Interview: Rev Mary Hunter, 2007 Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

|PIC1|Rev Mary Hunter is minister at Christ Church, Rathgar, in Dublin, and has been with the Irish Inter-church Meeting for the last four years.

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.

|TOP|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.

|AD|CT: How hard was it to make materials that would appeal to all Christians?

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.