Anglican Taonga

Bishop John Bluck preached this sermon at the Anglican-Methodist Covenant Service in Auckland on May 24.

So who’s the happy couple? Welcome to our engagement party. We’ve been talking about this relationship for years, rumours have abounded, but now we’re finally getting it together in public.

Back together if you really want to know, but most people have forgotten that. It’s a been a long time since we were accustomed to each other’s faces.

And just in case you were going to ask, no wedding date has been set, yet, but watch this space.

This is an extra special day because we’re a couple who used to know each other very well. Before our first divorce. We’ve been back to the altar rail several times before, but we’ve never got quite as far as we have today.

This really is the day the Lord has made.
Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

So why didn’t we get together before now?

Well, at this point the metaphor of marriage begins to break down and will get us into trouble. After all, who’s the boy and who’s the girl in this story? Who’s at fault for the divorce in the first place?

The way that Anglicans explain it themselves is found in the book we use called “For All the Saints”, and yes we do have a page devoted to John and Charles Wesley. Here’s what we say about the divorce at the end of the 18th century.

“Mainly for practical reasons and through lack of contact and understanding, Methodism eventually separated from the Church of England.”

Tell that to the Anglican priest John Wesley who was shut out of the pulpits of his own church. But this is not a day to dwell on what went wrong in England. It’s what happened here in Aotearoa New Zealand that matters.

We got off to a great start together. The first Methodist mission worked closely with CMS Anglicans. The Wesleyan and Anglican missionaries mostly got on well until they started competing for territory and even then they managed to work through what trade unions now call demarcation disputes.

Reading the old records you are struck by how petty the issues were that divided us. They read like a diary of family squabbles.
Henry Williams at Paihia, for instance, complaining about Methodist friends that stayed on in his house for too long and criticizing the way they organized their children.

“This little child of theirs (those Methodists),” he wrote, “ while cherished with parental care… is now more than 11 years old... it is surely high time when it should run about and pick up crumbs for itself.”

Wesleyan leader William White's response to this sort of grumpiness was to set off to Waikato and claim the west coast as Wesleyan territory.

Silly stories abound in our early years together here, but they were stories of family quarrels, good Evangelicals as we mostly were back then, in marked contrast to the bitter disputes with those dreadful Roman Catholics.

“Mainly for practical reasons, and through lack of contact and understanding, Methodism eventually separated from the Church of England.”

Sadly, we weren’t able to shake off that legacy, despite our living and working alongside each other so closely.

In the 1970s I worked for the Methodist Church for seven years. They gave me, a very green 29-year-old Anglican priest, huge responsibility and trust. The only doctrinal dispute I had in those seven years was over whether we should serve alcohol at the tenth anniversary dinner of the Methodist newspaper. A board member called David Lange preferred Coca Cola.

(Actually, there was one other dispute which you could hardly call doctrinal. Should a Methodist church paper print cartoons of Mr Muldoon with funny ears, given that he was Prime Minister and had a Methodist grandfather. But that’s another story.)

For the time I served Methodism, I felt like I was working for family. When you address the practical reasons, and make contact, the divide created by historical debris disappears, as most of the 29 co-operative ventures between Anglicans and Methodists around the country will tell you.

Of course we’ve tried before to end the divorce, through larger ecumenical attempts, most notably the Plan for Union, which came so close to being realised. One clergy vote in fact at the General Synod in Nelson.

The headline in the New Citizen in 1976 reads “Anglican No to Plan for Union but Loud Yes to Unified Ministry”. The Anglican Synod made that pledge (it was the only good thing I remember coming out of that day at the Stoke Memorial Hall, apart from the lunch they served of fish pie and golden delicious apples) but we’ve made precious little progress on that promise until today.

The covenant we are about to sign picks up the broken hopes of 1976. It gives flesh to the words of the General Synod in 1986 that recognized Methodist ministry (along with the other negotiating churches) to be “real ministries of Word and Sacrament, given by Christ as the head of the Church”.

It responds to the spirit of the documents on Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry and the progress made in bilateral covenants internationally.

It puts our public commitment ( and hopefully some of our money) where our mouth has been for a long time.

It moves us on and hopefully out of the impasse we’ve been stuck in for a while.

It addresses the tradition of episcopacy as something we can address again because we have successfully before and because it’s a tradition we share, expressed differently by our two churches.

It obliges us to find a way of unifying our ministries, with some real urgency, so we can stop offending each other as our current rules about ordination make us do.

And what makes us think we can succeed this time where we have failed so dismally before?

The answer to that question lies in the Scripture readings we have just heard. The passage from Jeremiah about the coming days when God offers a new covenant to replace the one broken by the ancestors, this time “written on their hearts and they shall be my people.”

