Do you know what your next-door-neighbours think and believe about God, the Christian faith and the Church? Do your next-door-neighbours know what you think and believe about God, the Christian faith and the Church?  The chances are, unless you are particularly fortunate in your neighbours, or unless your own understanding of Christian faith has barely developed since childhood, there’s likely to be quite a gap between the two.

I am always astonished by what otherwise intelligent men and women offer up as their picture of Christian faith from outside the confines of the worshipping community.  Some of it is to do with upbringing.  Gerard Hughes in his book ‘God of Surprises’ tells of how his early image of God was a family relative – ‘Good Old Uncle George’.  Uncle George lived in a large mansion, had a beard & was threatening.  He had a basement where there were blazing furnaces into which were hurled all those who failed to visit Uncle George or behave in a way he approved.  And Gerard Hughes comments that he was expected to keep telling Uncle George how much he loved him and that he wanted to do only what pleased him, yet dared not admit that he actually loathed this monster.

Of course it’s a total caricature of the Christian God, but it doesn’t stop people believing it if they’ve never seriously asked themselves what it means to have a Christian faith.  Recently, a well-respected (in academic circles) moral philosopher, Sam Harris, has argued that “the Bible is about as authoritative on the subject of morality as it is on astronomy”, and that the Bible supports genocide and human sacrifice, and instructs us to kill people for imaginary crimes such as witchcraft.  We may shake our heads in disbelief that such a hopelessly distorted view of the Bible could be held by an apparently intelligent person, but the fact is there are plenty more like him, and plenty who don’t have his philosophical and scientific training.

We in the Church are sleepwalking into the future if we don’t pay attention to what is being said and written about Christian faith by many who have had no grounding in religious faith or culture as children and young people.  The challenges to us in this and the next generation are serious and growing, and they require from us a different approach.  No longer can we assume an easy familiarity even with the simplest and most basic parts of the Christian faith and the Bible.  Today we have a lot more work to do to engage with the culture in which so many are now growing up.  We cannot rely on schools to help out, since RE teachers are increasingly thin on the ground and likely to be non-specialists, and RE as a subject is in danger of being marginalised.

But in any case, it was never the job of our schools to teach people what it means to have a living faith.  That is, and remains, the responsibility of our churches.  In order to do that, however, we ourselves have to have a dynamic, vibrant faith, capable of giving an account of what Christians believe, and willing and able to speak to our own culture on its own terms.  That isn’t the task of just a few: it’s what every Christian disciple is called to do.  We are to be witnesses for our faith; to tell of what we see and know, each in our own way, as the Holy Spirit empowers us.

In order to do that we first have to want to grow in our own faith, and then to look for and find (and demand, if necessary) the right resources to enable us to do our job.  One of the small steps we took in this direction during Lent was when a group asked if they could read Keith Ward’s book, ‘The Word of God?  The Bible after modern scholarship’ as a study book.  We need to do much more of that kind of reflecting, and to do it in a way which allows people to bring all their doubts, uncertainties and questioning without feeling foolish or guilty.

How many people are there out there (worshippers and non-worshippers) willing to take on the twenty-first century on its own terms from the perspective of a progressive Christian faith?  Are you one of them?

How do religions begin in the first place?  Not by clever theologians producing lists of doctrines for the faithful to believe, nor by moralists producing codes of ethical behaviour.   Religions begin with experiences which are then reflected on, interpreted and shared with others.  That’s how, for example, a great piece of music, work of art or beautiful landscape can stir in us thoughts and feelings which take us from the experience to considering the creative spirit lying behind it. 

In the case of the Christian faith, it’s the impact of one particular human life which causes people to reflect and ponder, and then to change the way people think about themselves, about one another and about the world in which they are set.  Christianity began when a few people began to reflect on their experience of being with Jesus, day in, day out.  They knew him as a fellow Jew, with a recognisable personality.  They saw that he taught in a way which invited people to draw their own conclusions, by asking them questions and not providing easy answers.

