By Adrian Pyle, Director of Chaplaincy and Connections
At the recent Uniting Connections Conference (the national UCA schools conference), Rev Andrew Syme offered what felt like an unusually honest reflection on the conversations that occur between different expressions of the Uniting Church.
One of the gifts of the address was his refusal to pretend that congregational, presbytery, synod and educational settings all carry the same assumptions.
- Different symbolic centres.
- Different age profiles.
- Different growth trajectories.
- Different organisational structures.
- Different employment and governance cultures.
- Different memories and experiences of growth and change.
- Different patterns of participation.
These things, Andrew suggested, all walk into the room with us, usually unnamed, and they shape the conversations we have.
Yet his emphasis wasn’t on overcoming difference, but on recognising deeper commitments that many of us share.
Drawing on John O’Donohue, the Irish poet and spiritual writer, he spoke of three beautiful ideas:
- Substantial becoming:
… whether in schools, congregations or other ministries, there is something profoundly hopeful about watching lives unfold and people grow into who they are becoming … - Emerging fullness:
… helping inner and outer life speak to one another may be among the deepest tasks we are given, whether with children, young people, adults or ourselves … - Grace and elegance:
… not the denial of hard questions, but a commitment to conduct ourselves with generosity, humility and a shared openness to the mission of God.
Listening to Andrew, I found myself wondering:
- What assumptions walk into the room when different expressions of the Church meet?
- Which differences need to be resolved, and which simply need to be understood?
- Have we sometimes spent too much energy seeking sameness, when perhaps the Spirit delights in diversity held together in relationship?
- What might our conversations look like if grace and elegance were not occasional virtues, but habitual practices?
Perhaps, as Andrew suggested, those places of substantial becoming, emerging fullness and graceful relationship are not simply signs of beauty.
Perhaps they are traces of the Spirit already at work among us.
