Common Ground

Common Ground. No, not the worship resource, but a topic close to my heart: in seeking to establish and sustain ‘spiritual’ conversations with folk who have no interest in institutional church, what are the areas of common interest and concern, topics which touch a nerve for the greater part of humankind?

I ploughed through a copy of ‘Shortlist’ on the bus recently; ‘Shortlist’ is a free magazine and claims to be the biggest men’s magazine in the UK with a weekly distribution figure well in excess of half a million. Several articles caught my eye…and by this, I mean that I read them carefully and thoughtfully. One was headed, ‘Ten grossly misjudged depictions of the future’; the title might sound a little alarmist, but it looked at ‘takes’ on an imagined future in various films, books and TV programmes. Unsurprisingly, all the depictions – generally concerned with the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century – were wide of the mark. A concern with, ‘What kind of future…’ is certainly something which I regard as ‘common ground’. An adjacent article dealt with so-called, ‘obscure religions’; yes, some were concerned with the weird and the wonderful, but the very inclusion of the article served as further evidence of an interest in faith, if not institutionalized religion. It was somewhat disarming to read about a number of completely new religions established as recently as the twentieth century, all of which have significantly more members / followers than the URC. Another article offered a comedian’s take on the top ten deceased authors ( and before you say anything, yes, the magazine does have something of a fixation with the number 10, but blame for this can hardly be laid at the doorstep of the magazine ). Any list which includes JD Salinger, Steinbeck and Dostoevsky is worth a careful read, however…and, lo and behold, myriad issues emerge which can legitimately be described as ‘common ground’, not least the ways in which God is handled.

Common Ground. Utopian or apocalyptic future? The proliferation of new religions? Spirituality in great literature? Strange that a free, populist magazine should be pointing out things to us and for us. I am not quite sure what this means.