Roberta Rominger Photo: Photo: Trish Carn.
Working together
Rowena Loverance hears a plea for partnership across faith boundaries
‘No big deal’ is hardly the way we generally refer to our relations with other Christian churches, but it was the overall message I picked up from Roberta Rominger’s engaging talk at Britain Yearly Meeting on Saturday 26 May at lunchtime.
‘I hope there’s some juicy business this afternoon, so I can see how you do it’. Roberta, who was already familiar with Quaker worship, was looking forward to her first big Quaker Meeting for Worship for Business. Roberta is general secretary of the United Reform Church (URC), which is celebrating its fortieth anniversary this year. It was created in 1972 from a merger of the Presbyterian and Congregationalist churches, and later joined by the Churches of Christ and the Congregational Union of Scotland. Roberta grew up in California and was ordained in the United Church of Christ.
The United Reform Church this year also celebrates the 350th anniversary of its founding event – the ‘Great Ejectment’ from the Church of England in 1662. Roberta is clear that Quakers and the United Reform Church spring from the same dissenting soil and still have much in common. She cited several strands of Rachel Brett’s Swarthmore Lecture that had resonated with her: the need for perseverance and the opportunity to create a safe place for making relationships. Quakers, she thought, could offer this facility to their partner churches. When she commented that a lot of her ecumenical energies are taken up with internal ecumenism within her own church body, a sympathetic ripple ran round the thirty or so Friends present.
Her main message, though, was that quite a chunk of URC work – interfaith, health and healing and property matters – is already being done jointly with other churches – notably Methodists and Baptists – and that she hopes and expects this will soon extend to basic areas of administrative work, and with a wider group of churches. If this doesn’t happen, she warns, churches will be left in a state of imbalance, with an ever-increasing load of essential bureaucratic and accountability structures supporting a shrinking amount of affordable real work. There is an invitation here for Friends, which she is already following up with our recording clerk. It was striking that, though partly driven by financial expediency, Roberta saw this as just the obvious way of doing things. After years of hearing the Lund principle preached – ‘doing together everything other than that which conscience compels us to do apart’ – here it was finally being practised. Earlier, in YM session, we would be invited to dream the future – and here, a future post-denominational world seemed to be opening up.
In discussion, Friends commented on whether people whose faith-journey takes them from one denomination to another now see themselves not as ‘refugees’ but as ‘fellow-travellers’. We heard of Friends’ ecumenical role in sustainability, and Roberta spoke of the Eco-congregation movement, now over ten years old, which enables churches to map and share their progress on sustainability. The URC had recently been challenged to find a congregation willing to ‘live the future’ for six months and be videoed doing it – and had failed to find one. Would any Quaker Meeting have stepped forward, one wonders?
