Hinde Street Methodist Church

Today I spent the day at Hinde Street Methodist Church in the West London Mission, a church that describes itself as being a conscience at the heart of Marylebone for nearly 200 years. It is also at the centre of a significant amount of social care activity and the Mission employs around 60 staff in this work. I reflected with the congregation that the only other time I’d been to the church was when I attended my first Methodist Conference in 1988 when Hinde Street was one of the venues for an ordination service.

The Church has a tradition of using a 1936 order of Holy Communion every Sunday morning and I joined the congregation to share in this. The main morning worship follows an hour later and today was led by the Superintendent minister Revd Sue Keegan von Allmen. I had been invited to preach.

Once a month different class groups volunteer to prepare lunch after the morning service and today Revd Leao Neto’s group were in charge in the kitchen. It gave a good opportunity to meet with members of the congregation in an informal setting.

Following lunch a group of us met to discuss the questions that arise from the recent debate about assisted suicide and advance directives. The group included health care professionals who reflected on how difficult some decisions could be as well as others who shared their thoughts when they had considered writing an advance directive for themselves. We reflected that the law can leave us in a messy place, but to try and clarify or change the law may makes matters worse rather than better.