 As they spent more time with him, they began to see that he had an especially close relationship with God.  They saw him perform healings, but then there were plenty of healers around, and Jesus was not unique in that regard.  His followers continued to see him as a man, a human being like them.

 They saw him as a man of God, one who was undoubtedly doing God’s work.  Jesus saw himself in the same way.  He called himself not ‘Messiah’ but ‘Son of Man’ – an ambiguous title which suggested others might also have a share in whatever he was doing, in his relationship with the God he dared to call ‘Father’.  And as his followers reflected on the experience of being with Jesus, they found that their relationship to God was becoming more and more closely aligned with their relationship to him.  Without ever losing sight of the everyday humanity of Jesus, they were gradually drawn to make the connection between this man and the God they had been brought up to worship.  They had, thanks to this man, a new image for God.   And the more they pondered, the more they realised that whenever in the future they talked about God, they could not do so without also thinking and speaking of Jesus.

Much of their reflecting took place after this man’s appalling death, which should have destroyed all their ideas about God.  After all, Jesus on the cross remained a human being – one who, in their eyes, was dying for his beliefs and his loyalty to God.  What persuaded them to continue to make the equation between Jesus and God – and to make it with an even greater fervour and conviction – was a new set of experiences.  They experienced, after Jesus had died, that same human being who was now closer to them than ever before, more alive than ever before.  The earliest letters in what became our New Testament show the first Christians trying to work out the implications of what they had experienced, to interpret it and begin to share it with others.  And gradually, as Christian faith spread, it was this same engagement with one human being and the events surrounding him which came to determine the beginnings of the Christian Church that we know today.

 No-one becomes a Christian – then or now – without going through a similar process of reflection on the man Jesus and his relationship with God; without working through what that comes to mean for us and how we live; and hopefully without wanting others to share in what we have discovered.  These few weeks of the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus are when we need to be at our most attentive in our reflecting.  They provide a crash-course for us, to help us deepen and renew our faith.  For the early Christians this was a lifetime’s work.  It is no less so for us.  Spending time over these next few weeks pondering these things will bring its own rich reward for our faith.

Nobody much today reads Etienne de La Boetie’s work ‘On Voluntary Servitude’.  Yet there was a time when this treatise – little more than a student essay dashed off by a sixteen-year-old in the 1550s amidst the French Wars of Religion- was the hottest book in Europe.  Even in modern times, its influence has been felt in the twentieth century, while echoes of it can be traced in recent developments in Egypt.

Its central theme is how easy it can be for a tyrant to dominate the people, who can seem to be mesmerised by something which, despite abuses, can be a kind of blind adoration.  But it only takes a few people, who have their eyes opened to the reality, to wake up and withdraw their co-operation, for a whole new movement of freedom to begin.

During the Second World War, ‘On Voluntary Servitude’ was used as a call to resistance against dictators.  It has also been held up as a model for Gandhi’s campaign of the withdrawal of co-operation against the British in India.

 The key element is that people begin to see things differently, to feel and desire and choose differently.  Out of that is born a change of consciousness which can literally turn the world upside-down.  In that sense it bears a close relationship to the Christian idea of repentance, of entering into a new way of seeing things where we see God, each other, and the world around us with fresh eyes.  It picks up on what is, and always has been, the most revolutionary aspect of the Gospel: that there is a power in the Gospel which can change us, and not only us, but that same power can radically change the values by which the world conducts itself.  It is the desire, the want, to be changed, which determines whether we are among those who de La Boetie saw as having their eyes opened to a new reality, or whether we continue in thrall to a modern version of slavery, whose values and standards we allow to dominate us.

 Lent can be about many things for the Christian: a time to try to give ourselves more space for private prayer, or for discovering more about our faith through study or discussion groups; it can be a time for reflecting on our lifestyle, trying to live a little more simply, or for renewing our understanding of our discipleship through attending to our stewardship of our money, time and abilities.  All of these are good and can profit us spiritually.

