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New general secretary urges church to stand tallThe United Reformed Church has special qualities and should face the future with confidence, according to the Revd Roberta Rominger, newly appointed general secretary of the United Reformed Church.
Speaking just before her induction at the URC’s general assembly in Edinburgh, she said: “While I share the URC commitment to walk in unity with other churches, I believe that God still has a purpose for the United Reformed Church. We have the flexibility, the openness, the experience of reformation, to respond to the challenges of a new day.”
She elaborated: “If we can get the glue right between us, we have the capacity for a perfect combination: support and mutual accountability on the one hand, freedom for local imagination and initiative on the other. We are free to worship as the Spirit leads us. Our forms of congregational life can reflect it – have a building if you want, or don’t have one. Stay where you are, or move. Expand, contract, unite, re-plant. Develop with insights from other cultures.”
Reflecting on the priorities of her new post she pointed out the need partly to “stay out of the way.” But she recognised also a need to: “Get the structures right, support a light-touch operation at the centre, make sure it’s cost effective, give local churches what they need without burdening them with what they don’t need. Enable those things we do jointly that we actually couldn’t do on our own.”
In public terms, Roberta Rominger said she felt her job was: “to be the face of our belonging to one another and to show a URC face to the world. Not an apologetic URC face, but one that radiates the confidence of the second largest Christian family in the world. We may be small here in Great Britain, but then we’re so self-effacing. There is no virtue in being a well-kept secret.”
Ron Buford, representative of Roberta’s home church, the United Church of Christ, in California, paid tribute to her as “a great and grounded woman of God, a calm, strong, visionary leader for our time.”
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