A Century of Theological Reflection

This sermon was given at Wesley Church Cambridge on the occasion of Wesley House’s second centenary event entitled ‘Leading like a Methodist’. Although we had originally planned our year-long series of centenary events to be in person, in practice they were mostly either hybrid or online because of the lingering COVID pandemic. Nevertheless, a congregation of about 50 people – staff, students, trustees, alumni, and friends – gathered in October to mark the beginning of the Michaelmas Term 1921 when the first six theological students arrived at Wesley House.

The texts on which the sermon reflects are Psalm 84, Revelation 22.1-2, and Mark 4.26-32, and the themes lifted up from these are ‘life, fruit, and healing’ as measures by which any theological college might be judged as it examines its past and looks forward into the future:

Life – in all its fullness – life lived in God’s ever-present presence – is this the source of our life and the life we seek to nurture?

These questions arose out of theological reflection on the above texts in the context of climate crisis, increasing polarisation in the face of globalisation, and growing awareness of the legacies of colonialism and slavery on a society and a church that still has a long way to go to dismantle structural racism and inequality. The texts seemed to me to cut through some of the concerns that inevitably pre-occupy institutions seeking to compete for business and funding in a global market (‘What is our brand?’ ‘What are our income streams?’ ‘Where is our market?’), to instead focus on the quality of our relationships as staff and students with God and with one another, and the quality of our impact on the life of the world.

As we look back, Wesley House is proud of the contributions that our alumni have made to the life of the world, of the church, and of the academy over the years. Many of these have been celebrated during our centenary year – from scholars in New Testament, Wesley Studies, and Interfaith Relations; to prophetic activists against apartheid, against poverty, and for democratic government; and to bishops and other leaders who have held and guided the church in faithful worship and witness in the UK and around the world. As we look forward, we keep worship and discernment at the heart of our life; we continue to be guided by a conjunctive Wesleyan theology that refuses binary thinking amid the complexity of the world’s challenges;¹² and we seek to equip scholars and church leaders for prophetic engagement in the life of the church and the world through our research and teaching activities. The sermon offers some measures for seeing how we are doing.

16 October 2021, Wesley Church, Cambridge

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations (Revelation 22).

He also said, ‘The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.’

He also said, ‘With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.’ (Mark 4).

In this last couple of weeks, as we have been marking the arrival in Cambridge in 1921 of the first students of Wesley House, both Stuart Jordan (Chair of Trustees) and myself have been recalling our own arrivals here as students: Stuart 50 years ago this month, and myself 30 years ago.

Students, in 1921, and in 1971 and in 1991, were chiefly sent to Cambridge to study on the Tripos¹³ in Theology and Religious Studies. I have strong memories of both the terror and the joy of this. Being taught ‘Jesus’ and ‘Paul’ by Prof Morna Hooker as she swept in in her gown, spoke without ceasing for 50 minutes, and swept out again; and classes with John Sweet in the old Lightfoot Room¹⁴, as we sweated over the Greek text and watched him twinkling at us getting it wrong over this two-inch dog collar. One thing I resolved as I left his class was never to preach on the book of Revelation – and yet here I am, armed with his commentary, preparing to do just that.

To me, in my twenties, the book of Revelation seemed bizarre, violent, polarising, and irrelevant: an unfortunate postscript to the New Testament which called into question the sanity of those compiling the canon. I learned the difference between eschatology (the end things) and apocalyptic (the unveiling of things hidden), and yet, in a stable Britain, heading towards Cool Britannia, and in a relatively stable church, not yet in crisis, alongside the Berlin Wall coming down and apartheid being dismantled, it seemed that the building of the kingdom of God by human hands was not going too badly.

How times and perceptions change! Europe again facing the rise of popular nationalism, something I thought banished with Hitler; climate crisis causing species extinction at an alarming rate and threatening the end of human life; politics polarizing on the basis of religion and race; the gap between rich and poor growing (not narrowing) with globalization; and the realisation that empire and whiteness have so colonized any notion of the kingdom of God that humans can clearly not be trusted with such a project.¹⁵

And so, to the Revelation text, which seems now, more relevant… For in this vision, the kingdom of heaven is not built by human hands (rising up to heaven like a tower of Babel); rather, it comes down from heaven as truth and light, exposing the fake as the root of all evil, and the travesties that substitute for the real heavenly city – in which colonized peoples and identities are held captive, compelled to add their wealth to the glory of those in power – whereas here, in the city of Ezekiel’s vision re-presented – in the city known as ‘God is there’ – in this city, there is water for life and fruit for food and the leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations.

