are too often "of
the world" but not "in it": not engaging with the rest of society
because we do not want to admit that we are affected by the same
values and problems that we see in the rest of it. If we are
honest, we are not meant to be a perfectly 'saved' and 'holy' group
of people who have the answers to questions and problems that the
rest of society does not even recognise.
At our best, we are sinners who are seeking to allow ourselves to
be made more holy and to live in more godly ways. Moreover, we
recognise that in particular practical situations it is hard to
discern what ways are more godly, because of the complexity and
confusion or our rapidly-changing world. So we care not only about
the need to help people have the dignity of work or
self-responsibility, but also about the need to provide food banks
to ensure that none is forced to go hungry in a world of waste and
plenty. We care about how both Jews and Palestinians might flourish
in the lands that are supposed to be holy, not least in the way
they relate to each other. We care about how human beings might
live life in all its fullness in traditional or fresh expressions
of relationship that reflect a wide range of human sexualities. But
we recognise that none of us is likely to fully understand the
practical answers to these things. We recognise that we often have
competing and even contradictory convictions about them because of
our different histories and perspectives.
One of the most significant things that our Faith and Order
Committee has produced was a report a few years ago entitled
"Living with Contradictory Convictions in the Church". Looking at
some of the debates we have coming up, it might repay re-reading.
As Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 13
puts it, we are all looking and seeing dark shadows in a distorting
mirror. It is only as my bit of vision rubs up against yours that
we start to see the Spirit's vision amongst us. And rubbing our
visions up against each other takes a lot of care, a lot of
humility and a lot of respect.
It is as we engage in this process, share its fruits and invite
people to join us in it that we have something to offer the world.
It is as we allow ourselves to be guided and transformed by God
that we contribute to the reforming of the nation.
It is important at this point to recognise that we cannot do any
of this on our own. The second small task that Wesley sets out for
the Methodists is reforming the Church. Now, let's be honest, most
of the time that feels like an even harder task than reforming the
nation. If our own experience of seeking to discern how God wishes
to reshape our Connexion so that we are fit for God's purpose in
the 21st century is anything to go by, then doing the same for our
sister churches is well nigh impossible. Some would say that the
Covenant with the Church of England proves the point. Yet there are
also great examples in places like Cumbria and Leeds and elsewhere
of the Spirit energising us and our partners in worship and mission
as we seek to discern the will of God together and to co-ordinate
our responses.
For we cannot do everything on our own. Yet the fact that we
cannot do everything does not mean that we can do nothing. We are
sometimes too quick to complain about the effortless superiority of
others, and too slow to recognise our own effortless sense of
inferiority. Wesley wanted the Methodists to be a distinctive
movement within the wider body of Christ. He emphatically did not
want them to be a sect, in the sense of a deviant and exclusive
group which existed apart from and often set over against other
parts of that body.
We therefore rightly emphasise that we are a church, part of the
Church of Christ. As a group of people seeking to be made into
God's holy people (h-o-l-y) we are wholly Church (w-h-o-l-l-y) but
not the whole of the Church (w-h-o-l-e). We need each other.
More importantly, Christ needs all of us so that the whole world
may be brought to believe and know God. That urgent, evangelical,
sacramental, missionary purpose is the reason that John's Gospel
shows Christ praying that his whole body be one; and why St Paul
shows that the different parts of the body with their different
roles and characteristics can only function as parts of the whole
not as separate entities. So for as long as we do not co-operate
and remain separate from each other we are refusing to let
ourselves be transformed by the grace for which Christ prayed. That
ought to make us and our ecumenical partners drop to our knees in
sackcloth and ashes.
I grew up in a Methodist church in a town centre. Of course, some
things - well, alright, lots of things! - about the Church drove me
to distraction. They still do! In my teenage years I leant more and
more towards atheism. Then I was challenged to become a member of
the Church, and something inside me made me say 'yes', despite all
the doubts and questions. In a sense, the doubts and the questions
were a sort of springboard to faith. I still wanted to discuss
them.
So it was that both as a student and back in my home town I began
to get involved in ecumenical discussion groups because - well,
because that was where you could discuss things! I tended to
gravitate away from those who taught absolute certainties which you
just had to accept without thinking. Perhaps that is where I
began to discover that I was a Methodist after all! I think that it
was another of my predecessors, Gordon Rupp, who said that John
Wesley wanted his Methodists to have their hearts strangely warmed,
but if he were to discover that their heads were now strangely
empty, he would be revolving in his grave. Please tell me that he
is not revolving yet! Is he?
