The Rev Roddy Hamilton outlines the opportunities presented by Pentecost.

IN the name of ecumenism, Pentecost Sunday seems to be the perfect day to find ourselves worshipping together, without baggage or dumbed-down liturgy, and to celebrate each other amid all our diversity.

We often offer Holy Week as our Christian witness to ecumenical partnerships but so much rides on that week; all our various denominational and congregational traditions wrestle with each and it can be difficult to offer something rich and coherent when services such as communion, stations of the cross, stripping of the sanctuary are all required in different degrees for different people. Pentecost, however, rather invites our ecumenical diversity as it transcends denominational lines.

Pentecost offers a story of confusion, in a plethora of languages and full of questions. Whatever happens when we worship in our ecumenical diversity, therefore, reimagines Pentecost in Acts.

We used Pentecost Sunday to bring both a Church of Scotland and an Episcopal congregation together, offering each other our traditions. No dumbing things down to a service that wouldn’t upset anyone; instead two traditions weaving their language and culture together, offering examples of what each other do, with sacred space throughout to reflect and learn about each other.

The common ground here was intrigue: with questions being asked like “who are we?’, ‘why do we do that?’, directed not just to our brothers and sisters, but to ourselves. These Pentecost moments work both ways; the spirit offers an invitation, and through the mirror of others, we wonder more about ourselves.

“ No dumbing things down to a service that wouldn’t upset anyone; instead two traditions weaving their language and culture together, offering examples of what each other do, with sacred space throughout to reflect and learn about each other.

The moment for us was a fully dressed Episcopal priest in cope, with crook beside a Church of Scotland minister in cassock and gowns, walking down the aisle discussing each other’s dress, in dialogue, with tongue firmly in cheek.

But the church had been decorated in strips of colourful cloth stretching the space between the galleries. People had been invited to dress differently. Most of the hymns were familiar to both congregations but we each offered ones the other congregation would be less familiar with. The whole setting was familiar but not quite. More intriguing. Unfamiliar ground was our common ground that morning where everyone was in the same place to ask questions of each other and explain, as well laugh at each of our own traditions.

In effect we started a large conversation, a bit of a babble, like that first Pentecost, where something new was invited.

The two congregations were closer, and still are, more fundamentally so now. But the lesson of Pentecost for each of us was that you need to keep those Pentecost conversations going. The first Pentecost was an invitation to keep doing this: find, in the unfamiliar, a common place to create and nurture new community.

The worship we enable on Pentecost can’t necessarily be enabled so openly in other seasons. We are meant to invite a bit of chaos, share a messy faith, confuse our liturgy, and listen to each other’s questions, sharing each other’s experiences.

Pentecost is possibly one of the more creative worship invitations for ecumenical partnerships. The story invites us to let go some of our order, and our fear of getting it wrong, and find imagination and creativity in the relationships we can have with each other that gave life to the disciples and the early church then, as much as to the older and tired church now.

The Rev Roddy Hamilton is minister at Bearsden: New Kilpatrick.