She was part of the Churches Together in Britain and Ireland (CTBI) writers group that adapted the resource materials for the 2007 Week of Prayer for Christian Unity for Christians in the UK.
The material for the Week of Prayer 2007 is drawn from the experience of Christian communities in the South African region of Umlazi, near Durban, and has been internationalised by a team of Christians from around the world to make the issues accessible to all participating churches regardless of which country they are in.
The community of Umlazi, like so many others, has been ravaged by HIV and AIDS, with an estimated 50 percent of the residents infected with the virus. And the suffering from the widespread prevalence of the virus has only been aggravated by the stigma attached to issues of sexuality within the communities which keeps sufferers from speaking out on their condition.
Rev Hunter shared with Christian Today her reflections on adapting the resource materials and her hopes for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity 2007.
CT: Was it a concern for you that as you put together these materials for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity that it would become an ‘intellectual exercise’?
MH: For me this year was particularly important because never before have we so clearly heard the cry of the Christian church in that hardship and to intellectualise it is to sanitise it, to say yes this is the situation, but just in case we might offend Mrs Bloggs or Mr smith by talking openly about the situation in Umlazi, it is that incredibly delicate balance, even within the writers group.
I at home would be considered a liberal but I realise every year as I come to the writers group I would be in the more conservative wing. So from my liberal conservatism of Ireland through to the liberal conceptions of the church and where it’s going and we have to work together. And it’s a wonderful exercise because you can write something and it can be taken apart at the seams by the rest of the group but it’s not a personal attack. It’s ‘Do you not think it might work better if we do it this way?’
And so for me it is a clear example of how the unity of the church is not uniformity and we have struggled and struggled and struggled and with very rare exceptions we found it worked.