 But at heart Lent is fundamentally about the business of repentance: repentance seen not as a grovelling to a God who makes us fear him, but as a change in our awareness of how things really are in the light of what God has shown us in Jesus Christ.  And that change in our awareness is not something which only affects our private, inner life; it affects the way we look at the world and see God’s justice denied, God’s compassion frustrated, in so much that we see around us.  Repentance should lead us not simply to a spiritual change within ourselves, but to a questioning of the values by which our society and our world are ordered.  It should lead us to a recognition of the moral dimension in every aspect of our common life together.  For Christians are called not to look at the world with a despairing shrug of the shoulders, as if to say ‘what can you do?’  Christians are called to have the vision to see with God’s eyes and, having seen, to point to what that requires in our dealings one with another.  It is that withdrawing of co-operation from many of the values that surround us that proves the true test of whether we have yet found our own repentance.

Of course, the beginning of the acting out of repentance is picking up a cross and being willing to walk with it.  It is carrying the cross into the heart of the public arena which, for some, can mean persecution, derision, imprisonment or worse.  And we should remember to pray for those who, in their willingness to carry the cross and face the prospect of being broken, nevertheless continue their journey in faith. 

True repentance is what Lent is about.  Are we willing to use Lent as a time to challenge our own assumptions, prejudices and fears?

Imagine an Anglican Church riven with conflicts, in which the Low Church party was making increasingly strident demands of the ruling body, determined to extend its power and influence.  No, it’s not the Anglican Church of 2011 in its upheavals over homosexuality.  The year is 1611, and the Puritans are trying to win over King James I.

But James was a politically shrewd operator.  Already he had demonstrated his ability by portraying the Gunpowder Plotters of 1605 not as Catholics but as terrorists (read ‘Muslims’ for ‘Catholics’ in 2011 and you get the picture).  He’d also had considerable experience of the Puritan mindset in Scotland before he gained the English throne.

James dealt with the English Puritan demands through a special conference held at Hampton Court.  He accepted just one of the demands: that there should be a new translation of the Bible, available for public reading in churches.  Thus began work on the King James, or Authorised, Version of the Bible.

James saw the project as a way of uniting his warring religious factions.  He could not have known he was setting in train the publication of a book which would have the largest and widest readership in history.

The King James Version is 400 years old this year.  Many of its phrases have become part of everyday speech: turn the other cheek, salt of the earth, in the twinkling of an eye, and many, many more.  It is a cultural as well as a religious landmark not only in English life but worldwide: the King James Version was exported abroad along with the British Empire.

The translators worked from previous versions, such as that of Tyndale, and the earliest documents they had available to them at that time.  They produced a version unsurpassed for the rhythm and musicality of its language.  All Bible translations have two main aims: accuracy and accessibility.  The producers of the King James Version were no different, and the principles they followed have been taken up in later translations.  But by the 19^th and 20^th centuries it was clear that developments in biblical scholarship – literary, archeological, historical – brought a need for a greater accuracy of translation because of new knowledge, whilst the archaisms of 17^th century English no longer spoke so readily to later generations.

So the Revised Standard Version (RSV) was published in 1952, followed in later decades by a whole range of new translations.  Over the past two decades one of these – the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) – has gained acceptance as the most generally used in cathedrals and parish churches.  It combines a faithfulness to the original texts with a contemporary idiom.

The NRSV is the version we shall be using from now on in our Communion services.  The Communion readings are contained in a single lectern book, with all three readings – Old Testament, New Testament and Gospel – printed together for each Sunday of the three-year lectionary cycle.  That means no more worries about finding the right page for lesson readers.  The new book also has the introductory sentence for each reading.

