This week I am starting to get ready for our summer series of services on a broadly Commonwealth Games theme.  To this end, I purchased a set of bunting that includes the flags of all the assorted nations (and pseudo-nations from a UN nation-state viewpoint), a Commonwealth flag and a Scotland saltire... well actually two saltires because the first was a very pale sky blue.  So far so good, but now I am debating how any or all of this might be 'read' and whether that is or is not helpful in a wider context...

Within our church are folk who are committed to 'Yes Scotland' and others equally committed to 'Better Together' so how will any of them interpret a saltire or, for that matter, a union flag which I have now ordered as a result of my overthinking?  I am really uncomfortable with anything that suggests this congregation takes either view, but at the same time, it seems nuts not to put some bunting and flags as part of the Commonwealth Games welcome.... so I tie myself in intellectual knots.

Is my thinking, I ask myself, skewed by the appropriation of the St George's cross by political extremists to the extent that many English people are embarrassed to use it, well except on the towers of the C of E and the cars of those who go to watch international football?  I'm sure that, in some measure, it is.

Is it because actually I don't really believe in nation states as a primary identity for those who claim to be Christians?  That defining, for sake of argument, Ghanaian Christians over against Zimbabwean Christians is clearly nonsensical and that, theologically anyway, our identity is not defined by where we are born or happen to reside.  I have a suspicion that in some measure it is.

Is it because the whole referendum debate seems to be predicated on setting Holyrood and Westminister as equivalent to Scotland and England, as if Wales, Northern Ireland and other bits of the UK of GB & NI didn't exist? Quite likely.

Is it because I don't want to offend anyone and so risk offending everyone?!  Entirely possible.

So I'd like to have a saltire up as saying 'welcome to Scotland' which, irrespective of 18th September, make total sense in a Commonwealth context.  But I absolutely don't want anyone thinking that a Baptist church is aligning itself with any specific definition of a nation state!  Hence the either/both/neither knots with the saltire and the union flag.

Welcome to my inner world of mental knot-tying... I decided that the saltire will stay... I'm not sure about the union flag... but it doesn't mean that I won't change my mind if it proves problematic or I hear people making assumptions...

In Christ there is neither England nor Scotland, Union or Independence, Holyrood and Westminster...

Now that's a theological mast to which I am happy to nail my colours!

EDIT - I asked my Deacons-by-any-other-name what they thought and we settled on bunting and Commonwealth flag only as the least problematic option!