Christian Unity

Holy Family Church in Blackbird Leys celebrated its 40^th anniversary in May. Built to be a parish church in the new estate in the 1960s, it was among the first to become 'shared' between four denominations: Baptist, United Reformed, Methodist and Church of England, as it has now been for many years. In 2005 it will also celebrate the addition of a fifth sponsoring Church, the Moravian, which has a good claim to count itself not only the church one of whose preachers 'strangely warmed' John Wesley's heart and made him England's greatest ever evangelist, but also the first Protestant church since the Reformation to send missionaries to other continents. The first of these were two young carpenters who offered in July 1731, after a night spent in prayer, to go and serve in St Thomas, the island from which had come the freed slave whose story Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf had brought back from the coronation of the King of Denmark!

The idea of a fifth sponsor had arisen in Holy Family's congregation, several of whose most devoted and active members had been brought up as Moravians in the Caribbean. Since the Moravians are a comparatively small church in England, they don't hold frequent meetings, so the process of reaching agreement all round has taken a year or two. But each stage has seen real joy at the recognition of contact, friendship and shared commitment, especially the agreement by last year's British Moravian conference to accept Holy Family as a member congregation of their province of the 'Unitas Fratrum'. On June 26^th, their incorporation into the world-wide Moravian Church was celebrated in Blackbird Leys in an afternoon at which members from all four of the other sponsoring churches were most welcome.

Martin Conway

(Dr Martin Conway is a member of the Bishop's Council Working Group on Unity and of the Sponsoring Body for the Blackbird Leys LEP)