Rupert Davies' 20th anniversary sermon (1993)

Twenty years ago, on Dorothy Daldy’s suggestion, we adopted as our motto the famous words of St. Anselm: ‘Faith seeking Understanding’.

It may be helpful to reflect on these words again after two decades. We all entered the Order with some degree of faith - sometimes firm and constant, sometimes wavering and uncertain, sometimes very little - but we all sought understanding, and we all prayed ‘Help thou my unbelief’.

We have entered the Order, not to receive a cut-and-dried theology, with all questions answered, but to have the material with which we could develop and build up our faith. We have entered the Order, not to take a crash course in truth so that we can say two or three years later, ‘that's all settled now, we needn't bother about it any more’, but to engage in a pilgrimage, an exploration, in which the discovery of each new truth leads on to further truth all our life long.

We have entered the Order, not just to examine and test the faith of our own tradition, - though that also was in mind - but to learn from and teach, in worship and study, those of other traditions so that we all can reach a deeper and fuller and wider truth than before. We have entered a teaching Order, and teaching, however defined, means struggling with our own faith until we know what we truly believe, and then thinking it through into words and concepts in which we can express it clearly to others.

This was an exciting prospect twenty years ago, and it still is - and today in gratitude to God we come together in Holy Communion, a mixed company of people of different temperaments, experiences, traditions and schools of thought, to commit ourselves again to searching together for the deepest understanding of our faith that may be granted to us.

Summary of the sermon preached by the late Rupert Davies, former President of the Methodist Conference, in Wells Cathedral on 10th July 1993 on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Ecumenical Teaching Order

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