The Welcome Mat

It was, of course, a great privilege to be able to host Paula’s Civic Service as Mayor of the Borough, but I’m glad it’s behind us. We were working out the choreography until just before we started, and deciding which of our organist and the Town Band (twenty of them!) was going to play what piece of music. Thankfully both of them were extremely flexible and understanding, and I came away with a respect for the organist’s sense of diplomacy which is not a quality you always associate with church musicians. Mayoral chains of various local authorities glittered around the pews. The centrepiece of this sort of event is an exchange of commitments rather like a wedding, when the Mayor promises to do their best and everyone else promises to support them. Afterwards I blessed the Mayor’s cake, and a gentleman visitor told me how as a young man in South Africa he’d seen a Roman Catholic priest in Soweto blessing a popcorn machine (it was intended to raise money for the Society of St Vincent de Paul, apparently).

As usual whenever I lead a service where I can expect the congregation will include people of a variety of different opinions, I began by acknowledging the possibility that some might not want to say some Christian things, but if so they should just keep Paula in mind; and in my homily – which was about the ambiguities and sacrifices implied in the idea of ‘community’ – I referred to the different ways Christians and non-believers might think about and describe the process of learning to live with diversity and conflict. A young woman who works for one of the charities Paula is supporting during her year as Mayor came up to me after the service, and told me ‘I was quite emotional during the service because as a humanist it’s the first time I can ever remember being specifically included in a religious event. Normally I expect just to let it all go past me, but this time I felt I was welcome’.

How affirming that was! Until I opened my bible this morning and read 1Thessalonians 2.4, ‘we speak not to please mortals, but to please God, who tests our hearts’. I do have an intense dislike of making people sad. If I was challenged to name my strongest motivation in life, I would say that I wanted everyone to be happy. I know they can’t be because some end up wanting things that are incompatible with the happiness of others, and many of us fallen souls wrap ourselves in delusions which need to be eroded before we find happiness; but is it a reprehensible thing to aim at? It might be, if my true instinct is less to avoid pain for others, than too avoid the pain I experience by causing it to them. I suppose my only security is that it is indeed God who tests my heart. Nor can you be confident that a course of action which brings people unhappiness is ipso facto pleasing to the Lord.

I became a believer in 1995, and nearly thirty years later still don’t know with any clarity where the boundary lies between the saved and the lost, or which side of it the young woman who spoke to me yesterday falls; or where I do, for that matter. I leave it to God, and throw myself and others on his mercy. What else can I do?

The Church has never before really faced a situation in which a previously believing culture decides that Christianity is something it wants to turn away from. The first apostles preached to Jews, and the task was to convince them that Jesus of Nazareth was the fulfilment of what they already believed; and to Gentile pagans, for whom ‘God’ was another deity like the ones they already knew. The Scriptures really give us very little clue as to how to approach a world which has judged the Church and found it wanting, or judged Christianity and found it unconvincing, nor do they tell us what God thinks about such a situation.

As the Church of England sacks the ‘independent’ safeguarding advisors it employed to hold it to account precisely because it didn’t agree with the way they were holding it to account, it seems that the Church’s desire for power and security still hasn’t been sufficiently burned out of it, and there is more disciplining yet to go. I increasingly feel that the task of this generation’s believers is to begin, just begin, the work of convincing the world that Christians are not monsters, made monstrous by belief in a monstrous God. A modest aim, but one we will struggle with enough.