It was an older Roman Catholic layman who really helped me
discover that I was a Methodist. He was acting as a sort of mentor
to the group back home. I learned a great deal from him. But the
most important lesson was when he suddenly turned to me in the
group and said "You are starting to sound like me. What does your
tradition have to say about this?": and I did not know. So I went
to find out. I started reading the Wesleys: and I discovered that
all this Methodist stuff made sense of what I was feeling after and
experiencing.
So I discovered that I was a Methodist through ecumenical contact.
It has been the same ever since. It is often people of other
traditions who are clearer about what is distinctive and valuable
in our own than we are ourselves. I now say to people of other
traditions that I need them to be the best Roman Catholics or
Anglicans or United Reformed or Pentecostalists (or whatever)
that they can be in order to help me be a better Methodist; and
that I hope that me being the best Methodist that I can be will
help them be better Orthodox or Baptists (or whatever).
I say that because that is how we all become better Christians;
and because the body of Christ needs all of us. As St Paul might
have put it, the Methodist foot cannot say that it is not part of
that body simply because it is not and does not wish to become an
Anglican hand. The Pentecostal eye cannot say to the Anglican hand
"I have no need of you"; nor can the Roman Catholic head to the
Methodist feet. The body of Christ cannot be just all one thing or
all another thing as it engages in worship and mission. It
needs all of us, all of its parts. It needs each of us to be who
and what we best are. But it also needs all of us to allow
ourselves to be transformed together into who and what Christ
wishes us to be.
If we allow God's love to touch us through Christ in the power of
the Spirit, and we start to love God in return, we shall find
ourselves being challenged to love the people and things that God
loves, including those other parts that make up the body of Christ,
with whom we disagree or do not get on. So, just as in a communion
service we offer to God in thanksgiving the gifts of God's creation
in the form of bread and wine, and we receive them again as even
greater gifts representing the body and blood of Christ, we need
similarly to offer the gifts of ourselves and each other as
individuals and churches, and we receive ourselves and each other
again as the body of Christ.
So we need to be more Methodist, and we can be, because God is
raising us up as Methodists and, as I said earlier, God has not
finished with us yet. We need to be more ecumenical, and we can be,
because that is what being Christ's body in the world requires. The
two are not opposed to each other. The love of God constrains
and compels us.
So, is it madness to say that part of our calling is to reform the
Church? Yes, if by that we mean that we arrogantly know what is
best for the body of Christ (and that all the other parts of the
body should agree with us and act like us and, preferably, give
being themselves and join us). The answer is "no", if by it we mean
that we have the faith to put ourselves into the hands of the
living God, with all the gifts we have been given, all the
distinctive characteristics we have gained, and all the things that
we are good at. Put ourselves into the hands of the living God.
"We'll praise him for all that is past, and trust him for all
that's to come", as the hymn puts it. That way we are a community
of openly broken people who are open to be raised to life. We are
allowing ourselves to be transformed or re-formed by grace. And if
we do that in a way which is connected with the rest of Christ's
body (and, remember, connexion is a good Methodist word, and one of
those things that we are supposed to be good at) then our
re-formation should flow into the life blood circulating through
others as well.
On the other hand, if we do not allow ourselves to be re-formed by
grace in a way which connects us with the rest of Christ's body,
the result is dis-ease, a lack of wholeness and, dare I say it, a
deficiency of holiness, both for us and for the rest of the
body.
That takes us back to the questions of who we are and what we are
for. Our identity and purpose. It also takes us back to holiness.
The third task in that statement I quoted earlier was "to spread
scriptural holiness over the land". The term 'holiness' tends
not to get a good press these days. We all know what it means to be
'holier-than-thou', even if we struggle to explain what it means to
be 'holy'. So what do we mean by 'holiness'?
Do not worry, help is at hand! Methodism is blessed in this
country by having a considerable number of eminent professors of
theology, particularly in the field of biblical studies, who also
engage with the life of our church and put their skills at its
disposal. In 2010 two of them, one lay and one ordained, Morna
Hooker and Frances Young, wrote a book together called Holiness and
Mission. They point out how odd it is for those terms to go
together, because holiness is normally thought of as separating and
withdrawing from the world, whereas mission involves going into it
and engaging with it. It seems to me that the danger of thinking of
them in that way is that you start to despise the world from which
you withdraw (even if you only withdraw from it for an hour on a
Sunday) and then you can only go out into it in order to attack it
rather than love it.
