Last night was the last evening prayer service – a stunning worship session led by the Church of Ireland that ended on a real high with the song ‘In Christ Alone’. Morning prayer today was led by the Chaplaincy Team and the stewards. Morning bible study no longer required stewards to point bishops to their rooms as they’d finally worked out how to get there themselves and the afternoon plenary was full of thank yous and summations of the Conference. And then, at 6pm, the closing ceremony in the Cathedral. I didn’t enjoy the service as much as the opening one; I think everyone was too tired to give it the energy it really needed, but near the end there was a massive high point, one that overshadowed everything that’s happened in this conference. And it was nothing to do with reflections, debates, controversy, unity or any other flashwords, it was the official recognition of seven Melenesian brothers as Matyrs of Our Own Time. Their story is, in a nutshell, this:
On one of the Melenesian Islands about five years ago there was massive civil unrest. There were two warring factions with a kind of ‘no man’s land’ in between. It was in this stretch of land that the Melenesian brothers and sisters set up a camp. They went to both sides, gathering up and neutralising weapons, and returning to their massively dangerous temporary home. One brother was dispatched to visit a warlord to try and convince him to stop the violence, but he never returned. Eventually another party of 6 more brothers also went to try and find what had happened to the first. They also never returned. All seven brothers were found, tortured to death, suspected of being government spies. Their bodies were brought home. Their deaths, however, were not completely in vain – it was an act that made the warlords reconsider their lives of killing, and the violence ended.
Today the brothers were accepted as martyrs, and their names carried the full length of the Catherdral by the brothers and sisters who were singing a litany of Melenesian saints. I don’t think I was the only one to start silently shedding tears at the sadness of the deaths of such humble people, and the beautiful harmonies offered up in their memory.
But, I will not end on that note, for there was for more to come of that evening! Despite some lovely English summer rain, we were all invited to a buffet lunch in the Cathedral grounds, and allowed to escape to the rather less moist atmosphere of the International Study Centre auditorium, where there was a jive band playing. Led by the bloke who runs the UKC Big Band… I though a cassock would be quite hard to dance in, but the bishops certainly didn’t seem to phased by it, and one of the stewards even managed to get a dance with the Archbishop. Get in. I even got a few bars of dancing in with Dave Walker (after one of my steward mates reminded me how to dance, hah) By the time the band had finished almost all the bishops had left, and it was mainly stewards walking back down Burgate to get on the coaches home. But there were enough bishops on our coach for a good sing-song on the way back to campus, wahey!
Thing is, the delegates start leaving tomorrow morning. Some quite early. or, rather, very early. And theyneed stewards to load the coaches to the airports. And guess who’s on the coach shift that starts at 2am?
No, they're not doing the Lambeth Walk...
