As the Methodist Church arrives at new offices a stone’s throw from United Reformed Church House, Reform asks what the new neighbours have in common and whether they’ll ever just move in together. Chatting over the fence are the Revds Micky Youngson, Assistant Secretary of Conference for the Methodist Church in Britain, and Philip Brooks, Deputy General Secretary (Mission) of the URC

A friend recently said to me, ‘I really don’t get the difference between the Methodists and the United Reformed Church.’ How close do you think the two are?
Philip Brooks: I guess I’d say two things. I think it’s quite good that somebody would say that, because we’re not about trying to recruit people to the URC or the Methodists. We’re hoping to get people to know and love Jesus in a closer way. So if you’re not seeing the labels, that’s an advantage.

And a personal response: in my family, on my father’s side all of the generations going back were Methodists, and I went to a Methodist Sunday school. On my mum’s side, they were all Congregationalists. So I’ve grown up in a family that didn’t see the joins that much at all. And for my first, and actually only, pastorate, I spent ten years in a Methodist circuit as a URC minister. The only time you could see the join was when it came to communion. We took the trays round, whereas the Methodist tradition was for people to come forward to a communion rail.

At local level, I think, for somebody looking for church, if you were happy in a URC, you’d also be happy in a Methodist one, and vice versa.

Micky Youngson: Our histories are different, but it’s quite hard to find the dividing lines between the two Churches. Theologically, I’ve always felt very comfortable with any experience of URC worship. As a superintendent minister I had oversight of two URC-Methodist local ecumenical partnerships (LEPs) and the interchangeability of ministry and of lay preachers was really smooth. Most people in the pew weren’t very bothered about which they were. It was their church and that’s what mattered…

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This is an extract from an article published in the November 2024 edition of Reform

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