Dear Friends,

Twenty years ago I began my training for ordained ministry at Wesley College on the outskirts of Bristol.  One of my tutors was a man called Diarmaid MacCulloch.  He had taught church history at Wesley College for twelve years and left after my first year to write more books.  He was an outstanding tutor.  He has become one of this country’s leading historians and will present a BBC tv series this autumn.

His latest book has been published and received a rave review in The Guardian from the Archbishop of Canterbury.  It is a large book – over 1,000 pages – and at the time of writing this I have only read10%.  But it is a delight to read.  It is entitled A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years.  Three thousand because of Christianity’s origins in Judaism and Greek thought and culture.

He writes about the apparent unity of the Church in the early centuries before its division into three increasingly distanced parts, of which Western Christianity was not necessarily the most important.  He says that at the end of the first eight centuries Baghdad seemed like a more likely capital of world Christianity than Rome.  (I recently read another book, The Church in the Shadow of the Cross, which also emphasised this point.  For four centuries after the mid 7^th century, over 50% of world Christians lived under Islam).  The dominance of Western Christianity is comparatively recent.

The Oriental churches still survive.  Orthodoxy (the faith of the Byzantine empire for a 1,000 years) is on the rise.  Western Christianity continues to become more and more splintered.  Methodism and Anglicanism are not exactly at the centre of things.  All this puts our local church and our denomination into perspective.  We are a pinprick in the history of Christianity but still as much a part of the story as anyone else.  To be ecumenical is to understand this and to seek to enjoy other people’s stories as well as to share one’s own.

You may not want to read a book with a 1,000 pages but do watch the tv series.  Let’s develop a better understanding of the breadth of the church down the centuries (the triumphs and the tragedies) and of the church in the world today.

I’m grateful to Dr MacCulloch for all that he taught me all those years ago.  He was succeeded by Dr Tim Macquiban who many of you have met and who is now minister of the central Methodist church in Cambridge.  We are all part of the Christian story, a story which Dr MacCulloch reminds us had its beginnings three thousand years ago.  It’s like a very long play – our walk-on parts are taking place now.  We are actors in the Christian story!

 

With very best wishes,

Colin

Minister’s Letter

Highlights from The Messenger