I spent most of Wednesday as part of a group called the Nomination Committee. This is a Church of Scotland Committee that recommends appointments to the other Councils and Committees of the Church. There are two good things about being part of the Nomination Committee: 1)it only meets once in the year, for one day; 2)if I am a member of this committee then I can't be a member of any other Church committee.
The preparation work for the committee is a list of names. Each year, a certain number of people retire from membership of the Church Councils and need to be replaced. It is our task to find these replacements and to do so in a way that is balanced and fair, so you can't just nominate all your friends (actually they wouldn't be your friends for very long if you kept adding their names to these lists!!)
I know some of the names; in fact some of the people whose names were on my lists I have known for a long time; that may or may not count in their favour. Many of the names, I had heard, but have never met the people, so couldn't tell you anything about them; that means I have to rely on other people's judgement as to their suitability for the jobs we were considering.
The great thing about names is that each one represents a story. I am constantly meeting people who introduce themselves to me on the phone or who come to something I'm arranging, to a church service or children's club and they tell me their name (then I have to work hard to remember the name) and then begin to tell me their story. It will be a unique story, full of joys and delights perhaps, and also full of pressures and difficulties; sometimes it is a story that leaves me humble as I begin to see some of the hardships people, even children, have to overcome in order to make their way in the world.
Colin Sinclair, the minister of Palmerston Place is the convener of the Nomination Committee and in beginning the meeting, Colin joked about reading all of the 9 chapters at the beginning of 1 Chronicles. For those of you who don't know, these chapters are a series of lists of names, family trees, generation after generation, with nothing to break the pattern. You won't have heard these chapters read very often in Church. Eric Alexander, sometime minister of St George's Tron Church in Glasgow, once said of these chapters that "every name is a footstep in God's plan" and, of course, he is absolutely right.
When you meet someone for the first time, and they introduce themselves to you, how well do you listen? Can you remember the name they tell you? Or does it just go in one ear and out the other? I have been in conversations lately where the person speaking to me has been looking through me and past me to see who else is in the room, who might be more worthy of his time, who might be more important for him to talk to. You can imagine how that made me feel, that although I was in conversation, I was clearly being ignored.
If every name in the people of God is a footstep in God's plan to bless the world, then we should make sure that we treat our fellow-Christians as if they are the most important person in the world while we converse. If every name in the people of God is a footstep in God's plan to bless the world, then we should make every effort to get to know these names. There are new people who have come to our Church in the last few weeks: have you noticed? Have you made the effort to speak to them? Have you asked them their names? Do it soon!
