Supreme Issue For Churches Is Unity, Says Moderator

Wanganui Chronicle, 2 November 1948, Page 6

Supreme Issue For Churches Is Unity, Says Moderator

“Churches calling on the nations to unite while themselves not Christian enough to be able to heal their own divisions are a scandalous spectacle,” declared the Right Reverend Cecil J. Tocker. ot Invercargill, speaking as Moderator to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church which opened in Wellington last night. He quoted the Moderator of the Church of Scotland as saying “More than ever before the supreme issue for the Churches throughout the world is to unite. We need combined operations. The things which divide us are small and trivial and indefensible and almost absurd, in view of the world situation. The tactics 01 the 19th. Century have to be abandoned.”

"At the beginning of a new age with utterly changed and changing human outlooks and customs,” sail Mr. Tocker, the Churches must make considerable organisational changes, Otherwise, when a new evangelica. fervour arises and a new clarity ox mind concerning the contents of the Christian message, they will be sadlyhindered in giving it to the community. "However, in the present formative years, when the structure of the age-to-be is being built the Church has something to say to the world as well as something to learn from it. Our community! future will depend on the character of its people, even more than on their brilliance to discover and invent, or their skill to make and organise. Hitler had these without quality of character, and so has Communism. We will deserve, and have neither peace nor permanence unless we are better men and women, with hearts and purposes that can stand all tests. "You cannot have that, continued the Moderator, in a people who forget God, and who are founded upon something less than His august will. Our brave new world will fall like a house of cards because of its own inherent defects, as did Nazi Germany and the Rome of long ago, unless it can be builded upon the values that are revealed to us in Jesus Christ, who Still in 1948 is the Way, the Truth and the Life. If this generation will not have Christianity it hail better ask itself in time what it is going to put in its place? Jesus’ parable of the man who builded his house upon, the sand is still valid. No statesman, no scientist, no educationalist even, has a task more vital and needed than that entrusted to the Church.

"Lest my words seem only what is to be expected from this chair,” concluded Mr. Tocker, "may I quote one of the greatest and thoughtful of outliving poets, T. S. Eliot: ‘Wnere there is no temple there shall be no homes, though you have shelters and institutions. Although men may bind the earth and water to their service and divide the stars into common and preferred if the Church

is disowned, the age only advances progressively backwards.' ”