The Bishop of Shrewsbury has urged Christians to strive for full, visible unity and not settle for a weakened form of “reconciled diversity”.
Bishop Mark Davies, speaking in an Anglican church on Sunday at the end of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, warned that visible unity between the Churches was in danger of becoming “an impossible plan” because Christians had tired of ecumenical activity and were content with “an essentially debased vision of reconciled diversity”.
He deplored this “shallow enthusiasm” and told the congregation at St Mary’s, Nantwich, in Cheshire that they lived in one of the most irreligious and de-Christianised societies in the world.
Failure to unite would mean a failure to witness to “lost” contemporaries, the bishop said, adding that divided Christianity gave confusing and conflicting directions.
“I think of times when I’ve got lost along the roads of the Shrewsbury Diocese I serve and looked for someone, anyone who could give me sure directions,” he said.
“This reflects the situation of so many of our contemporaries who find themselves without direction amid the vacuum of faith and moral reasoning which surely poses the greatest danger to the future of British society, a vacuum which will be all too easily be filled by deceptive ideologies.”
He suggested that, in the past 50 years, divisions among Christians had grown greater than ever and called on Christians to pray for full unity between the Churches, as envisaged by Pope Francis.
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