'Together for the Common Good'

I want to invite you to a conference. It will be held at Liverpool Hope University, 6-8 September this year, and has the title 'Together for the Common Good'. You can read all about it, together with the movement of which it is a part, at http://www.togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/conference.html. In brief, it concerns faith-based movements for social justice both in today's world and that of the 1970s 80s and 90s when Bishop David Sheppard and Archbishop Derek Worlock were together in Liverpool. There is no doubt in my mind that their influence and inspirational leadership in the spirit of ecumenical cooperation saved the day as far as the City of Liverpool was concerned.

I had the great privilege of being Bishop Sheppard's chaplain in the earlier days of their friendship. I witnessed at first hand the high degree of accountability each had toward the other, their loyalty to each other and their passionate desire for 'the common good' in Liverpool and across the nation. These were, of course, the days of a robust right-wing Conservative national government and subsequently (in the early 1980s) a doctrinaire, extreme left-wing Militant Labour City Council. So bad did relations between the two become that at one stage Margaret Thatcher seriously considered annexing Liverpool, after the fashion of Northern Ireland. It was Worlock and Sheppard, in part, who dissuaded her, Sheppard later wrote, 'We never pretended to be negotiators between city and Government. We tried to interpret what was going on to parties who were not speaking to each other.' (Better Together, p.237.)  So it was in October 1985 that the two church leaders wrote a joint letter to The Times, expressing concern that the needs of the people of Liverpool and other urban areas were simply not listened to in Whitehall.

This interpretative role for the Church seems to me as vital as ever in today's world, and indeed part of the Christian's role in social justice must be just that: to speak up for the needs of the poor, and wherever possible seek to meet them.

But I think it's also important to realise that the Sheppard-Worlock partnership was based fundamentally not on a pragmatic union for political (or perhaps apolitical) action, but on a true friendship in Christ - which included Bishop Sheppard's wife and daughter, as he explained in his book Better Together. It would be true to say, I believe, that God had brought them together for that time and that place and their faithfulness to God and to each other is what enabled them to be so effective in their leadership. Those who are  involved in social action today, from a Christian standpoint, need to be equally sure where their confidence lies: in their divine vocation rather than simply trying (as the saying goes) 'to make a difference.' After all, we believe in a God who 'makes whole both people and nations.'