The United Church of Christ in the United States, as part of their 'God Is Still Speaking' campaign, produced that
fantastic ejector seat ad. If someone comes in to the church and doesn’t
fit in, you just hit the ejector button.
I ministered in Islington through most of the eighties and one of the
interesting challenges that took quite a bit of time over a number of months
towards the end of that ministry was a variety of refugee crises, particularly a large influx of Kurdish
refugees to Hackney and Islington at one point.
I always remember the Sunday afternoon when I got a phone call asking if
we could temporarily put up a group of Kurdish men in the church. Thank goodness that health and safety hadn’t
got going quite as it has now in those days.
And thank God for a congregation that lived with the wild and wonderful decisions
of their minister. Because as the
faithful arrived for Sunday evening
worship, so did about thirty Kurdish men, some of whom were going to end up
using our church premises as home for up to three months. Over the weeks that followed, I, and others,
befriended these men and helped with the provision of food and clothes, despite
the lack of a common language. I
remember one particular Sunday some weeks later. I had messed up big time in my preparation
for Sunday morning worship. I had only
realised about fifteen minutes before the service that it was scheduled as
all-age worship and so jettisoned my carefully prepared sermon and was very
much making it up as I went along. Shortly
after the service began, one of my Kurdish friends, Halil, decided to come into
the service. He entered the sanctuary
and looked around to see where to sit. It is always good to sit beside someone you know – and the person
he knew best was me so, despite the fact that everyone else was, more or less
facing one way – we were probably in something of the round, rather than
straight rows – and I was doing the opposite, he came and sat beside me and,
despite the language barrier, proceeded to interrupt the time I was trying to
use to think about what I was going to do next, by asking me various things
about the service. But, so far as the congregation
was concerned, nobody gave any indication that it was anything other than
perfectly normal for someone to come in and sit down beside the worship leader.
Let's be ready to welcome the stranger!
