South Wales
Life in the URC, aged 40
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- Created on Friday, 14 October 2011 14:06
The United Reformed Church will be 40 years old next year – and, like people of that age, it is in mid-life crisis. It is stuck between needs of those gone before, the older generation of parents and the elderly, and those coming after, the younger generation of children and teenagers.
That was the message of URC Assembly Moderator the Revd Dr Kirsty Thorpe, when she talked on ‘The URC at 40’ to a gathering of URC churches in South Wales Region. But her experience was not of God saying either this or that but saying both / and. ‘If we try to use only CD rom or the web instead of printing documents, there are protests from those with no computer,’ she said, ‘so we need to print, too. We must keep hold of all possibilities – ‘both / and.'
Kirsty said the URC needs to work on relationships – to meet together, to talk together. District councils had often been frustrating but people had talked to people from other churches. ‘Conferences on Skype are not quite so satisfactory,’ she said, ‘nothing replaces being with people.’
There were two types of talk – ‘report’ talk and ‘rapport’ talk. The URC was good at the first but not the second. There was no time, the agenda was too full. ‘The most authentic communication is the hardest to do,’ she said. ‘On Back to Church Sunday, when we’re asked to invite someone to come to church, it’s scary!’
The church was caught up in changing times. A helpful illustration was that of a bypass. The shops in main street were no longer the place for people go – there was a retail park on bypass. Custom at the shops dropped – and the church was in that position. ‘People rarely need to come to us,’ she said.
‘They may value the church if they wish to get child into church school; they may value a service for those who have died – they’ll come for a funeral. But most of the time the world doesn’t need us. We do the equivalent of standing on the bypass with posters asking people to chat.
‘We need to try to find new ways of being church where people are, work out how to be attractive to a world going past us. But it can’t be just about new people. It’s always a case of both / and.’
It didn’t seem 40 years since the URC was born. She remembered the great hope the URC would never get to 40 – all the churches would be reunified in one great church well before then! It had not happened.
She said: ‘Ecumenism has changed so much in my lifetime. It has moved from top-down ways of structures coming together. We need to invest hope in bottom-up ecumenism – think of street pastors. Churches come together when they see projects that need to be done, projects we couldn’t do on our own. That’s the future of ecumenism.’
• Kirsty was speaking in the series URC Matters, an occasional series of discussions on things that matter to URC people organised by the Synod Elders of South Wales Region. Held in Hope and Market Square Church, Merthyr, it was chaired by Synod Elder the Revd Gethin Rhys
Jean Silvan Evans