Morna Hooker and Frances Young point out that that way of thinking
does not seem to reflect very well how God treats the world or what
God is like. The God we see in Jesus is a God of justice and
compassion, a righteous and loving God. God is not a God who stands
apart, but a God who creates and recreates, identifying with
humanity and getting involved with the creation. That is what it
means for God to be 'holy'. That is what we see in Jesus. That is
what God hopes for and requires of his people in the world. In
Leviticus 11 verses 44-45 God in a sense introduces himself to his
people, pointing out that he has taken the initiative in
establishing a relationship with them, a relationship in which he
will be their God and they will be his people. He then asks them to
consecrate themselves in order for them to be holy as God is holy:
God says "You shall be holy as I am holy".
So we are meant to be allowing ourselves to become more godly,
reflecting in so far as we are able God's character and
co-operating to the extent that we are able with God's creative and
transformative love for the world, for which he was prepared to
give his only Son. If you want to see the holiness of God in
action, as it were, look at Jesus. If you start to relate to Jesus,
then you will find yourself drawn closer to him, transformed into
being parts of his body both as individuals and as churches; and in
the power of the Spirit you will find that holiness working in you
through what you are, what you say and what you do.
St Paul makes this point again and again. In Philippians 2:6-11 he
describes what we might dare to call Christ's 'mindset': unlike
Adam, who was made in the image of God but tried to make himself
into God's equal, Christ was in the form of God but did not regard
equality with God as something to be exploited for his own benefit.
Instead, he emptied himself, poured himself out in love for others,
even so far as dying on a cross for them like a slave. Paul says
that that 'mindset' is what God exalts. And it is that 'mindset'
which he says we should share as individuals and as
communities.
It is fascinating that it is to that passage which John Wesley in
Philippians turned in his sermon on "The New Birth" when he wished
to define what he meant by scriptural or gospel holiness. He says
that scriptural holiness " .... is no less than the image of
God stamped upon the heart; it is no other than the whole mind
which was in Christ Jesus…" He goes on to say that that involves
all of what we would call our instincts, feelings, emotional
dispositions, ways of thinking and spiritual sensitivities being
brought together, made whole and made holy. It makes us respond to
God thankfully and lovingly in turn. And, says Wesley, if we start
to love God, we shall naturally end up loving the rest of the world
as well. We will not be able to help it. God's love will not let
us.
There in a nutshell you get holiness and mission combined.
Methodism began, in a sense, as a holiness movement within the
wider Church. It also began as a mission movement within the wider
Church. What was distinctive about it was the way in which it
combined the two. I believe that at our best it is still
distinctive of us now. If it isn't, then what are we?
If you were wondering what difference it makes to add the word
'scriptural' to the word 'holiness', part of the answer is that it
simply reminds us that the Bible is our constant reference point
for showing what Jesus is like, and therefore what the holiness of
God is like. But notice that the emphasis is on having the mind
that was in Christ Jesus rather than just on being able to quote
one or two biblical texts.
This brings me to what I believe is a desperate need in our
current situation. It is also something which I believe our
tradition has had a gift for in the past. It is what I shall call
"speaking biblically to serve the present age". That is not the
same as just being able to quote biblical texts, although knowledge
of what the scriptures say is important. But the texts in the
Bible were written down a long time ago. Not only are they written
in different languages, they come from different cultures. People
might be the same, but the circumstances of life then were
different. Shepherding and farming, for example, were different.
What people understood by 'family', and what they expected family
life to be, was different. The ways in which they thought and
talked about their own experience and about God were
different.
Yet God is still God, despite the passage of time. People are
still people. The gospel message in and through the scriptures can
be and still is the word of life for them. Moreover, people still
try to make sense of what is happening to them, of who they are and
of their purpose in life. But many no longer use the language or
stories of the Bible to do it. They have different points of
reference. They use other words and pictures and stories. What is
more, they do not all use the same ones. Our contemporary society
is fragmented into any number of cultures and sub-cultures, each
with its own language and way of looking at the world. With all the
social media and technical aids now available, there is a huge
amount of talking, but how much real communicating? I may be
showing my age, and I do try and use some of the technology, but
sometimes it feels like the babble of Babel. [And if that
scriptural reference passes you by, it serves to illustrate my
point!].
What we need to be able to do is to speak biblically in the
context of our contemporary cultures, and in language that those
cultures can understand. That involves us in understanding both
what the bible is saying in its time and place, and also how people
talk about what is important about life in contemporary society.
