RELIGION, CHURCH or GOD?
Religion can be a menace. It is rightly criticised for sometimes
causing division and even conflict.
Church may not be quite so bad - but it can be
boring and out of touch. Alan tells me
that congregations over Christmas were up by about 20%. So it is not all doom and gloom as the media
keep on telling us. However most of our
worship is one way communication, but some people like the opportunity of
responding and would like time to talk, question, think and comment. Our wordy liturgy does not allow time for
that.
BUT
God and
Jesus can be very
exciting, as we try together to discover who they really are. Our ideas of God can be disastrously
wrong. The Jews were taught to call him
by the mysterious name of Yahweh, meaning I AM (or perhaps better I WILL
BE) The criticisms voiced by Richard
Dawkins in his provocative book "The God Delusion" may be misguided,
but that is understandable, in the light of what we Christians often say or
do. The impression created by parts of
the Old Testament does suggest that God can behave as an unreasonable
tyrant. We need to understand that God
only reveals what he is like slowly, as we are not smart enough to take in too
much in at one go. I used to shout at my
children "NO!" on occasions when they got too near the fire (an
unreasonable tyrant?). Later on when
they were older I was able to explain things better and in more detail.
Christians
believe that if you want to know what God is really like you need to look at
Jesus. Jesus himself claimed, "Anyone
who has seen me has seen the Father."
(John 14 9) Or to quote a former
archbishop, Michael Ramsey, "God is like Jesus and in him is no
unChristlikeness at all."
Last year some
of us discovered more about Jesus by looking at the Gospel of Mark, the
shortest and the simplest of the four gospels in the New Testament. These small groups allowed people to talk,
think and argue.
This year we
shall be carrying on our voyage of discovery based on the booklet that is
available free in all the churches in the benefice, "What can we believe
these days?". (You can also
download it from the home page of our
Winterborne and Milton Abbas benefice website.)
During March
there will be small groups in our villages and we hope that it will not be just
church members who come along, but also anyone who wants to find out more about
Jesus, and the God that Christians worship.
We do not mind if you disagree with us, we do not always get it right. We might all get surprises - indeed I rather
hope we will!
Full details of
these groups will be published in the March Valley News.
Jimmy
Hamilton-Brown
