The tradition of celebrating a harvest festival in schools or churches as we know it today began fairly recently in historical terms when, in 1843, the Revd. Robert Hawker invited his Cornish parishioners to a special thanksgiving service at Morwenstow church. Celebrations of the harvest season, however, date back many hundreds of years and whole communities, over the centuries, have been united by the growing and harvesting of food.
As we celebrate our Harvest Festival at St Johns Seven Kings this month in 2009 we could ask ourselves what unites our community in Seven Kings today. Our first reaction may be sceptical and cynical; that our community is now so diverse and different that there is nothing that unites us. I talked at our Annual Parochial Church Meeting about population changes in our locality and the challenges that these pose to churches in this borough and some may have thought that I was reflecting a similar scepticism and cynicism about our community.
That could not be further from the way that I think about the challenges we face as church and community from the diversity in our borough. I think that it is part of our Christian witness to find and contribute to ways of uniting our diverse community and that to do this is a sign that the kingdom of God is for all peoples everywhere. Sometimes I hear people talk as though the Church community should come first and the wider community second. But that is to think like the world in which people consistently put themselves and their needs first. Instead the Church is to be, in the words of Archbishop William Temple, the one organisation that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members.
As we provide a venue for a wide range of community groups, as we host TASK meetings and contribute to the Seven Kings & Newbury Park Residents Association, as we deliver our own activities for the wider community, as we show care and interest to our neighbours and as we carry out our work tasks across London, we are regularly bringing different people and groups together in ways that would not otherwise be the case.
Our involvement in local campaigns for improved community facilities – library, park etc – is beginning to bear fruit. Attention is beginning to be paid to Seven Kings and its community in a way that was not previously the case. Local people and the local authority are more aware that this church and others are a key part of the local community both for the local facilities that we provide and the way in which we are able to bring people of different backgrounds and races together. We are seeking to build on this awareness with our plans to promote the Church Centre and its activities (Church and Community) more widely and to develop our garden area as a community garden.
We are aware too that aspects of what we are doing are controversial for some and have sought to find ways of talking about this and other controversial issues in the Church and community through our ‘Dealing with disagreement’ series (which has itself had a measure of controversy). We may not fully like or agree with this direction for St Johns – it may be different from and a challenge to what we have been used to – but we need to find ways of talking about this together, of supporting one another and the church as we move into a challenging and uncertain future, of continuing to seek and to find ways to unite our diverse community, and to do all this in the name of God who continues, as our text for 2009 reminds, to provide what we need even in challenging and uncertain times:
“The poor and needy search for water, but there is none; their tongues are parched with thirst. But I the LORD will answer them; I the God of Israel will not forsake them. I will make rivers flow on barren heights, and springs within the valleys, I will turn the desert into pools of water, and the parched ground into springs.” Isaiah 41. 17-18.
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Al Green: Simply Beautiful.
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