The Very Rev Albert Bogle urges us to pull down the ‘walls of shame’ separating us from fellow

Christians. BUILDING walls seems to be the age old solution to keeping people apart when they cannot agree.

Yet building walls only creates borderlines or borderlands of fear and mistrust. The world is full of these walls of shame. From Bethlehem to Belfast, from the US-Mexico border to the DMZ in Korea.

But it’s not just physical walls that do the damage. The real walls of shame are in our heads. Such walls become borderlands or borderlines between people and ideas, between war and peace, between hatred and fear, and between Christian and Christian. In this article I’m inviting us all to consider how we might begin to change mindsets and have these walls of shame removed. Surely we could become the peacemakers who remove the walls of mistrust and fear that have divided local Christians? Christ is waiting to meet us with the renewing presence of his Holy Spirit when we pray and seek the unity of his body.

God is often encountered in the areas of life where people would normally refuse to be by choice. When they are afraid to go forward, when they feel at their wits’ end, when they’ve reached their limits. Is it not true that many of us feel this way already, especially when it comes to trying to keep the old model of church on the road? The truth is we need each other, we need the brothers and sisters from whom we’ve become estranged. Jesus said: ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’

God in some amazing way can be encountered in the midst of these dead ends where hope no longer exists. God turns up, inviting us like the children of Israel to step into the water, to cross over into a new land. I believe we need to be ready to go on the journey.

At the heart of this spiritual pilgrimage is a call to live by faith and to seek the unity of God’s people. It is summed up well by the writer of Hebrews in chapter 11, when he quotes the impact that faith has had on the great heroes of the faith. It is now time for us as a church and individuals to step out in faith and cross the barriers that are preventing us from going forward. We need to face up to the need for reconciliation to take place across the divides of our Christian communities. If we face this issue, and seek a solution to it we will be fulfilling the prayer of Jesus ‘that we might all be at one with each other’. Even if it appears to be a forlorn hope and there is no future in it, faith invites us to never give up.

There is something spiritual about the desert places, or the borderlines. We need to open our eyes to see the mystery and recognise God in the lonely places where visions are caught. Think for a moment on the borderlines between light and dark, where seas crash against land, where sky touches horizon, where wind shapes the landscape. There you find beauty has been hewn out of turmoil.

God is already at work in the world and in our nations, preparing the churches to receive a new vision for an old commission. We have been commissioned to seek the unity of the body of Christ. Can the areas of tension and worry, anger, stress and fear be resolved? Can broken dreams, failed relationships, family disputes ever see healing? Can they really be turned into something beautiful? Could we see a great reconciliation happening between Christian brothers and sisters who have fallen out and built walls of protection around themselves?

Such walls become borderlands or borderlines between people and ideas, between war and peace, between hatred and fear.

I believe we can, if we decide we will not allow fear to construct any more barriers around our relationships. If we refuse to allow the barriers to become walls – hiding the beauty that can emerge when we accept the changes that the storms of life have made upon us all. When we learn to accept our changed landscapes, might we not recognise the beauty of Christ in our diff erences, recognising that we are hewn from the same rock? 

The Very Rev Albert Bogle is a Pioneer Minister of Sanctuary First Church Online at www.sanctuaryfirst.org.uk