Revnigel’s Blog

Goodbye Uncle Chris

Last week my uncle Chris died. i will miss him and am grateful for him. he has had quite an effect in my life. for a start he was my fave uncle. always fun and silly, he was the uncle who would wrestle and play toys. He was also the one who was there when Dad was so ill and died all those years ago. He and auntie Kath would drive down from Manchester just to go to appointments with mum and dad and when Dad died Chris was there immediately. He never tried to take Dad’s place, but he was always there. in truth i could have taken more advantage of that, but i guess that my personality simply does not settle well into that kind of relationship. I am simply unable to go from living miles away to totally open when we occasionally get together. But i still knew he was there.

I know for a fact that Chris and i were very different theologically (he too was a minister in the URC and i have no idea how we both ended up in the same place and yet so different). Chris was very open to social action and was old school 1960′s liberal where Jesus was the best socialist who ever lived. He never had the hypocrisy that so many of my fellow Evangelicals have because Chris was always up to he elbows in helping others and was so driven to love and care. i praise God that the theological atmosphere i have grown up in does not put such work in the liberal camp, but rather says rightly that working for social equality is a Christian thing to do. (i know what i mean).

I am only sorry i never got to know Chris properly as an adult. For whatever reason i was always the nephew and our faith differences put up barriers. i remember having a conversation over a beer (good beer too) where Chris could not accept my premise that God is nice and he likes us (stolen phrase from Adian Plass). he said that for him God had always been a God of justice. i was so frustrated as i tried to make clear that God is love and that justice and niceness are both sub categories of love and are in no way mutually exclusive. So much we didn’t talk about though because of history and prejudice (at least partly on my part as a child of evangelical parents).

Last year when i came up for my 7 year refresher and Chris his 21 or 28 we were both at the same get together in Cambridge. it is the only time we had been together at a ‘church’ thing where we were able to enjoy being members of the same church. What was interesting was how similar we were. we grew in faith in different places, with different theological backgrounds, seemingly it was totally coincidental that we were in the same denomination, yet we were so alike in style and passion. driven reformers. genetics ran true it seems.

During the last months it has been nice to spend time with him and pray with him. Anyway, i will miss Chris and i hope and pray that i will see him again in God’s presence. I pray for Kath and the boys, and hope i can be a good witness to them.

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