Because the NRSV readings are now downloadable, we are also printing out the Communion readings in full in a new-style weekly sheet.  Those who like to follow the reading in church will find it much easier than trying hurriedly to find the right page in the pew Bible.  It also means the readings can be taken home for further reflection during the week.

The purpose of all this – in 1611 as in our own day – is to enable the Bible, the Word of God, to come alive in its readers and hearers: to comfort, to inspire, to challenge and to move to devotion.  The Word of God needs to be heard more than ever in today’s world.  The task for our generation is to do all we can to ensure that it is.

I wish you a happy New Year.  Or, as we might soon be saying, I wish you a high rating in your felicific calculus.  For our level of happiness is, according to the government, something which the Office for National Statistics is soon to measure in its survey of households.  Strictly speaking, it is supposed to be a measure of ‘well-being’, which in itself poses the question as to whether happiness and well-being are necessarily the same thing.

At the foundation of the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 is the phrase ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’.  Thomas Jefferson, its author, originally left out any reference to happiness in the first draft (which talked about the right to land).  But even in setting out what he regarded as man’s inalienable right to pursue happiness, he was wise enough to recognise there is no guarantee he will achieve it (As a later cultural icon, Mick Jagger, noted nearly two hundred years later, “I can’t get no satisfaction”).

Happiness is elusive.  We are well used to being sold dreams of happiness by advertising and lifestyle gurus.  In the run-up to Christmas one consumerist myth read ‘Give happiness.  Give them everything they want’.  Happiness, it turned out, was a laptop.  And happiness might be thought to be highly subjective: what engenders a sense of contentment in one person may do nothing for another, while some people find contentment in ways others can only find baffling.  The poet Philip Larkin wrote: “Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.”  We don’t all find our joy and delight in the same ways.

We know that money alone is not the key to happiness.  Many years before the birth of Christ, Aristotle told us that “wealth is merely useful and for the sake of something else”.  It’s not enough, in other words, to want to accumulate more and more of everything – money, material goods, food, drink – if you want to be happy.  Simply consuming things – or desiring to – doesn’t stop you feeling sad or angry.

The Benedictine monk Christopher Jamison has argued that monks are not unhappy because they do not experience life as gloomy, forlorn and miserable.  That is a good starting point.  The spiritual resources of the Christian tradition can help us to face up to and handle what it is that makes us unhappy, and at the same time will begin to point us to an understanding of what happiness is that will take us away from many of our common understandings of happiness.

St Benedict, who laid the foundations for much Western monasticism, described a monk as somebody who “delights in virtue”.  In this he was following Aristotle, who held that happiness was about living virtuously: “the activity of the soul expressing virtue” was the way he put it.  In other words, forget our modern association of happiness with feelings and emotions: happiness is about living in harmony with our own purposes and ends.  It is a form of rational behaviour, which can be learned until it becomes a habit.  We learn as children what is fair and just: we can grow up to be adults who act fairly and justly, and that brings happiness both to ourselves and to others.

So if we want to be happy we have to first know what is good – in the sense of understanding what is right behaviour and what are the principles of a good life – and then we have to do good – in the sense of living out a virtuous life.  None of that is easy.  There are plenty of siren voices tempting us down other paths towards happiness.  There are plenty of obstacles in the way of knowing and doing what is good.  But this is the road the Christian tradition takes us down if we want to know true happiness, contentment and well-being. 

Instead of drawing up a list of New Year’s resolutions, why not ponder this question: in 2011, what makes you happy?

Many of us at this time of year will have an Advent calendar.  Its twenty-four windows mark the countdown to Christmas, and we’re supposed to open one window each day, to build a sense of expectation as Christmas Eve draws nearer.  If you have young children or grandchildren, you might find it hard to stop them sneaking a look at the days ahead.

Hopefully, your Advent calendar will be one that actually relates to the Christmas story, not one which features Harry Potter, or Santa Claus with assorted elves.  And if your calendar is one that rewards the opening of each window with a small piece of chocolate, try and ensure it’s a Fair Trade one (I get no commission for this, but what could be more appropriate than for your Advent calendar to be ‘Divine’?).