I wonder how those young men arriving at Wesley House in 1921 read the book of Revelation? Emerging from the Great War, three of them having fought in it, what did they make of the New Jerusalem of this vision? Did they see it as history, having already been fulfilled in the New Covenant in Christ’s blood? Did they see it as prophecy fulfilled by the Reformation? Did they see it as the perennial battle between good and evil, with God and King Harry on the winning side? Or did they see the events prophesied, as did many early church theologians, as predicting the future end of the world? – all published and popular ways of reading the text at the time.

A century is a long time in biblical hermeneutics. Post-colonial criticism was not then imaginable; but now, to preach at the celebration of an institution that has inscribed in its gatehouse, ‘I look upon all the world as my parish’, and not speak about decolonization, would be culpably blind.

In 1921, the British Empire was still in full swing, and notions of the book of Revelation as the culmination of a singular sacred narrative from creation to Christ, through the expansion of the church throughout the earth to judgment, were perhaps easily correlated with a divinely ordained territorial expansion of Christianity. It worked well for Constantinian models of Christian mission; and it worked well for the British empire too: an optimistic version of the Christian story in which the church and divinely established rulers overcome evil and create a global order fit for the presence of Christ and his millennial reign.

And yet the disintegration of empire, the holocausts of the ‘final solution’ and the atom bomb, and the emergence of other narratives to challenge the stories of the victors of history, all combine to beg for a more humble reading of our Scriptures in which we cannot assume, whether as white people or as any other dominant group, nor even as Christians, that the evil is outside of us and that we are fighting it; rather we need to acknowledge that the harlot, Jerusalem, and the glorious Zion of Revelation are not two different cities – with the enemy outside the gate. Rather, the light of the city – the light of the presence of God’s very self – invites us all to see ourselves and to measure ourselves as God sees and as God measures…

And the measure by which we shall be measured? You and I, and this institution we call Wesley House? I suggest that three yardsticks are offered by our reading from Mark 4:

Life

Life – in all its fullness – life lived in God’s ever-present presence – is this what our life is about?

Fruit – in the sense of food – nourishment for that life –material, intellectual, spiritual – is this what our lives are for?

And Healing – not just for the chosen; not just for those who convert; not just for people like us, but for all the nations: the nations made vassal and the nations demanding tribute. The nations trampling and the nations trampled. Healing for all the nations. Is this the end to which our research, teaching, and learning is directed?

Some of you know that I like to photograph birds. And so I like the reference in Psalm 84 to birds nesting in an altar. We’ve had pigeons nesting in the bell chamber of the Wesley House chapel, and hedgehogs in the heating ducts, but never birds nesting under the communion table (unless that’s a story Brian Beck hasn’t told us).

I like the psalm and I like the parable of Jesus in which the purpose for which the mustard tree grows is not its own perpetuation as a species, but for the sake of the birds of the air who need nourishment and shelter and who freely come in and go out.

And it seems to me that as tempting as it is sometimes to measure an institution in terms of its endowments and the publications of its staff and the quality of its accommodation – and I’m not saying these things are unimportant – we need to measure what we are about in rather different ways.

Are we working in such a way that our graduates and our partnerships are being rooted in the life-giving water of God’s very present presence and inviting others into that life-giving stream?

We have seen evidence this centenary weekend of some of the best of the impacts Wesley House has had and is having around the world: we have heard of Mvume Dandala’s contribution to the dismantling of apartheid and the building of the post-apartheid church in Southern Africa and beyond (Mvume was a student at Wesley House in the 1970s); we have heard from Paw Liang The in Indonesia (an MA student at Wesley House in the early 2000s), seeking to make safe spaces for pastors in this Kairos moment of global change, to discern the next faithful step; and we have witnessed the power of partnership working as we have participated in a global network of common concern that seeks to rediscover and re-open deep pathways to Christ and God’s kingdom in a myriad of cultural contexts.

