Europe

For all my ordained ministry I have been very much involved in ecumenism. I suppose I have been lucky, for I have experienced at first hand the vibrancy and excitement of working with others to establish something new and to do it with people of very different traditions, whose very difference brings new riches to the partnership. Difference becomes a blessing. What unites us is not being the same, but bringing our difference to a common creative vision. I once heard someone say that, in any organisation, what is needed is both pioneers and settlers. The Wild West could only have been won by pioneers, but then people needed to put down roots and settle. Both the pioneering and the settling had their part to play. There would be nothing to settle without the pioneering, yet people need to put down roots and establish systems and conventions, if culture and society is to flourish.

I find this a helpful perspective. Yet, in terms of ecumenism, we cannot just see this in linear terms of pioneering leading on to a calmer time of settlement. My experience is that, ultimately, that never works. I believe that the Church comes alive when its members are drawn together in a common task which fires the imagination and releases creative energy. The best of ecumenism comes when churches together are drawn into such a shared endeavour. What epitomises such creativity is leadership (clergy and lay), whose shared vision is both infectious and inspirational. That has been my experience and that is why I am an enthusiastic ecumenist. It draws us into that oneness that was Jesus’ prayer for us and it is through such oneness that the Spirit is known and the mission of the Church comes alive. Settling, by which I mean putting down roots and establishing shared ways of doing things, is an essential part of any such endeavour. It is about building for an ongoing future. Yet, when that future arrives, it can found that the spirit has gone out of what was once so life-giving. Those who had led the vision have moved on and others have taken their place, others who were never part of that vision. Ecumenism then becomes a matter of sitting around in committees and keeping structures going. What once had been so creative, vibrant and energising has now become time-consuming and something that eats up energy. We ought to keep channels of communication open, but the life has gone out of that shared enterprise we once found so exuberantly life-giving.

As I ponder how I might vote at the forthcoming referendum over our future in Europe, I feel a number of emotions. I am confused by the wild rhetoric of the two sides and their various hidden (or not so hidden) agendas. I am angry at political leaders, who seemly are failing to set out the issues in a calm and rational way that might help people to make this decision. I do not feel that we are being well served by the manner of this ‘debate’. Indeed, a good deal of wounding is going on, from which it may take our nation a long time to recover. But then I wonder whether the confusion of these days is simply a reflection of a society which has lost its way. The vision of what Europe might be, with any sense of us being drawn into an enterprise which gives purpose, or leads us into life-giving new possibilities, seems to have given way to a edifice in which managing the structures have become the very purpose of our shared life together. That has long ceased to be an attractive and energising thing. Rather, the energy (and money) eaten up, by what is no longer seen to be a worthwhile enterprise, has come to be resented. What is missing is a shared vision of what is could mean to be European and the shared leadership that could give form and direction to that vision.  Calculating how to vote, by asking what we might get out of this situation, is simply symptomatic of how far we are from the kind of shared vision that would make the European project a dream that empowers us and leads us to discover an exciting future.