Ministers' Page


2012 looks set to be a very special year for us – we will be celebrating the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, cheering the athletes at the Olympic and Paralympic Games and, here at Wade Street Church, commemorating the opening of this church building in March 1812. The congregation, originally an Independent Church, had been meeting in a rented warehouse in Sandford Street under the leadership of the Revd William Salt (commemorated by the plaque under the gallery), but finally raised the money to build its own premises. (The story of how that came about is an exciting one, but we’ll tell that some other time.)

During the early years of the nineteenth century, life was not easy for the “Dissenters” of Lichfield. At that time the vast majority of people in Lichfield, as elsewhere, were part of the Church of England, and anyone who dissented from that tradition was deemed a little odd – and, indeed, dangerous. There is good evidence of a flurry of scurrilous pamphlets that were distributed around the city warning people away from the small group of worshippers who gathered together in Wade Street. In a letter which William Salt wrote to one of his erstwhile theology teachers in 1820, he mentions that the small Sunday evening congregation – only (only?) 50 or 60 “grown people” – were “hooted at and often pelted” on their way to worship. Even then, established congregations didn’t really take to rival church plants.

Happily, those of us who worship at Wade Street Church two hundred years later do not have to deal with the same kind of treatment from our Anglican neighbours! But it is clear from the pamphlets which were circulating at the time (mostly written anonymously), that the main problem was not necessarily one of theology, but of fear of something different. William Salt and his congregation didn’t do things the way everyone else did, and they seem to have been very committed to their own ways of worship and witness, so everyone else was rather afraid of them.

Today we still continue to look rather anxiously at those who are different from us. The main bone of contention in 2012 is not usually religion, but such things as ethnicity, sexuality, lifestyle or politics. All too often we find ourselves judging others simply because they act or even look different from us. I suspect most of the good citizens of Lichfield don’t stoop to “hooting and pelting”, but there are plenty of other ways of demeaning those whom we regard as different. The clear message of The Bible is that all people are equal under God – and all equally loved by him – and we should not be afraid of or discriminate against those who seem different. The whole of Jesus’ ministry was based on that idea and the message of the Old Testament prophets often had a similar theme. This year, let’s draw on our own heritage to remind ourselves that we’re all equal in God’s eyes – and Jesus died for every single one of us. That’s certainly worth celebrating!



Rev Ian Hayter