A few weeks ago, I participated – remotely – in the launch of the Institute of Wesleyan leadership at Kenya Methodist University. I spoke then on these two parables of Mark. The first: a reminder that it is God who plants the seeds that germinate in due season, allowing us to reap at the right time. The seeds of that Institute were planted in 1991 when I came as a student to Wesley House and met a Kenyan student already studying here.

Then, neither of us had any idea that he would become the Presiding Bishop of the Methodist Church in Kenya and the Chancellor of Kenya Methodist University, and I had no idea that I would become Principal of Wesley House, as an old way of being died and new possibilities were opening up. Yet, knowing each other then in an intercultural community of prayer and study meant that when we met up again 25 years later, there was a bond of trust and common understanding that allowed us to dream dreams. That shared imagination nourished the seed that God had planted without our knowing, and who knows what seeds are being planted even now, in this room, of which we are unaware.

As I spoke at Kenya Methodist University about the mustard tree, I realised that it takes a whole forest of mustard trees to do the work of the kingdom, and I thought about the way in which the planet needs not only trees – or even clumps of trees – but global corridors of trees that allow the earth to breathe and life to move from one place to another, cross-fertilising in order to flourish and sustain all that lives.

Which brings me back to Wesley’s parish… and the words inscribed in our gatehouse: ‘I look upon all the world as my parish’. Read as an attractional model in which Cambridge is the centre of the world, this phrase aligns us with a colonial and paternalistic vision of what Wesley House is for and what the kingdom of God is like; yet read from everywhere to everywhere, we find ourselves part of a great forest in which we have a role to play – both in giving and receiving; breathing in and breathing out – as together with our partners throughout the world, we seek to rediscover and re-imagine deep pathways to Christ and God’s ever-present kingdom.

So, my prayer today is that the God who, in 1921, scattered seed on this ground, may continue to nourish us and the work of this college by rooting and re-rooting us in the water of life, that we might bear fruit, and, with humility, play our role in the global forest of trees whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.

This Sermon was preached before the University of Cambridge at Pentecost, as the Ramsden Sermon – a sermon founded to invite reflection on ‘the extension of the gospel in the Commonwealth of nations’. Pentecost coincided with Queen Elizabeth II’s Jubilee weekend and the combination of the prescribed topic, the secular occasion, and the liturgical season led to a reflection on ‘The Spirit that Crosses Borders’ – an invitation to the congregation to inhabit borders rather than simply cross them, as places in which the Holy Spirit invites us all to put off the blinkers of our colonial past and learn from each other.

The sermon reflects on much of the travelling that I have been privileged to do since 2013 when Wesley House intentionally sought to become a global provider of theological education for those in the Wesleyan and Methodist families. It picks up the themes of globalisation and decolonisation from the October sermon, but takes us deeper into what it might mean to practice cultural humility, particularly in places of historic privilege, like Cambridge. It prefigured our final centenary weekend in which we hosted a day conference on the legacies of slavery and colonization and invited into conversation representatives of many communities who share a divided history: Chinese and Hong Kong Chinese; White African and Black African; Anglo American and African American; West African and Caribbean; White British and Black British. As we gathered in July 2023, we were educated about Methodist slave ownership in the United States by our Vice-Principal, Adam Ployd, about the resistance of Methodists to slave trading in the United Kingdom by Trustee Colin Smith, about the case for reparations from alumnus Valentin Dedji, and the need to address the legacies of structural inequality from Associate Member Ruby Quanston-Davies. But we also told personal stories and reflected together about how we respond, both personally and professionally to the issues as they come to light as we take the risk of entering the borderlands of encounter.

Acts 2.2-21

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.’ All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, ‘What does this mean?’ But others sneered and said, ‘They are filled with new wine.’

But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them: ‘Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: “In the last days it will be, God declares,

that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,

and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,

and your young men shall see visions,

and your old men shall dream dreams.