The practice of a daily Advent rhythm –opening one window at a time – is a good spiritual discipline.  It gives us a regularity which can so easily be lost amidst all the hustle and bustle of life.  It teaches us something of the importance of patient waiting – one of the key themes of Advent.  For God is in no hurry, and will not let himself be bound by our arbitrary timescales.  When the time was right he sent his Son into the world: when he judged the time to be right, not when it might have been more convenient for us.  In Advent we remember we are on God’s time – an especially hard but essential lesson when most of us are dashing round like mad things in an effort to prepare for the ‘great day’.

So we are to wait and watch.  But each newly-opened window is not simply a way of marking the passing of the days.  One day you may find a candle, or a shepherd, a donkey or a star. 

And each new window gives us a chance to pause for thought; to reflect on the significance of that particular window in the whole Christmas story.  Each window gives us a subject for a few minutes’ meditation, helps us to stop what we are doing and just ponder what it’s all for, where it’s all leading.

It is a kind of daily practice of the presence of God, and a way of nurturing our sense of wonder as we approach that most mysterious and startling of God’s gifts to us – his very self in human form.  One of the greatest examples of our modern poverty is the way we allow our imagination – and therefore our sense of wonder – to become dried up and deadened.  Imagination is one of the most important ways of learning how to respond to God and to what he is doing in our own lives and in the world around us.  Those of us who are essentially ‘nuts and bolts’ people are particularly in need of rediscovering our faculty for imagination if we are to make progress in the spiritual life.

An Advent calendar can also teach us vital lessons for our life the whole year round, not just in Advent.  It is a microcosm of our need to see every new day as a gift from God, full of surprising possibilities, filled with his near presence.  It is an invitation to cultivate that sense of his presence in everything around us – those we meet (and not least those who seem the most unlikely of bearers of the divine presence) and all that we see.  It takes imagination to see beyond the surface, to see with a new light, with eyes that unveil a little of the reality that God sees, but which our own deadness of vision obscures and hides.  It also takes faith that, in the midst of the unpredictability of opening each new window and what it might show for our own lives, the same God is nevertheless at work.

An Advent calendar gives us windows of wonder – for a season, yes, but not just for a few weeks only.  There’s a lifetime of wonder ahead.

You might remember the scene in ‘Monty Python’s Life of Brian’ where two Palestinian would-be revolutionaries are listing grievances about the occupying Romans.  One says to the other ‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’  Silence follows, then slowly they begin to identify some of the benefits the Romans have brought: roads, law and order, drains, and so on.  Soon they have such a long list they stop airing their grievances.

What’s that got to do with our church finances?  Well, by far the largest item of our annual expenditure is the Parish Share we pay each year to the Diocese.  This year it’s just over £55,000: next year it’s £57,000.  Talking about ‘the Diocese’ can often suggest some remote, bureaucratic body into whose black hole we are asked to pour our money.  So what is the Parish Share, and what has the Diocese ever done for us?

Much the most important use of the Parish Share is to pay clergy stipends and pensions.  Nearly 63% of the Parish Share goes into the ‘pot’ from which stipends and pensions come.  Time was, 20 or 30 years ago, when Dioceses were cushioned by subsidies from the Church Commissioners nationally.  They effectively paid for a third of all clergy pensions.  Those days are now gone.  All the money for stipends and pensions in this Diocese has to come from the regular giving of members of the congregation.  The Church nationally is doing what it can to keep the amounts required to a sustainable level: clergy pay is currently frozen; the proportion of stipend used to determine the level of pension is now being based on a reduced level of a curate’s stipend rather than that of an incumbent; from next year clergy will have to work till 70 to be eligible for a full pension.

