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The Speechless Sing - Page 25

  • Looking at Worship (1) - Midweek

    September has been spent visiting a variety of churches to experience their worship. One of the things I was looking at was Midweek worship - who is it for? how is it shaped? what is it's purpose?

     

    I was really hoping I would find somewhere that was serving younger folk with families for whom Sunday morning is a problem - but I didn't, these are all catering for people who available in the morning and so are largely the retired. Most are using this as their second service of the week - as they will also be found in church on a Sunday morning - "a top up" one person said, "quieter, more peaceful" said an office holder who spends Sunday morning busy organising. Two good reasons for midweek worship - but I am left wondering where those juggling work, family etc can find their worship space.

     

    However, these services cater for the people who come and each one is well done and valued by those who come along. None are particularly different in style or content - "tame" one Minister described it as - but that suits the people who go and I must admit on each occasion suited me as well. Time is interesting - most were in the morning - 9.45am, 10am, 10.30am - one starts with coffee, another comes before the regular coffee morning (but meant that those setting up couldn't come in) another comes before a Bible Fellowship (although not on the week I visited) so those who want to are spending half a day involved in church activities. The alternative time was 12 noon - after a coffee morning; they had less people there than anywhere else and it was more of a meditation (which is how it was billed) than a service. But it's timing meant that it felt like an add on, and afterwards people were rushing away for buses and dinner. Our midweek communion at St. Andrew's follows the same pattern with the same result - perhaps we need to look at it again.

     

    Nobody used their chapel. One used a foyer area - a good place just off the street for someone trying to find it. Others used community rooms with various issues about locked doors and how to find. One would have been impossible to find had I not been met by the Minister outside, as it was down a long winding corridor. In setting out the room, straight lines predominated - even when placed in a 3-sided horseshoe! Perhaps it's just me - but I do like circles and shape, it feels inclusive and welcoming. And it seems a terrible waste of space not to use the places designed as worship space - a result of course of them being hard to heat and inflexible - is it good stewardship to have big spaces used for an hour a week?

     

    All of these services hoped that Mission would be part of what they are about. One service is used by a couple of people who don't use Sunday morning - this in effect has become their church and it was the establishment of this service that brought them back into church life. All of these would be good places to quietly invite someone to, gently re-introduce friends to worship life - but on the whole I didn't get the impression that was happening - in fact the service before coffee morning has to close it's door so that those arriving early for coffee morning don't disturb them and was set out in a way that would mean that quietly slipping in at the back was not possible. So are they too tame or are we just too embarrassed to invite people along?

     

    So would anyone like to tell us about other forms of midweek worship? Is anyone trying to cater for working people? what else is going on? Anything in the Cambridge area that I could pay a visit to during October?

     

    Next contributions will be on Cafe Church and Sunday morning - but will probably be written from Cambridge as I will be at Westminster College from tomorrow.

     

  • 21 September

    What a day

    in the morning left our youngest at Chester University
    fc82a5534c692cadf55d99bee201bb74.jpg - she looked a bit lost as we left her, but she seems to be mixing with folk and finding her way around - sure she will be alright. But without both chaps this place seems very strange - Max was searching her bedroom this morning wondering where she could be.

    She's here Max .../22d3b33605eff4130bac0c2aee02f589.jpg



and then in the afternoon - Joy O Joy - City score 6 - wonderful brilliant stuff, we couldn't quite believe what we were watching. I do have a loads of issues about the multi-million pound nature of modern football - but for the moment its just great fun!


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  • Being Reformed

    In Letting God be God:The Reformed Tradition, David Cornick does a difficult thing well in his usual straight-forward engaging way. The task was to describe Reformed spirituality for Traditions of Christian Spirituality Series and sit alongside more obvious Catholic, Anglican and Ancient spirituality's - the very places we tend to go to when we feel we need a bit of spirituality to counteract our dry words.

    Yet, it is back to the words - or rather The Word - that David takes us to find the depths of a Reformed spirituality and he spells it out in four chapter headings :-

    A Speaking God and a Listening People: we expect God to speak to us, through the bible; through the preacher; in prayer and so we expect those through whom God will speak to prepare and study and speak in a language we understand. And all of us must listen for we “are a people created to listen to the One who spoke creation into being” (p61) 

    A Choosing God and a Chosen People: concepts of election and predestination are to be found in the Bible and so however uncomfortable it may be for the post-modern mind we have wrestled with hows and the whys and the consequences. Election brings “a sense of calling to live a godly life for the sake of the Kingdom” and is “a liberation from spiritual striving” (p90-1). The chapter finishes with an analysis of Watts’ When I Survey the Wondrous Cross, as a meditation on the spirituality of election - love so amazing, so divine/demands my life, my soul, my all.

    A Holy God and a Worldly People: no idol or image can depict the holiness of God, yet we are called to an imaginative engagement with scripture; all space is sacred, there is no distinction between public space and sacred space; we are called into the world and to engage with politics, ethics, issues of justice and culture. In van Gogh’s Starry Night the village church does not lack light because God is missing (as some have argued) but because the people (who are the church) are out in the world - “However tortuous his spiritual journey,however black his depression, van Gogh’s mind was steeped in Reformed culture, and Reformed spirituality is worldly - the starry night is precisely where the Reformed would expect to encounter God” (p127-8)

    A Loving God and a Catholic People: The true church is wherever the  Word is truly preached and the sacraments properly administered; which makes boundaries hard to draw; in the 16th Century monasticism was discarded in the 20th Century three Reformed communities at Iona, Taize and Grandchamp have introduced a new catholic form of monasticism that has enriched the whole church. “God is there before us, a generous giver of lavish grace. The unity of the Church lies in that grace, which is why the Reformed seek to be a catholic people.” (p155)

    In Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution a history from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first, Alistair McGrath tackles an even bigger subject - the way in which the obligation of every person to interpret and re-interpret the Bible through the eyes of their own experience, culture and times has shaped the world in which we live - this is the 'dangerous idea' at the heart of Protestantism.

    He begins with the various 16th Century movements that became known as Protestantism, the ways in which their biblical interpretations led them in different or similar directions, takes us into 19th Century global expansion particularly in the United States. He then explores the way in which the movement has been manifested through believes, belonging, structure, shaping of Western culture and in Arts and Sciences - through it all it can be seen that the dangerous idea has given people permission to both believe and disbelieve, to find God in scientific research and conclude that we are deluded; it helped to create the conditions for capitalism, colonialism and the tools to fight the injustices that emerged; it allows us to question and explore and imagine and experience and re-interpret and adapt and question and....

    He sees the new Reformation being led by Pentecostalism - which has taken us beyond the age of Reason and into an age of experiencing God beyond the written word - where the Holy Spirit is expected to be part of the re-interpretative process. (I certainly had not realised the extent to which the pre-20th Century church believed that the Holy Spirit was no longer active). McGrath believes that the future will be pentecostal, de-centralised and unpredictable! He concludes "Protestantism possesses a unique and innate capacity for innovation, renewal, and reform based on its own internal resources. The future of Protestantism lies precisely in Protestantism being what Protestantism actually is."

    Both of these books have reminded me of the great heritage of the tradition in which my faith has been nurtured and grown and developed. Amongst all the angst about decline, the wailing of the doom-mongers that Christianity is dead, I am encouraged that we are being reformed - and in being reformed we must let God be God and allow the new future to emerge ...