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IN GOD’S HANDS

Some of us are old enough to remember Howard Stan­ley’s famous address to the May Meetings of the Con­gregational Union entitled The Next Ten Years. Once again a General Secretary is inviting us to think ten years ahead, challenging us to realise afresh the wisdom in the Authorised Version of Proverbs 29:18 that ‘where there is no vision the people perish’. Some thirty years ago in an inter­view with the BBC in Edinburgh, in a voice redolent with pes­simism, one of the doom and gloom merchants asked me: ‘Mr MacKenzie what do you think is the future of the Kirk?’ I replied then, as I would reply now, that our future is in God’s hands. With Mother Teresa we are called not so much to be successful as to be faithful. With the Iona Community we are called to walk by the light which we have and to pray for more light as we seek to find new ways to touch the hearts of all. With Jesus we are called to realise afresh that he is the true vine and that God is the gardener.

As individuals and as churches our purpose is to bear fruit not for ourselves but for the Gardener whose responsibility it is to prune and to cleanse us. Our responsibility is to abide in the vine, remembering with John the Baptist that the axe is always laid at the root of the trees but above all with Isaiah that a shoot has come and continually comes again from the stump of Jesse. Because he lives we will live also, as we abide in him and he in us, remembering with our Congregational and Presbyterian sisters and brothers over the centuries that where two or three are gathered in his name he is there in the midst of them. These are not just platitudinous words. These are the words of the living God whose Word it is who prunes and cleanses.

To be pruned and cleansed is to be re-formed. To be truly reformed is to become one, holy, catholic and apostolic. As the United Reformed Church is fundamentally composed of local congregations and not large institutions, and as the local congregation is where two or three are gathered together as the hermeneutic of the Gospel, it is there that people need to rediscover what it means to be one, holy, catholic and apostolic.

In practical terms this will mean organic clustering in cir­cuits/deaneries/districts with other local Christians in pursuit of a common mission of Evangelism, Christian Nurture, Social Caring, Challenging Injustice and Concern for the Environment. Insights and precious gifts peculiar to the reformed tradition, such as the three-fold ministry of ordained Minister/Superintendent in local episcope; ordained Elders enabled to Serve and Preside at Communion and to exercise Pastoral Care; Diaconal Ministry of all the People, taking decisions together in Church Meeting and Assembly; with a government ‘distinct from the government of the state’, will be invaluable to disestablished Anglicans, Methodists and others. So too will be a robust hymnody and Biblical theology which refuse to succumb to the temptations of the fundamentalism, candy floss and cheap grace so popu­lar in many places today.

My mother taught me that ‘tomorrow never comes, because when it comes it is today!’ Let us not wait for ten years. Today is the day of salvation, nearer than when we first believed. Therefore let us lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light knowing that Jesus has the whole world including each of our churches and each of the churches in his hands.

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