But the bottom line remains: stipends and pensions depend upon the Parish Share being paid in full.  And the policy of the Chester Diocese is that parishes which consistently fall behind with the Parish Share are likely to find that the next time there is a clergy vacancy they may only be allowed a half-time priest, or face being merged with another parish.

Of the remainder of the Parish Share, 9% goes to maintain clergy housing, and 16% to support the work of the Diocesan ‘centre’.  This gives parishes access to such things as free legal advice, and advice on a wide range of issues – from heating and lighting to children’s work and much else besides.  A further 8% goes to train the clergy of tomorrow, and the final 4% goes to support the work of the Church of England nationally.

So parishes get a good deal out of the Parish Share.  But of course the Parish Share doesn’t cover any of the day-to-day running costs of a parish: gas and electricity, insurance and repairs and a host of other necessary costs that have to be met simply to ‘keep the show on the road’.  Even after keeping our costs down to an absolute minimum, we budgeted this year for a total expenditure (including Parish Share) of £87,000.

All of that has to come from our regular giving and other smaller sources of income.  None of that currently comes from our giving to the Building Fund, which up till now has been quite separate.  The first call on any parish’s resources has to be its ‘General Fund’, from which it pays the Parish Share and all other ongoing expenses.  The Diocese requires that to be our first priority when it comes to allocating our resources.  And the vast majority of the Parish Share makes its way back to the parish in one form or another.

These are not easy times financially for many people, and the prospects ahead are uncertain.  But it is important to understand that there is a direct link between what we receive in benefit through the Diocese, and what we give to the ‘General Fund’ out of our own thankfulness for what God and his Church mean to us.

Dear friends,

What was the last book you read? Chances are it would have been a novel (especially if you were looking for some holiday reading).  Sales of modern fiction are booming – inspired in part by the recommendations of Richard and Judy and other book groups.  One of the novels I enjoyed over the summer was the English translation of Hans Fallada’s ‘Alone in Berlin’ – a moving account of life for ordinary Germans in the Berlin of 1940.

 But what was the last Christian book you read?  Booksellers tell us that less than one in ten of churchgoers ever enters a Christian bookshop.  With the demise of SPCK and Wesley Owen it’s getting harder to find a place you can browse among a wide selection of Christian books, while Amazon will save you the inconvenience (and paying the full price) of tracking down a Christian bookshop, so long as you know the book you want to buy.

 Reading Christian books is one important way we can build up the ability of ordinary Christians to give an account of their faith, to develop confidence and enable the Church to be intellectually credible.  The likes of Richard Dawkins, with their aggressively anti-religious secularism, continue to dominate the best-seller charts.  The need is more urgent than ever before for Christians to be informed about their faith, and at least know where to begin a response.

 There are many reasons why that doesn’t happen.  Too many Christians just stop learning about their faith after they’ve been through confirmation (or, in some cases, Sunday School).  The desire, the appetite to go further and deeper simply evaporates.  A fair number of Christians make use of bible study notes as a regular devotion, and some read ‘inspirational’ books (‘The Shack’ is the most obvious example).  And while these are all good and useful, they still represent what St. Paul describes in 1 Corinthians as ‘milk’ rather than ‘solid food’: nourishment for those who are ‘infants in Christ’ rather than ‘spiritual people’, as he puts it.  Likewise, clergy and the Church generally must take some of the blame.  In an episode of the recent series ‘Rev’, the Archdeacon replies to the Vicar’s suggestion of dealing with important issues of faith by saying ‘you want to give them muesli, but they only want corn flakes’.  In other words, don’t frighten the horses.  And so clergy can all too easily collude in presenting a version of Christian faith they themselves gave up when they went to theological college. 

