A divided Christian witness convinces fewer and fewer people less and less of the time, the Archbishop of Dublin, the Most Revd Dr Michael Jackson said at a service marking the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.
Speaking at Saints Columbanus and Gall Church in Milltown, Archbishop Jackson said “Older people find that exclusivity does not square with their experience of long life. Younger people find equally that exclusivity does not square with their experience of loyalty and friendship. Exclusivity has largely become the collector’s item of the spiritually middle aged – and this is deeply worrying”.
Outlining his vision of the next decade of ecumenical relations, the Archbishop said: “There needs to be a common voice of humility on the part of all churches in Ireland, a voice which gives priority to service over leadership”.
Secondly he said there needed to be “a structured and collaborative engagement of the same churches with the abundant capacity of lay people every bit as much as clergy. I suspect that lay people are tired of hearing this and, indeed, of hearing themselves referred to as: lay people. The church is of God. The ministry is of Christ. We are less different from one another than history has made us. The change in culture is urgent if it is not already almost too late”.
Archbishop Jackson added that young people “although often unreadable by older people, are the lifeblood of the present. They have a commitment to justice and fair–mindedness, to friendship and to versatility at which we ought all to marvel. So often, all we can say about them is: Why are they not in church? We need to trust to the presence of the Risen Christ in them and among them, generating the good and selfless things which they do”.
Fourthly, he stated that in a time of impacted recession there should be the renewed recognition that the poor are always at the heart of the Gospel “not as the grateful recipients of second–hand generosity but as the dispensers of grace and the hosts of God’s gifts to humanity at large, has to be reasserted and re–enacted”.
The Archbishop also said that ecumenism alone was not enough. “Christian Churches together need to engage in the common cause of humanity with those of World Faiths other than their own and, in that gloriously gentle phrase, with those whose faith is known only to themselves and to God. We need to cease pushing ourselves, invading the space of others. We need to accept the integrity of intention of others and leave the specifics to God and their consciences,” he explained.