Even upon my slaves, both men and women,

in those days I will pour out my Spirit;

and they shall prophesy.

And I will show portents in the heaven above

and signs on the earth below,

blood, and fire, and smoky mist.

The sun shall be turned to darkness

and the moon to blood,

before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.

Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”‘

So what am I doing here?

This is perhaps a question we are all asking ourselves on this Jubilee weekend when we could be on the river, or on a city break, or still in bed…. ‘What am I doing here?’

As I ask myself the question, there are various levels at which I seem to need an answer for myself:

There is the question of place: what is a Methodist doing in a Cambridge – a place to which John Wesley was refused admittance by the Puritans of his day – and which he subsequently avoided like the plague? And then there is the question of the occasion: what is a non-conformist doing preaching in the established church as we celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee? Or what is a white person doing preaching the Ramsden sermon that celebrates the extension of the Christian faith into the Commonwealth – a white person who has worked hard as part of the preaching syndicate to see that voices from other parts of the world speak on their own behalf?

And then there is the question of the text: what is a woman doing speaking on a text that has taken the witness of the women at the empty tomb of Easter Day and platformed a man to speak solely to men? Or what is a member of the Cambridge Theological Federation, committed to interfaith dialogue, doing speaking on a text that has been used to redefine Israel not only to include the Gentiles but to supersede Judaism? Or a what is a member of a Wesley House that seeks to decolonize theology doing preaching on a text that has been used to legitimise the colonising of peoples across the world by conquistadores of every first world nation hungry for gold, and missionaries of every denomination, hungry for souls?

What am I doing here?

I am here both because I belong… and because I don’t.

Because, by both circumstance and by choice, I choose to inhabit borderlands which are the domain of the spirit and the promise of a better world.

Your intended preacher for today was Bishop Minerva Carcaño, a Mexican American woman from the borderlands of the Valley – that ravaged and disputed land between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande – territory that was once Indian, then Mexican, then Texan, now part of the United States. Bishop Carcaño is someone who embodies, far more visibly than I can ever do, a way of life that crosses borders every day – of language; of culture; of gender barriers. A Mexican-American bishop in a white majority church in a white man’s land in which Hispanic children, like black children, are of less consequence than the lobbies that pay to keep guns in the hands of white supremacists and the political forces that keep critical race theory out of the classroom.

I hope that one day she will stand here and bring you a sermon that begins from somewhere else, but, today, as a child of this nation, and as a graduate member of this university, and as an heir of the Western intellectual paradigm, I must start from here.

But, ‘here’ is not a simple place because the journeys which as Principal of Wesley House I have been obliged to make these last ten years since Wesley House was re-founded and refocused upon research and education in the global Wesleyan family, these journeys have invited me to cross borders, not only in the literal sense as I have visited the United States and Mexico, Zimbabwe and South Africa, Kenya and Tanzania, South Korea and Japan, but in the internal sense as I have developed relationships and been invited to see the world from other points of view. Journeys which have complexified my sense of where I belong and enriched it to the extent that ‘home’ is no longer a simple proposition, if it ever was.

On these travels, I have been to the Valley. To that desert of mesquite trees where the wind blows and the dust swirls, and the herons and the ibis and the egrets fly. I have been to Border Field State Park where the wire mesh that separates Tijuana from San Diego is so fine that not even fingers can touch, even as the pelicans fly nonchalantly over the fence that extends even into the sea. I have crossed the Rio Grande on foot at Nuevo Progresso and made the journey back again – a gringo in a queue of mestizas of Mexican/Indian descent – people who were born here – who stand and stand in line in the sweltering heat. And I have been convicted of the privilege of my birth and my passport and my education on this border where, as Gloria Anzaldúa puts it, the first world rubs against the third world to make an ‘open wound’ that never heals.¹⁶

Yet, this, like other borders around the world, has become a border that I enter by choice and do not simply cross – a place in which I cannot abrogate the richness of the intellectual life to which I am heir, nor the democratic institutions that grant the human rights and huge freedoms from which I benefit – but in which borderland I cannot ignore the self-deceptions and violence on which the edifice of the West has been built and is maintained. The self-deceptions and violence of which are seen all too clearly by those whose land or self-determination was stolen or treatied away, who remain without rights or voice on the other side of the fences we build, wherever borders are drawn between those we will treat as people, and those we will process.