 What to do?  Well here’s one suggestion, a book recommendation.  Try Keith Ward’s book ‘The Word of God?’ (published January 2010, price £9.99, or £5.99 on Amazon if you must).  150 pages long, and divided into chunks of about 6 pages, it covers issues such as ‘Can we believe in biblical miracles?’ and ‘Are there immoral rules in the Old Testament?’  It’s a book for those ready to step up from ‘spiritual milk’ to solid food (and for those who may not want to step up but who really should).  Some may find some of Keith Ward’s comments surprising – perhaps even shocking (certainly those who are still wedded to the view that the bible is literally true, or else faith falls apart, are in for a tough time).  But Ward is really only summarising for the most part what any first-year ordinand or theological student will be familiar with.

 Bible Sunday this year is on October 24^th.  Looking further ahead, 2011 is the 400^th anniversary of the publication of the King James version of the bible.  What better time than now to develop an adult Christian faith by the reading of Christian books?

This year’s Harvest Supper is once again being held at Lymm Golf Club. Tickets are £12.50 for adults and £6 for under 12’s. There will also be an Auction of Promises. If you feel that you have an item, talent or skill that could be used by other people then why not offer it as an auction item? All offers of promises for the auction can be made to Liz, Sue or Vanessa. Tickets will be available from 19th September.

Isn’t there something more enjoyable you could do on a Sunday than go to church?  Clearly, many people think so.  Sometimes, when you visit other churches, you feel they might be right.  Imagine sitting through an hour or more of underprepared worship: lessons read without understanding by people whose first acquaintance with the text seems to be that morning; no sense of the mystery of God (or ritual masquerading as mystery, done for its own sake); a sermon that lost the power to live (and certainly to change anyone’s life) after a few minutes; an erratic sound system; and a congregation well-versed at making newcomers feel frozen out by its bands of cliques.  Imagine a Family Service where those leading the worship appear to see themselves as akin to holiday camp entertainers, offering religion-lite for those they see as philosophically-challenged by anything more complex than a word from Simon Cowell.  And to round it all off, tepid coffee which has barely glanced in the direction of a coffee bean.  Would you go again? Neither would I!

Visiting other churches can be an uplifting experience, or it can be literally soul-destroying.  Many of us over the summer (even if you haven’t been on sabbatical) will have experiences of worshipping elsewhere.  Examples of good practice as well as horror stories may abound.  But it does make you look at your own church with fresh eyes.

There are many reasons why people go to church – impossible to do justice to them in a single article.  And there are many tasks for which the Church exists.  But it all starts with worship.  That’s the Church’s overriding, primary task.  That’s what people experience when and if they come.  It’s the shop window to the rest of the world.  How we do it says a lot about how a community sees God, and how it sees itself.

Above all, worship says that it’s God that matters – over everything else that we do or are involved in.  Worship is when we put everything else in second place.  It’s when God is the focus of our attention, in a way that ideally he should be all week, but in practice he gets crowded out so much of the time.  Especially, worship is when our self, our ego, the ‘me’ in all of us, is forced to take a back seat, when we forget for once the price of everything and re-discover what is of true value.

Worship is good for us: it sets us on the path to health and wholeness.  It challenges us to put aside our peculiar and petty likes and dislikes. God has no interest in whether you prefer the Book of Common Prayer or Common Worship, or whether the choir and organist happen to be on form that day.  What matters is that lively, life-giving worship, centred on God, is offered on behalf of the community.  Styles of worship are secondary – formal or informal (but not casual or sloppy – God deserves better than that) doesn’t matter. 

What matters is that we are there, ready to wait on what God has in store for us.  Whether we ‘like’ the service doesn’t in the end matter: the crucial test is how God through worship is shaping and changing us, so that we in turn can go out at the end to help shape and change the world into that kingdom for which we pray.  It helps, of course, if we all come prepared.  Liturgy is work, and it is the work of all the people, not just those leading the service.  There are those who make being a last-minute Anglican an article of faith as important as the creed.  But why should we expect God to be ready for us if we have not made ourselves ready for him?

Worship offers us the key to a purpose-filled, life-enhancing week.  So what else were you going to do on Sunday?