Thought for the day – Sunday 28th June 2020
Today is Conference Sunday in the Methodist Church and I believe that as representatives from the church gather virtually this year, they represent a bygone age, steeped in our culture from the early days of the small group of Anglican Priests who met to create a movement in the Church of their day to make the faith they held dear, open to the people of their time and place and we have a rich heritage spanning four centuries, and spreading worldwide.
It is over two hundred years ago that Charles Wesley penned the word of the hymn “A charge to keep I have” and I have held dear the words of the second verse for most of my adult life, “to serve the present age, my calling to fulfil; O may it all my powers engage to do my masters will” and I have never believed those words to mean the time that Charles Wesley was living in, but the age that we, generations later are living through and they are words of great wisdom.
The world has maybe changed more dramatically over the last three months than at any single time in my lifetime and whether we like it or not, the present age is an alien place to a lot of us. I might well want to cling to things of the past, but the reality is that we live in a digital age, where we speak with our brother and sister around the world as easily as we do with our next door neighbours. People speak about WhatsApp, Twitter, Zoom, Instagram, Facebook, and a whole host of things that my generation either learn or stay well clear of.
If we are to serve the present age, our calling to fulfil, we need to engage with the uncomfortable and the unknown and walk alongside people who think differently to us, live different lives to, have different beliefs to ours and even speak a different language to ours. We might hold dear to our traditions and there will those of you reading this, for whom those things are simply too precious to deny, but remember, John and Charles Wesley and their “Holy Club” were revolutionaries of their day. Is God calling us to be revolutionaries today?