The Church of Ireland
Diocesan Press Release

On Sunday 4 November, Bishop Harold Miller became a Methodist for a day.

In the morning, he was preaching in the East Belfast Mission, on the Newtownards Road, and in the evening at a special Home Missions event for the North Eastern Methodist District in Antrim. For the last four years Bishop Harold has been co-chair of the Joint Theological Working Party of the Church of Ireland and the Methodist Church in Ireland. The Working Party has, over the last two years, been involved in drawing up a Draft Covenant between the Methodist Church and the Church of Ireland which, while leaving the two churches as separate entities, would draw them closer in their commitment to each other and in their life and mission.

In his address, Bishop Harold spoke of four things he feels passionately about. First, the fact that all those who are in Jesus Christ are already united in 'one Lord, one faith and one baptism'. "Those who are born again in Jesus Christ cannot but be members of the same family with the same heavenly Father", he said. "But equally, we must passionately want to make this visible for all to see. In a divided community like ours, people need to see the church coming together in unity. We can become much too attached to our denominations and their labels, in which God has little interest. In one of the hymns sung in both churches the famous Methodist hymn writer, Fred Pratt Green, expressed the same thought in these words:

'May we no more defend
barriers he died to end:
Give me your hand, my friend,
One Church, one Lord!'"

Bishop Miller went on to say that unity does not mean uniformity: indeed, true unity (like the unity of the human body) needs the diversity of the different parts. "I feel passionately that all our churches have been given special and different gifts and emphases by God, and instead of being the cause of division, the time has come to share these with one another". Drawing out what the people called Methodists had to offer the Church of Ireland, he mentioned:

• the warmth of Methodist fellowship
• the joy and life of Methodist singing
• the long-established practice of Methodists sharing their lives together in small groups or 'class meetings'
• a passion for evangelism, so much in the DNA of any true follower of John Wesley, and
• the way in which Methodists have always looked outwards to the community with a caring heart for needs.

And he concluded that it may well be the case that the Church of Ireland will have things to offer the Methodist Church as well, but it wasn't his place to say what those were!

Finally, Bishop Harold appealed to the members of the two churches to spend time listening to each other. "In Ephesians 4, St Paul asks us to 'speak the truth in love', and also to relate to each other 'with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with each other in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace'.

"Quite honestly", he said, "I have been hurt by some of the comments made both by members of the Church of Ireland and by members of the Methodist Church. There are a few Church of Ireland people who treat the Methodist Church as 'not the real thing', because you don't have bishops in the way the Anglican Church has bishops. And there are some Methodists who have said bluntly, 'The Church of Ireland doesn't preach the Gospel'. Those things hurt. But, when members of both churches have met together, and listened to each other's experiences of the Lord, the response to the Covenant has always been positive.

"You see, in the end of the day unity is passionately on the heart of Jesus, who lets us in to the will of the Father. It is also on the heart of Charles Wesley, who, declaring that God has stamped 'Void' on all our distinctions, puts it like this:

Names and sects and parties fall,
Thou, O Christ, art all in all."

(The Covenant between the Methodist Church and the Church of Ireland will be on the Agenda at next year's General Synod and Methodist Conference.)