CELEBRANT: Rev Ermal Kirby, Chairman of the London North East District of the Methodist Church

ARCHITECTURE: Rebuilt 17th century, lots of Victorian upgrades, the church where Oliver Cromwell was married and John Milton buried

SERMON: A call for “new kinds of personal apostolic leadership” in a world where strong personal leadership is increasingly necessary and where the energy which comes from committee work is diminishing

MUSIC: Voices lifted to sing Charles Wesley’s Love divine, all loves excelling and other traditional hymns

LITURGY: Communion service with signing of covenant, exchange of gifts and the gospel story of the Prodigal Son

SPIRITUAL HIGH: A timely reminder of how the tides ofschism come and go, making it wonderful to write for once about a joyful display of unity, almost a paradise regained

AFTER-SERVICE CARE: Cakes, sandwiches, drinks and jazz music

AS ALWAYS, the Bishop of London, the Right Rev Richard Chartres, looked and sounded just like his 18th-century prelatical predecessors might have done. From the steps of the 17th-century church of St Giles Cripplegate, surrounded by the unforgiving 20th-century concrete of the Barbican, he read to the assembled crowd of pilgrims: “Methodists are a new enemy who, for some time past, have been breaking in upon the peace and good order of the Church, and giving shameful disturbances to the parochial clergy, and using very unwarrantable methods . . . they have a busy and schismatic spirit.”

He continued: “Methodists are a set of pretended reformers — Their leader, John Wesley, leads men into horrid pride and blasphemy.” The bishop then tore up the texts, took a match and burnt them. After this our crowd of Methodists and Anglicans went inside to share in a joint eucharist at St Giles, having already marched together through the City from Wesley’s Chapel nearby, in procession with two banners made specially by a church embroiderer Vivien Havel.

These hostile sentiments were uttered by an 18th-century Bishop of London, Edmund Gibson, and by a former Bishop of Exeter, George Lavington. They seem extraordinary now and extreme, but contributed to a climate which led eventually to schism. Today the two churches are inching closer back to unity. At our service, “Tearing up the Past”, the bishop and our celebrant,the Rev Ermal Kirby, signed a covenant where they committed themselves to a number of shared services and other events throughout the year. It followed the covenant agreed by the national bodies of both Churches earlier this year.

Sitting among Methodists, as religion correspondents frequently do, it is hard to credit the criticisms of Lavington of them as a set prey to “cryings out, screamings, shriekings, roarings, groanings, tremblings, gnashings, yellings, foamings, convulsions, swoonings . . .” The list goes on. But maybe it is not so unbelievable that he should have accused them of these things. In spite of all the advances in science and psychology, the Anglican Church seems little different and the similarities with the rhetoric being used in the dispute over homosexual bishops are self-evident. If it takes another 250 years for this new rift to heal there may well be no church at all by then, just bishops, straight and gay, issuing comminations against each other.

Bishop Chartres approaches things differently, and more in a spirit of love. In his sermon, he spoke of working together to overcome “antique perceptions and polemics”, and of fear and death, life and love. “Let us embrace as lovers and make merry with our friends,” he said.