April 2007

Dear Friends,

I trust this letter finds you all well and springing with enthusiasm for the warmth and green of a new summer to come. The sunny days here are still crisp and cool. I’m sitting at the keyboard this afternoon with a nasty cold, avoiding human contact, using a bit of time away from the office to write.

Church life continues to go well, still slowly growing, still trying to meet the challenges of living in the center of the city. Following a year-long self-study and goal-setting exercise I’d designed for the South Wales district, we re-organized what we call our “ministry groups.” Now we have a Church and Society group and a Church Life group, each convened by enthusiastic elders, both filling up the church calendar with innovative activities. On May 13, for instance, we’re having a “Church and Society Sunday,” with the United Reformed Church’s national secretary for church and society, Stuart Dew, leading the service and after worship presenting a seminar on euthanasia. Quick on the heels of that, Church Life is having an afternoon “Tea for the Elderly” at three o’clock.

Does that sound like tight scheduling? I’m afraid it’s typical around here.Yesterday we were visited by the general secretary of the World Council of Churches, the Rev. Dr Samuel Kobia, along with several others from the WCC’s Central Committee. There were so many groups meeting that day that one had to set up in a corridor.

We were very flattered that, of all the churches in Wales, the WCC delegation chose to visit City Church. They were very concerned with migration issues, so a lot of our conversation turned around our work with destitute asylum seekers. But they were also interested in our ministry of radical openness, and the work we do in welcoming the city’s marginalized populations. We can barely touch many issues that are begging for response. With the recent 200th anniversary of the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act (outlawing the slave trade throughout the British Empire), much attention has been focused here on human trafficking and migrant labor working in slave-like conditions. One of our members, who works in a street drug rehabilitation program, is a fluent Czech speaker who lived and worked among Czech Roma people. She has enabled us to have some minimal contact with the Romani community in Cardiff, a community that has swollen in size since the expansion of the European Union to include Eastern European countries. Trying to respond to this, Marieke and I traveled to the Czech Republic in January to meet with a friend of ours, Jan Mamula, who serves on the national staff of the Czech Brethren. We’re trying to establish a link, not just to expand our horizons, but to understand better what is happening in our own back yard. This is slow work, and quite beyond us right now, but we hope some day something will happen.

Speaking of expanding horizons, for our Lent program this year we had house groups looking at Philip Jenkins’s book, The Next Christendom, in which he chronicles the gradual shift of the center of gravity for Christianity to the Southern Hemisphere, and to forms of Christianity that traditional Europeans and North Americans would not recognize or find comfortable. This book was a real eye-opener for us, and our discussions led to several practical responses in terms of the way we do things locally and our attitudes toward the church’s mission. We’re determined to listen better to other cultural perspectives.

Because we concentrate so much on hospitality here, in the last six or eight months we have begun to explore what it means to be a “healing” community, one in which the fellowship itself is a place of healing for people who have experienced rejection elsewhere or are broken in any way. We sent one of our members to a recent PC(USA) conference on the congregation’s role in caring for the terminally ill, and we have had two very moving Sunday evening healing services, modeled on the healing services of the Iona Community. This sense of being a healing community has remained central. I myself have a lot of personal investment in this move, as my health has just not been very good recently, with a series of mini-strokes, and I feel I have benefited immensely from the support of this community. Marieke and I have been exploring models of holistic health, and have gone off coffee, milk products, meat, and all sorts of things. I feel so much better after only a few weeks on this new regime that I am in danger of becoming a really obnoxious born-again evangelist for vegetarianism. I really must learn to keep things in perspective.

It is wonderful to have this day to myself. I should come down with a cold more often. Next week we have to gear up for hosting a delegation of clergy from Syria who want to see City Church, then Marieke and I are off to a pre-retirement conference. Yes, I’m that old.

All the best,

Tom Arthur

The 2007 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 172