Then as we begin to make connections between the two, we can
encourage others to start making the same connections and so begin
to hear God speaking to them. It is what that great person who
could inhabit Greek, Roman and Jewish cultures, St Paul, did when
according to the Acts of the Apostles he stood in the public square
in Athens, talked about one of their altars, quoted the way their
own poets and philosophers looked at the world and then introduced
the Christian gospel of resurrection into it.
It is also what we find Jesus doing when he tells stories of
farming and shepherding and hiring workers in the market place,
stories which reflect everyday situations his hearers knew, but
which also pointed them to God, who was very close to them. One of
the fascinating things in the gospels is the way that they show the
effect that Jesus had on people. They recognise that the grace of
God is working in and through him and that it gives him a special
quality. Jesus seems to have so digested and absorbed the knowledge
of God in the scriptures that by grace they have become part of his
being. As another Methodist Professor of New Testament, Jimmy Dunn,
put it, when dealing with particular issues, Jesus's habit was one
of "pressing behind the immediate issue to the deeper questions of
motive and right..., refusing to take the easy way out in testing
cases of applying the most immediately obvious ruling, and digging
deep into the law to discern the divine rationale [justice] in its
particular commandments. To do the will of God was still the
primary goal, even if that will could not be discerned simply by
reference to the Torah [Scriptures]".
In this way, Jesus was recognised as speaking as God. He calls us,
his followers, to share, to the extent that we are able. in the
grace of speaking in God's name. There is a huge need for that in
the world and the Church today.
My worry though is that we are becoming less and less able to
fulfil it. We seem less and less able to speak the languages of the
people and cultures round us. We seem less and less steeped in the
language and stories of the Bible. So how are we to help other
people make connections and start to hear God speaking to them? At
our best we have always had a gift for recasting and re-expressing
things in changing circumstances. You can see the fruits of that it
in all sorts of places, not least in our hymns and songs which
bring together people's contemporary experience and the word of God
expressed through scripture .
We need to do the same again. If we say and do now what we have
previously said and done, despite the fact that circumstances have
changed, we are lost. On the other hand, if we simply speak to
today in today's language and reject where we have come from and
the way in which things were said before in different times and
places, we are in danger of making ourselves into the creators, the
controllers and the content of the gospel message, rather than
people who have the "mind of Christ Jesus", to return to that
phrase.
Yet in each generation we Methodists have been good at:
- reading about God the Holy Trinity in the Bible;
- recognising that the workings of God's grace in the contexts and situations described in the Bible are also happening in our experience (with appropriate adjustments for the change in context);
- reflecting on that in prayer, celebrating it in worship, and letting it energise us in mission; and (as part of that)
- we've been good at re-expressing it in the languages of contemporary cultures so that others may also recognise God's grace in their situations and in their experience: in the language of Matthew's Gospel that you heard earlier in this session, that means being able to bring both old wisdom and fresh expressions of it out from the treasury as we need them.
I believe that this is still our genius, our gift. I believe
that we are still doing it in all sorts of places and ways. It is
just that we do not honour or celebrate it as much as we
should.
When I was a schoolteacher, the Head of English once said in a
sixth-former's report "If X is to get on, he needs to read about
the books, think about the books, talk about the books, and, if
possible, read the books!". So do we with the Bible! You want a
slogan? Back to the Bible and forward to the world!
So maybe this is what Methodists bring to the party. We link
holiness and mission as we link the world of the bible with our
contemporary world. We are a Methodist people on pilgrimage. We are
communities of very different people, sometimes multi-cultural and
sometimes multi-national, connected together in what we call a
"Connexion". We come together in small groups and communities to
help each other explore the grace of God. We gather round the bible
and the table in order to discover the presence of Christ amongst
us in word and sacrament. We encourage each other and watch over
one another in love. What we have in common is that we all
recognise our need of and dependence on the grace of God: the God
who loves us before we know it; who saves us through Christ when we
do not deserve it; who sanctifies our thoughts, feelings,
intentions, words and actions through the Spirit working within us
when we are unable to do it for ourselves; who comes to us, is made
real for us, nurtures and guides us through various outward and
visible and, therefore, sacramental signs.
We then seek to embody that grace to others, playing our part in
the re-forming of the nation, the re-forming of the church, and the
spreading of scriptural holiness over the land. What we are for is
therefore what we have always been for. We are for holiness and
mission, and have been given the grace by God to speak biblically
in order to serve the present age. Can we go on doing it? Since God
has not given upon us yet, by God's grace yes, we can!