MH: Last year, for the year 2006, we made a very real effort to make an all-age worship. This year with the materials that have come from South Africa we found very limited time available to us because we only had two and a half days really and we do 12 hour days when we are together to put it together and we were not able to put together an all-age service...
Because from the youngest to the oldest the concept of togetherness and sharing is basic to Christianity as far as I’m concerned. Therefore to exclude the children this year was really difficult for me but we just did not have time, the material was just so difficult to address and to work with that we just did not have time to do an all-age service. So I am delighted that Roots (CTBI magazine that provides all-age worship resources) has been able to do that because it was a definite miss in the writers group this year.
CT: What kind of fruits of the prayer week are you looking to see in terms of Christian unity?
MH: I have been unconsciously committed to Christian unity all my life but consciously working for Christian unity since the late sixties. Because for me to be a faithful Christian means living up to the teaching of the Word of Jesus Christ.
Jesus prayed in the Garden that we might be one. Now how we manage that I still struggle with. But unless we continue to struggle with it then we fail, we doubly fail Jesus in our separate and fragmented state and in the scandal that that it is. But we don’t know how to be together and different. And that is as big a problem for the whole of society as it is with the whole racial tensions, faith tensions in world religions colliding with each other.
Human beings like everybody to be the same and they have not yet learned how to be different and together and that is the goal for me and that will be a never ending goal for the Christian church if it is to be faithful to Jesus.
End
The resources for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity were launched earlier in the week by Churches Together in Britain and Ireland.
