Me struggling with English

At today’s BESPA meeting I struggled with differing varieties of English. (BESPA is the Belgian English-speaking Pastors’ Association - a meeting of English-speaking Christian pastors of all denominations). Start with two varieties of black African English: Malawi from the guest speaker and excited Nigerian from Peter, our very excitable Pentecostalist pastor. Add to this the thickest Irish accent I know from Fr Patrick, a native Gaelic-speaking priest from the Franciscans (our hosts), a lovely man, but I’d understand him more easily if he spoke French!, the delightful Afrikaans accent from Wim, a missionary to Moslems (including Tadjiks in Moscow), and educated American from the new Episcopalian priest(ess).

But it was a good meeting, on prayer and mission. And we shared hard, with a rare level of honesty and openness among mature Christians. I remember Wim came in heavy with his ‘Don’t prayer for anything if you’re not ready to be part of the answer.’ John, another pastor said ‘Don’t go out on mission work till you cry to God both for your own sins and for your target group’. 

But what struck me equally much was the joy to be swimming way out beyond denominational differences. It mattered very little that we are Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox or whatever. We were most of us mature Christians, men and women who have had to fight hard and take risks for our faith. We all face the double duty of pastoring expatriate flocks outside their national and cultural contexts and asking ourselves what is our relationship and responsibility to the wider Belgian population, large parts of which seem as obdurate as steel against the Christian gospel (or at least in the version we want to give it to them….).  In this context I am no longer ‘Mr Orthodox’, supposed to put across a ‘party line’, as I too often am, but simply a committed Christian with others, able to contribute with a certain level of Christian experience and, I hope, maturity, to a critical debate.

On the same line: this was the morning after the announcement of the new pope. There was a joy and enthusiasm went right across the confessional spectrum. It was the sense that the Christian church worldwide – and not just the Roman Catholics– has a leader and a good one.