Heritage and History

A sermon preached by Revd Barry Hutchinson
at Barnard Castle United Reformed Church,  5 August 2012

A few weeks ago I attended a Quiet Day at Durham Cathedral, in the company of Anglican brethren and led by an Anglican priest.  Because I was reading for this sermon I happened to ask if anybody knew anything about the Great Ejectment of 1662.  Not one of them could recall ever hearing anything about it, not even the leader/priest who was a very well educated and well informed man.   I am not a historian – in fact I had forgotten much of what I had learned about dissent in Britain during my training –the story had then been just another load of facts to process and if necessary turned into an essay. 

But just recently a couple of experiences have led me to appreciate how much heritage and history can mean to human communities.  I come from Bishop Auckland originally but very early in life we moved to Fishburn where my dad was a pitman.   When I was a teenager I couldn’t wait to get out of the Northeast and so I moved around for many years until eventually settling down, now that I’m retired, near Durham City having been surprised a few years ago by a sense of being drawn back home. My wife and I went a few weeks ago to Durham Big Meeting, the annual Miners Gala – and what a day we had.  There was a huge sense of being grounded back into my own community, of taking in a new and proper sense of community pride and of the recovery of community self worth and value in what we have accomplished, politically and socially and economically in the North East, often against the odds and perhaps especially during the 1980’s which was a dark and depressing time on the Durham coalfield.  Yet here were people (over 100,000 of them by all accounts) from mining stock celebrating their heritage, defying the odds in an area where no coal mines exist anymore.  It was a remarkable day.

The other experience was watching the Olympic Opening Ceremony, which admittedly began slowly and patchily but ended up by being a huge celebration of what it means to be British, which is not easily indefinable yet  here included the back breaking and sometimes soul destroying toil of ordinary people as they worked in factories and mills during the industrial revolution, suffered during times of war, drew strength from their religion conviction to see them through dark times – and not forgetting Rowan Atkinson, Mr. Bean, who presented what had to be the funniest and quirkiest interlude in the history of the modern Olympiad;  typically British ironic humour.  There was a huge sense of national pride that British people pulled that ceremony off so well and did something so utterly different and compelling without being arrogant and proud in the wrong sense of that word.

So it was a sadness when I came across this piece by Tristram Hunt in the Guardian in 2006 as I swotted up for  this sermon, around a topic I only tackled because I was asked to:

The stories, monuments and myths that traditionally linked progressives with their heroic past have steadily retreated from public consciousness. This amounts to something akin to a loss of collective memory. And so it should come as no surprise that we have difficulty rallying any broader, popular enthusiasm for our political process when we lack an appreciation of our democratic heritage.

Hunt is speaking largely about political dissent which championed working class causes and struggled for the freedoms of democracy - but his statement can easily be attached to the history of religious dissent in our country which at different and many times has been the catalyst for the search and fight for equality of political representation,  access to education for all British people, access to health care for all people, and social care for the vulnerable, the search for which was often grounded in religious dissent.  Listen to this paraphrase:

And so it should come as no surprise that we have difficulty rallying any broader, popular enthusiasm for our religious process when we ourselves lack an appreciation of our religious heritage.

The Ejectment of 1662 meant that around 2000 educated clergymen and teachers could not follow their calling and underwent terrible suffering because their conscience would not let them conform to an act of parliament which denied some of the fundamental human freedoms which Christianity sought, and still seeks at its best, to bring to all people.  They were added to a band of people who from Elizabethan times were already worshipping in small groups outside of the established church, having given up the idea that the Church of England would ever change.  Happily for the dissenters of 1662 they were supported and encouraged by many of their former parishioners, some of whom were wealthy professional people,  who called them back into clerical service when that became possible.  But even then, and throughout the 18^th C.  they could not be educated at Cambridge and Oxford, the only degree awarding institutes and until early in the 19^th C. dissenters, or independents, or none conformists, were among those who could not hold military, public or political office unless they were willing to dissemble and at least appear to be conforming to the practices of the established church. 

To answer the need for good, solid education dissenters set up Academies of learning, some of which were not quite the thing but many of which became highly regarded and turned out some of the most distinguished and highly regarded scholars of their day.  Indeed, the academies became centres of progressive religion, promoting the application of intellectual reason in religion as well as in the developing and increasingly influential scientific projects of the age of enlightenment.   This reliance upon reason in faith,  maybe too much trust was given over to reason, led in the 18^th C. to many Presbyterian  congregations becoming Unitarian in belief – though these particular Presbyterians were largely unconnected to the Presbyterian Church of England which is now part of our tradition and came into being in the 19^th C.

Congregationalism which, as you know, is another major precursor of the URC was all the time developing and strengthening its influence, supported by new Congregational Christian industrialists and entrepreneurs who were agitating for more democracy and the right to be represented in the governing of the country.  Our forefathers were not ‘squeeky clean’ and some of them were as oppressive towards their workers as the political and religious establishment were to them.  But many of them promoted wider education and so Sunday Schools took root. 

Much of this political and social dissent was underpinned by belief in the freedom that the gospel gave to individuals and to like minded local groups of Christians to answer the call of God, uninfluenced by government, and to make decisions which affected people locally at the local level. 

And so the call of God stretched to being actively involved in the development of society as a fairer and more wholesome place for all its inhabitants where governments did not oppress the little man but strove to enable each to reach their full potential.  So political and social action have always been part of the dissenting agenda. 

There is so much in our dissenting history that would make your heart swell with pride as you read it.  We’re in a time when our influence continues to wane and we seem to be increasingly marginalized, not only socially and politically but also as a faith community which appears to be having much difficulty finding its place in modern society.  We are in a crisis which seems to me to be every bit as big as the ejectment of 1662 – and crisise need tackling in different ways to the ordinary, run of the mill ups and downs of a steady community journey.  Can you imagine the soul searching and determination and continuing commitment which must have arisen amongst the dissenting communities after 1662?  It led, when times changed, to the establishment of new, vigorous  congregations of faithful Christians, living and worshipping in new and different ways, experimenting within the faith to allow the Spirit to move in them and through them into the world to bless it? 

Sometimes this led people astray.  More usually it re-invigorated and remodeled their faith and empowered the people to become who they were meant to become.  And through their dissent other people came into more human freedom than they had known before.
And so we can re-capture our history as a means to encourage ourselves in these less encouraging times.  We can explore and adapt our traditions, just as our forefathers have done before us, resting, as the Gospel story points us towards, upon Jesus who is the genesis of our faith and the completer of our faith and guardian of our faith.  We can continue to promote the freedom of conscience for all people engendered by the dissenting religious agenda and thus defend democratic values for the future.  

Free church traits such as voluntarism, an active laity, populist forms of church government, individualism, and suspicion of authority have nurtured the growth of democracy - and more importantly personal and community freedom and equality.

In the same way as our forefathers did we can take new looks at our faith, bringing to bear our time and energy to discover how to follow our Lord in a challenging age, an age when some people see the future of the churches being focused for a while at least upon a few centres of Christian excellence where resources can be concentrated and new ways of being, experimented with and developed.  There are signs in our colleges and amongst our leaders that we can be successful in the transition, that the Holy Spirit is still at work amongst us if we open our eyes and dare to follow, sometimes down some unorthodox and scary paths.  But the need to change and adapt to current conditions, however hard that might seem to be, is a constant lesson in our dissenting history.

Centering our life, faith and church community on the desire to do God’s will and to follow Jesus as our first priority, we can be sure that God will bless our efforts and the church will continue to be God’s servant and the servant of society which at its best it always is.