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From Here... Love and Home
by Colonel Ian
Barr
It is sometimes the simplest vision of
what the Church and Christianity are about that speaks to the
hearts of those of us who love Jesus. The words of the
Anglican priest and poet Geoffrey Studdert-Kennedy to the
eleven people who turned up to his induction at London’s
famous St Martin’s in the Fields church on Trafalgar Square on
a cold November night in 1914 resonated with me when I first
read them, and more so in recent years.
“I stood on the west steps and saw what
this church would be to the life of the people. They passed
me, into its warm inside, hundreds and hundreds of all sorts
of people, going up to the temple of their Lord, with all
their difficulties, trials and sorrows. I saw it full of
people, dropping in at all hours of the day and night. It was
never dark, it was lighted all night and all day, and often
tired bits of humanity swept in. And I said to them as they
passed: 'Where are you going?' And they said only one thing,
'This is our home. This is where we are going to learn of the
love of Jesus Christ. This is the altar of our Lord where all
our peace lies. This is St Martin's.’”
“They spoke to me two words only, one
was the word 'home' and the other was 'love'.”
We cannot simply assume that everyone
knows what ‘home’ and ‘love’ means, even among our own people.
My wife came home one night from a prison visit where she
encountered a young woman who was ‘inside’ for some offence,
but whose Salvationist parents had disowned her. The tragedy
was compounded by the fact that her sister was well known to
many of us in the Army as someone who was so starved of love
at home that she hung about the reception area of Army
buildings in the hope that someone might give her some
attention and perhaps a cup of coffee.
The Church is not short of examples of
people who have been made to feel unwelcome or unloved.
Nevertheless, the Officers Covenant makes such people a
specific priority: ‘To love the unloveable’ (an unfortunate
choice of word, nobody is ‘unloveable’. Perhaps it should be
‘those who are not loved.’) The gates of Hell may never
prevail against the power and people of God, but the gates of
much of evangelical Christianity seem to be
impenetrable to a wide range of people, not least
people from the various the LGBTQI+ communities. And there are
others, many of them born into this movement, who might feel
that all the church has to offer is judgement and
condemnation, rather than the Good News about Jesus for all
people.
Studdert-Kennedy once spoke of having
the words ‘Love’ and ‘Home’ inscribed above every entrance to
the church. In my final appointment I wondered why the word
‘love’ was so seldom seen on business plans, strategy
documents, reports, and corps opening and closure proposals. I
found it a very strange omission. The word ‘home’ tended to
relate mainly to social services institutions.
Yet in the past decades I have
witnessed again and again the loving presence of officers and
others in communities across my home territory, building
churches that are loving, welcoming, respectful, and accepting
communities of faith, each one a spiritual home where God’s
presence and purposes can be discerned in the lives of good,
Godly and sometimes flawed humanity.
These two words ‘home’ and ‘love’ are
so powerful. I am a member of just such a corps, where love,
respect and mutual acceptance are central to who we are - as
is discretion.
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