ROSE Macaulay's novel, The Towers of Trebizond, takes us on a rather bizarre pilgrimage with some very unconventional people.

The main character, on board ship on her journey to Trebizond, finds herself in conversation on deck one morning with one of her travelling companions, a particularly eccentric Anglican priest by the name of Father Chantry Pigg.

He suddenly asks her: "How much longer are you going to go on like this, shutting the door against God?"

"I don't know," she replies.

"It will end," he says. "Such things always end. What then? Shall you come back, when it is taken out of your hands and it will cost you nothing? When you have nothing to offer to God but a burnt out fire and a fag end?

"Oh, he'll take it, he'll take anything we offer. It is you who will be impoverished for ever by so poor a gift. Offer now what will cost you a great deal, and you'll be enriched beyond anything you can imagine."

This was of course a challenge addressed to an individual soul, but it might equally appropriately be thrown at us, "the Church". Will we wait until there is no alternative, until it is taken out of our hands, before we finally learn sense?

Will we, as the Church of Christ in this country, wait until we have nothing to offer to God but "a burnt out fire and a fag end" before we start to act as a single Body of Christ to those around us?

Or must the Church in this land be utterly humiliated before it will learn humility?

The goal of unity for Christian people has sadly become a luxury that is now far lower down the agenda than keeping the tribes content, the faithful faithful, the youth from defecting, or the finances from collapsing.

When will we get our priorities right, and truly place the shared service of Jesus Christ as a primary demand of the Gospel?

Because it is only then that we can ever dare to commend the Christian Gospel to others, inside or outside the Church.

NO ONE could be convinced of the validity of the message of the Gospel if 211 that can be seen peering nervously out of the ecclesiastical bunker - is the frightened face of an institution more concerned with self preservation and internecine aggrandisement than with the humble service of Christ.

Perhaps our greatest current weakness is our concern with "image". Yet, paradoxically, when we become obsessed with how we are perceived we lose all spiritual perception.

But Christ will sadly allow us to go on playing those games that all our churches play those games of domination, self preservation and image. Christ will not force us to change our ways, or ever compel us to open the door to service or to penitence.

He will never make us take upon ourselves His mindset - "the mind of Christ", who took the form of a servant and became obedient to death on a cross; that mind of Christ which is the total antithesis of manipulation, and of safety at all costs.

I have do doubts but that we will eventually learn to change our attitudes. The crucial question is whether it will only be through necessity, through weariness, through the absence of alternatives, that we will ever face outwards together to a country which is steadily losing faith to the thousands of men, women and children in this country who are losing faith in Jesus Christ because they have lost faith in us, the Church.

And those tens of thousands of good Christian people of every tradition and culture who are the Church would be doing us all a favour if they were now less patient with the pace of progress towards unity. The push must now come from the men and women who are the Church. If you wait for us for the professionals, the apparatchiks, the committee fodder of the Church - you will be waiting until there is nothing left worth waiting for.

WE HAVE, of course, already made a beginning. Today, unlike 30 years ago, we can meet together for prayer and for the worship of God in many parts of this island without too much self consciousness or embarrassment. We need now to move on quickly to the point where, when we encounter a fellow Christian of any tradition, we can first genuinely rejoice together that we are the disciples of the same Lord, before we have the slightest interest in which particular "church" each of us belongs to.

Only then can we even begin to face our country honourably with a message of hope and grace, a message of salvation which men and women have stopped hearing, because we have so twisted and perverted the truth of the glory of Jesus Christ through our own self seeking, cultural ghettoism, and obscene tribal hatreds.

It will not be an easy process. All that Christ was on earth, and all that he taught on earth, are pointing us towards the Gospel as a dangerous venture. We can be assured that if the whole Christian Church in this land does not learn to take risks with its own future in the name of Jesus Christ, a burnt out fire and fag end it will be.

As Father Chantry Pigg would remind us, God will take anything we offer. It, however, we wait until it is taken out of our hands, it is we who will be impoverished for ever by the poverty of the gift.

Offer now what will cost us a great deal, and we'll be enriched beyond anything we can imagine.