大象传媒

Good Morning,

Trafford Park in Manchester, where I had a Parish, was once a thriving industrial estate and known as the machine shop of Europe.

In its heyday, with tens of thousands of workers there, at night there was a queue of buses literally a mile long waiting to take them home.

Even Henry Ford had a factory there once on First Avenue in the Park.

Now making millions of cars worldwide each year they have come a long way since 1903, 110 years ago this month, when Ford in Detroit sold his first car to a doctor in Chicago.

As the Ford factory in Detroit was expanding, Reinhold Niebuhr came to that industrial city to be a Pastor. A bright young man, caring for the people there taught him to connect what it is to be human with life in a changing world.

Writing in his diary in 1925 about a visit to a car factory, he said: "The men seemed weary...and toil is slavery. They simply work to make a living. Their sweat and their dull pain are part of the price paid for the fine cars we all run. And most of us run the cars without knowing what price is being paid for them."

Later, when he was a Professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York, Niebuhr would sit in the chapel and read the newspaper. For him that was prayer. His understanding of God and people was very much rooted in the messiness of the world. It was there that he wrote the prayer for which he is particularly remembered:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. Amen