FOOTMARKS for JULY 2010:

“Celebrating our diversity and freedom”

The growing diversity at St. Marks is an exciting development. When the church was born at Pentecost it was marked by its diversity. The people who were gathered and empowered by the Holy Spirit came from all over the known world. Last Sunday there were people in our gathering for worship with their origins in New Zealand, Tonga, the Philippines, the United States, Thailand, Great Britain, South Africa and Japan. This is something to be truly celebrated!

But our differences go way beyond ethnicity and culture. These are the things that we can immediately see. There is also a wide variety of experiences and understandings of faith in the congregation. We each know God in different ways. Some of us have Methodist backgrounds, others are Roman Catholic, or Presbyterian, or Anglican, or Baptist, or Dutch Reformed, or none of these. There is a variety of religious tradition we come from. This is something to be truly celebrated!

Then if we dare go beneath religious upbringing and explore our spirituality these differences become even more apparent. There are those amongst us who have a mystical spirituality, others who are more practical in their orientation; those who are prophetic, and those who are pastoral. We have evangelicals, liberals and radicals and those who don’t want to wear a label. This is something to be truly celebrated!

We can foster this culture of diversity by encouraging everyone to be himself or herself. The reign of God is not progressed by pressure, from within or without, to conform. The Holy Spirit grows community through grace and love, not compliance to uniformity. We are called to encourage and support one another to walk with God in the way that each of us is called to, not to try to get others to do it our way.

Henry David Thoreau reminds us of the importance of this in his classic book “Walden” when he shares that one young man of my acquaintance, who has inherited some acres, told me that he thought he should live as I did, if he had the means. I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; beside that before he has learned it I may have found out another for myself, I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or mother’s or his neighbour’s instead”.

May we continue to welcome and celebrate diversity and freedom at St. Marks. It is a strength we would do well to build on.

It is a sign of health when there are a huge variety of people involved in a faith-community, and freedom of faith and conscience are encouraged.

Mark.