Is there an honest politician in the house?
“Is there an honest politician in the house?” (Psalm 58:1 MSG )
God is not just interested in private righteousness; public justice matters to the Lord. The coming election is a chance for members of King’s Church to use their vote to make a Kingdom statement.
Do use your vote!
Not far from King’s House, on the border between Prestwich and Salford, is Kersal Moor. This was the setting for the largest political rally ever to take place in Manchester. An estimated 250,000 people gathered there in September 1838 for a political rally to fight for the right to vote. They were called “Chartists”
The established denominations of the time had many leaders preaching on the evils of Chartism. However, support for the Chartist Movement did come from among other non-conformist church leaders, many of whom lived lives with little difference to those of the working class men and women to whom they ministered. One such leader, (who had been booted out his denomination because of his support for Universal Suffrage) was Joseph Rayner Stephens who spoke to the huge crowd that gathered on Kersal Moor, in September 1838.
What is seen as the last mass rally of Chartists took place yards away from King’s House in Ardwick cemetery. This was for the funeral in January 1869 of Ernest Jones. In one of his speeches Jones said: “…..democracy is but Christianity applied to the politics of our worldly life.” The ceremony was public and many thousands of people, probably between 80,000 and 100,000 crowded the streets as the procession which started from his house in Wellington Street, Higher Broughton went along Bury New Road, through Strangeways, along Market Street and London Road to Ardwick Cemetery, down the road from King’s House (which didn’t exist at that time!)
Many Chartists lost their lives or went to prison arguing for the right to elect members of Parliament. As King’s Church Manchester we are surrounded by “a great cloud of witnesses” let’s make sure we make the effort to vote in the coming election. In the next few weeks we will be publishing some of the issues about which we need to know the candidate’s views. We will also publish a biblical perspective on these issues. Having found out their views we can prayerfully vote from a Kingdom perspective in an informed way.