Christianity, of course, has played its part in bolstering the hegemony of the West, of the white, of the patriarchal, of the hetero-normative and of the lie that truth is one. Something I learned from Janet Soskice, when studying the Tripos in the Divinity Faculty here was that ‘the truth looks different from here’¹⁷ – a foundation that has led me to think that any insistence on a single totalising narrative is nothing short of fascism – whatever clothes it might wear.

And we can read this text, set for Pentecost, in that light. Pentecost, the name of a Jewish festival which Christians have appropriated for our hegemonizing narrative. For here, the many voices of Babel are defeated by the unifying language of the Spirit. Here starts the Church, built on Peter the Rock, legitimating his claim in Jerusalem, the centre of the religious landscape, now heard, representatively by all the known world (well, its men, anyway); and it is one short leap to Christendom and one short leap to the scramble for Africa and another to the neo-conservative political ideologies that – cloaked in evangelical Christianity – seek to suppress all voices and histories but their own.

And if this is so, then why am I here? professing Christian faith? Preaching this text, on this day?

I am here because even in this text there are other voices and stories if we would listen to them, or let different others help us find them, of oneness that is not built on homogeneity or maintained by cultural purity, or defended by fences and other more persuasive security measures.

Because here in this text is communication that does not require everyone to speak English or assume that the gospel should be extended from here; here are cultural identities that need not be surrendered to a dominant culture – even a Christian one; and here is a way of living that is not founded on a man called ‘Rock’ (Peter = petrus = rock), but which relies on a Spirit that crosses borders as easily as a pelican can lift itself above the sea.

Of course, the rationalists and gatekeepers of the day dismissed this heart-to-heart communication in which the humanity of the other is recognised and the borders between nations and identities are softened and a sense of belonging and solidarity is created with all things seen and unseen. Of course, the rationalists dismissed the experience as drunkenness. What else could it be? How could this be of God? How dangerous to the carefully constructed order of things would it be for this Spirit to be poured out on all flesh? How many self-deceptions and vested interests would fall?

Just as the rationalists of John Wesley’s day dismissed him as an enthusiast and banned him from preaching the University sermon in Oxford, just as the women were dismissed on that first Easter day with their visions of angels and stories of an empty tomb, just as the spiritualities of indigenous peoples everywhere are discounted by western experts who export their sterile solutions to everything from peace-making to farming, when ‘the truth looks different from here…’, when not merely crossing borders of language and culture and paradigms of thought but entering into those borderlands might be the generative place in which this spirit is at work, weaving together the fibres of a better world.

So postcolonial theory tasks the privileged to allow room for other voices; and supports the subjugated to find their voice. And yet as the Chicana scholar Gloria Anzaldúa insists, to find a counter-stance is not enough because a counter-stance is not a way of life. It is not enough to stand on one bank throwing stones against the other, even from the place of subjugation; it is not enough even to switch sides from one bank to another in solidarity with those who protest – not enough to stand against the West, even as a Westerner, or against Christianity, even as a Christian, or against patriarchy or against hetero-normativity. Rather, Gloria Anzaldúa invites us all into the Borderlands of her Valley home, in which new, rich, enriching, and life-giving intersectional identities can be wrought that are not blind to the flaws and oppressions of our home cultures – whether Western or indigenous to other cultures, but are open to the life force that comes like wind and like fire, energising and changing the shape of the world we inhabit through encounter.

It is Easter Day 2022. Seven weeks ago. I am the guest of the Methodist Church in Kenya. Planted by the British in 1862, it has been an independent church since 1967. As I prepare to preach – almost the only white person in a congregation of more than 500, I am aware of the cultural violence perpetrated by my Methodist ancestors in Kenya – the demonization of everything African; the separating of young men and women from the culture around them by refusing to allow them to complete the rites of initiation necessary to attain adult status in their community; the cutting off from sources of wisdom and identity of generations of people from traditions now half lost; the carving up of denominational missions on tribal lines that still reinforce and struggle to challenge electoral violence – and much more. I have made it my business to read this history and hear these voices and learn from them.