And the passage from John 1 where we declare what we have seen and heard and touched from the beginning – the practical things we have done together as Anglicans and Methodists in Aotearoa, the contact we have had, the understanding we have shared in gospel service – those down-to-earth, everyday things that John says make up the word of life and which we have seen and heard in order that we may have fellowship, with each other and with the God we know in Jesus Christ.

That’s what this covenant is about. If we don’t think it’s going to take us closer to the heart of God by making that journey together, then we shouldn’t sign it.

If we don’t believe this is a new stage on that long and fractious journey, a stage that will lift us out of family squabble and accept a bigger wider and more generous frame for all our ministries, then we shouldn’t sign it.

Do you trust that God will write this covenant not only on the paper today but on our hearts today?

After watching the dance between Anglicans and Methodists for a lifetime, and standing in the shoes of both partners, I believe this covenant can take us into a new stage on the journey.

We are older and wiser than we were in the 1790s and the 1970s. And we are going into this covenant more soberly than we did in the 1970s (I use the word only in a poetic sense of course, out of respect for that disagreement I had back in 1975).

Back then we had great expectations that if we got the structures right the rest would follow. This time we start with no additional structures. This time we’re light on organization, heavy on dialogue, exploration, creating free space for the Spirit to move and lead.

And all that is very timely. Anglicans and Methodists spend a lot of time currently talking about Fresh Expressions, open-ended projects, pioneering ministries, ground breaking rather than fence building. The covenant fits well into this milieu.

Back then we hardly ever mentioned Te Tiriti O Waitangi. Both our churches have been through their own bicultural revolutions since then. Both of us have been dragged muttering if not kicking and screaming to realize we live in bicultural and multicultural worlds, that the old monocultural models that lay mostly unexamined beneath the Plan for Union have had their day and we can’t go back to them again.

A partnership between two mutually respectful and self determining people Maori, Pakeha or Tau Iwi is the basis for our future.

Back then the Pacific was still seen as a mission field out there. Now it’s a neighbour right here. Now Pacific people are a major force in Kiwi culture, both secular and religious, with their own proud identity.

Both Anglicans and Methodists have had to restructure their shape and understanding of church to respect this multi cultural reality, symbolized today by our worship happening in two places, neither of them Tikanga Pakeha.

We are in a new place. We know the urgency of making room for each other as we try to work out our future together.
Pray God that will be a future that draws from all the wells of living water that surround us here in Aotearoa.

A 10-year-old in a Mangere school was recently asked what culture he belonged to.

Well l’m a quarter Samoan, half Palangi and my Dad’s Maori, he replied.

That doesn’t add up to one, the teacher replied.

Yeh, I know, said the boy, but it works for me.

Pray God for the day when we can say I’m part Anglican, part Methodist but don’t ask me to sort out which is which. And to arrive at that day the language of covenant is a better way to go than institutional restructuring.

Anglicans right now are desperately trying to agree on a covenant to keep them together worldwide.

In Aotearoa New Zealand we’re a long way from agreeing to sign it, whereas we have agreed to sign this covenant with our Methodist brothers and sisters, as you have with us. We’re ready to make some local promises, even if we can’t internationally.
Let’s thank God for all the groundwork that lies behind this covenant.

It wouldn’t be possible if we hadn’t been through the struggles and false starts of the last century’s ecumenical efforts.

It wouldn’t be possible without the the things we have seen and heard together as servants of a shared gospel and a shared mission in Aotearoa for nearly 200 years.

It wouldn’t be possible without the history our forebears brought with them – a history of trying to cope with and mostly failing to accommodate new forms of spiritual renewal.

We’ve found a little more flexibility since then, not enough unfortunately to stop the split with Ratana in the 1920s, but hopefully enough to cope with today’s challenges of fundamentalism and biblical interpretation that divide the body of Christ, whatever its denomination. And the even bigger challenge of a secular materialism that sees no need of God.

Like never before we need to learn as churches to be light on our feet to stay in touch with the communities we serve. This covenant will help us both to do that.

The tragedy is that while the churches bicker or worse still ignore each other, the much bigger issues of poverty, war and environment get more entrenched and divided churches become part of the problem and not the solution.

And therein lies the real test of this covenant we’re about to sign. Will it help us contribute more clearly and courageously to the things that threaten the peace and well being of all the peoples of Aotearoa and the Pacific in this economic crisis?

Will we be able through this covenant to speak and act more usefully about what’s happening in Fiji and right here in Auckland with the prospect of a supercity?

Will the new ecumenical space this covenant creates help us listen more carefully and respectfully to each other and to the communities we serve?

Will it help us to get out of the house for a while, our church houses, and into the places where New Zealand’s values and directions are being shaped?

Might this covenant of ours become a model for other churches and community groups to follow?

This afternoon we might well be starting something that many of us have only dreamed of.