Finding our Middle – 40 Days with Anna

Day 10 – Saturday after 1st Sunday of Lent

To Read:

Anna had bypassed all the non-essentials and distilled centuries of learning into one sentence – ‘And God said love me, love them, and love it, and don’t forget to love yourself.’  The whole business of adults going to church filled Anna with suspicion.  The idea of collective worship went against her sense of private conversations with Mister God.  As for going to church to meet Mister God, that was preposterous.  After all, if Mister God wasn’t everywhere, he wasn’t anywhere.  For her, church-going and ‘Mister God’ talks had no necessary connection.  For her the whole thing was transparently simple.  You went to church to get the message when you were very little.  Once you had got it, you went out and did something about it.  Keeping on going to church was because you hadn’t got the message, or didn’t understand it, or it was ‘just for swank’.

From the Scriptures:

‘And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. ⁶ But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.’  (Matthew 6v5-6)

To Reflect:

Do you know people who go to church ‘just for swank’?

I think churchgoing for appearances sake is still alive and well in some places in most denominations but as a vicar I am glad that it is something that is generally on the wane.  In many countries this is due in no small part to the fact that people can do (often only have the time to do) other things with their friends and families on Sundays.  One of the challenges for churches across the globe after the enforced isolation of the Covid pandemic is that many of the faithful have indeed found something else to do with their Sundays and this has increased the rate of decline of church attendance.

Yet still, though we know that Religion [is] for doing things, not for reading about doing things, we seem obsessed with counting ‘Bums on pews’ as if measuring how many people gather in a holy huddle each week is a measure of the effectiveness of the Gospel of the love of God.  The bane of Archdeacon’s up and down the Church of England is encouraging the annual collection of Statistics for Mission from confused vicars and parish workers. Yes, I know we need to know where we are so that we can work out in which direction to travel in future but the, sometimes creative, interpretation of attendance figures is not a good way to measure the work of God in the lives of the people of God.

Too many years ago my denomination realised that what happened in the building was not a true measure of the witness of the faithful so we sought to build a Mission Shaped Churchinstead of being stuck in the rut of the same old Church Shaped Mission.  The problem is that we have tended to glorify change and all that is new and we have in some cases ended up with Funding Shaped Church, Hobby Shaped Church, Whatever-is-New Shaped Church (beware of the lessons of 2 Timothy…).  Where oh where are those calling for God-shaped church?

 

Please Note:  These reflections are also published on my blog: suffolkvicarhomes.com on Bluesky as @suffolkvicar.bsky.social, and on my public Facebook page  Suffolk Vicar – Rev Andrew Dotchin.  If you would like them as a daily email please send a request to revdotchin@gmail.com

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