And yet important though these voices are for me to hear, there are other narratives that also need a place… the voice of one Kenyan Wesley House research student, for example, as we stood outside the old Divinity School where I was taught, and where I was explaining about the expiring of the 500 year lease from St Johns on that property, to which she said, ‘You have been teaching theology in this university for more than 500 years? What took you so long to get to Kenya?’

As I prepared to preach the Easter message seven weeks ago, I knew that whilst cultural humility was essential, this would not be the place for a colonial guilt that would silence me and keep me on one bank or another, because by being invited to preach and into the homes of my Kenyan hosts and into the classroom to teach at the university, I was being invited not to cross a border but to enter the borderland of encounter; I was being invited into a space in which my sense of belonging and identity and home would be changed if I would let it.

Not that all the best of what I have inherited would no longer belong to me… but that I would learn how to share it, as a gift that others could examine and critique, and that I would learn how to receive the best of what others have in their hands… that in the exchange, something new might be birthed… dreams and visions of a new heaven and new earth, animated by the Spirit that visited those gathered at Pentecost, who found that they could understand one another.

The experience on that day of Pentecost was the work of a moment. An instant. An ecstatic experience of oneness and communion. And yet the life of the Spirit is not a silver bullet or a magic wand that solves the deep gulfs of understanding and unequal wealth and traumatised histories of our world, it is a way of life that needs to be lived everyday.

In the classrooms of Kenya Methodist University, I did not want to be the fêted white guest, and yet I was in a culture that gives honour to those to teach and lead. The students would not let me wait in line for my food no matter how hard I tried. They wanted me to go first and they wanted to serve me. Nothing else felt right to them and nothing felt more wrong to me. I wanted a classroom that was a collaborative learning space where students would challenge and ask questions and take the learning where they needed it to go, but whatever I tried the students were slow to question out of habit and out of respect.

What to do that we might understand one another? I named the gaps. I named my goals. We named the gaps. We named our goals. We laughed. We learned. And there were moments like wind and like fire as something in each and between each burst into life and the miracle of communication happened.

And this is why I am here. Because I believe in the non-coercive Spirit of God – which others might name in a myriad other ways – who invites us all not simply to cross borders, but to enter the borderlands of encounter where I believe the goodness of God is at work: in the borderland wherever Mexico and the USA meet; in the borderland wherever colonized and colonizer meet; in the borderland where people of faith and none meet; in the borderland where the proper colleges of a university and its satellite colleges meet; in the borderland where one human heart may meet another and be changed as we have the courage and the humility to let go, not of the Babel of home cultural identities and languages, but of the Babel tower’s builders’ need to be first, to be best, to be the only, and to be right.

In the borderland where we are invited to acknowledge what those pushed to the margins know, that our identities are not a homogenous, God-given, unassailable birth right – British, Christian, white, as if these were synonyms. Instead, that they are complex, intersectional, dynamic and porous crucibles – of culture and of belief, of gender and of sexuality, of ethnicity and of nationality. An invitation into the Pentecostal borderland where the Spirit of God teaches listening and self-awareness, fragility and resilience, self-esteem and interdependence.

So, as a child of this nation on this Jubilee weekend, with all its overtones of Empire, I want to acknowledge damage done and the huge inequalities that separate us still, and yet I also want to uphold the values to which the new commonwealth is committed of which the next head will not be the British monarch by right, but whomever the member states elect. As a graduate member of this university, with all its brilliance and intellectual history, I want to lay down the superiorities of the canons of knowledge that come only from the Western paradigm and open our curricula and our academic appointments to those who see differently because they begin from somewhere else.

Yet I know that such openness will be threatening to those whose work and worldview will inevitably be decentred and that this work will take patience and a long obedience in the same direction. And as a white Western Christian and as a woman, I want to critique so much of the way in which we have wielded the Bible as a tribal weapon, and yet I want to be in that crowd at Pentecost, feeling that wind and fire that disturbs and purifies and unifies and sets us together on a journey, not from any perceived centre to any perceived periphery, but as the Spirit is poured out on all flesh – from everywhere to everywhere – which puts the invitation into the borderland which is the domain of the Spirit and the promise of a better world into the hands of us all.

This hymn was jointly commissioned by Wesley House Cambridge in its centenary year and Southlands College in its 150th year. It is structured around the Southland’s motto, Light, Love, Life, which is almost identical to Wesley House’s motto: Lux, Vita, Caritas: Light, Life, Love. With the words written by myself and the music by Nicola Morrison, Chaplain at Southlands, this hymn represents a collaboration between two British Methodist educational institutions and the fruit of both our theological educations at Wesley House.

It is inspired by Ephesians 3.17-19 as a prayer for both students and teachers:

I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

The three verses invite a Trinitarian reflection on God the creator as the source of all light and true knowledge, God as the love revealed in Jesus Christ as we come to know and be known face to face, and God as the life of the Spirit revealed in transformed lives and communities. It grounds the vocation of the teacher in the teaching of Christ and invites those who teach also to be learners of the ways of Christ who engage themselves and others in a holistic education that embraces heart, mind, body and spirit and results in a practical wisdom that is for the healing of the nations.

Written during the Russian war on Ukraine, it develops the metaphor of growth used in the Ephesians passage through Jesus’ images of the kingdom: the sower who went out to sow and the woman who mixed yeast with flour. These support the Wesleyan theme of growth in holiness that is both personal and social, seeing the purpose of education in whatever field as being the dignity of the human being, fully alive, and the service of the common good, even in political and social circumstances that challenge faithful action.

This tune is named ‘Schaufeld’, following Nicola’s tradition of naming compositions after people that have inspired her own faith. Vera Schaufeld (née Lowyova) was evacuated from her home as part of the Czechoslovakian Kindertransport (1938-40) organised by the British humanitarian Nicholas Winton. None of Vera’s family travelled with her and once in England she was fostered by a very caring Christian family who respected Vera’s Jewish Faith. It wasn’t until after the end of the war that Vera learnt that her family had not survived.

Vera was educated at a Methodist school, and in 1948, at the age of 18, Vera joined Southlands College, qualifying as an English teacher in 1950. After leaving college Vera spent a year in Israel before returning to England to teach English in Brent, London. In 1972, Vera took the decision to use her experience of learning English as a child in order to teach a group of Ugandan and Kenyan refugee children, who had recently arrived in Brent. Most of the children were of Asian descent and had been expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin – the then President of Uganda. The experience of being a refugee during the war shaped Vera’s life choices which, in turn, offers us ongoing inspiration for our own lives, perspectives, and choices. In writing its 2016 report about the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe, the Methodist Church in Britain has stated that ‘We must affirm the case for a human response to the crisis, which recognises that we are all made for goodness, and that the human dignity of refugees is intimately connected to our own.’¹⁸

The hymn was sung for the first time at the Southlands and Wesley House celebrations in the last week of June/first week of July 2022 as we concluded our centenary year. Its themes and its dedication honour the long history of Methodist education stemming from the foundation of Kingswood School and bring us full circle to the question of how any such institution should be measured: in terms of the life it engenders, the fruit its students bear, and the contribution they go on to make towards the healing of the nations.

“Light, Love, Life”

Enlightening light, we blinded seek

The Word that brought the world to birth,

And shines undaunted in the night

Of evil deeds and unmet needs

That threaten to engulf the earth.

Shine now your rays;

Reveal your ways,

That all who teach and learn may know

The source of all things true and fair

From whom all love and goodness flow.

Empowering love, we see your face

In Jesus Christ our light and friend

Whose teaching opened eyes and hearts,

And raised the least to share the feast

Of knowing and of being known.

Infuse this place

With signs of grace,

That all who learn and teach and sow

The seeds that shape the world we share

May, grounded, in your goodness grow.

Abundant life, we feel the beat

Of goodness pulsing in our veins

When knowledge serves the common good

And love is found to be the ground

In which the Spirit’s fruits may grow.

Make us the yeast

That sows God’s peace

Wherever we are called to go,

That justice, mercy, love and care

May be the proof that Christ we know.