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Written by Marian Richards
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Jul 01, 2009 at 02:45 PM |
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Rector's letter for July/August |
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Written by Rev Elizabeth Moxley
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Jul 01, 2009 at 02:06 PM |
Dear Friends
I don’t know whether or not you like statistics – but here are a few which caught my imagination recently. When adults in the UK were questioned about issues of faith it became clear that:
70% believe in God
26% believe in a personal God
51% believe in life after death
44% believe in a spirit or life-force
37% had experience of prayer being answered
Now we’re used to hearing that there is widespread ignorance about the Christian faith in our society because many people have had no contact with Christianity. You may have heard about the little boy who when he was told the Christmas story asked, ‘Why did Mary give her baby a swear word for his name?” And many of us contribute to a sense that things aren’t what they were. We reminisce about the ‘good old days’ - and I’m as much to blame as anyone. I’ll admit I tell stories about how not so very long ago, in 1985, our congregation in Burnham built ‘Cornerstone’, a Parish room which enabled us (among many other things), to re-launch a Sunday School which grew rapidly and wonderfully.
Now it’s true that the number of people attending church every Sunday has declined, although that’s not nearly as true here in the countryside as it is in towns and cities. But we know that, because fewer of us come to church weekly - these days we value spending Sundays with friends and family and many of us are lucky enough to take breaks away from home. In fact, currently 9% of people go to church monthly.
But this is about numbers of people who attend church, not people who have faith. Let’s look back at those statistics. More than two thirds of people believe in God. Half believe in life after death. A third have experienced answered prayer. So there is a spiritual awareness among our friends and neighbours. Our calling as Christians is to help people to make the links between their stirrings of belief and the Christian faith. We could do worse than follow the example of St Paul. When he spoke to the Greeks in front of the Areopagus in Athens, he started by making it clear that we are all searchers after God – he affirmed people’s spirituality before speaking about the way in which Jesus Christ fulfils these yearnings of the soul. You can read about this in Acts 17: 22-31.
The wonderful thing about the mission of the Church is that it’s God’s mission and that means we will find God working ahead of us as we accompany people on their journey from spiritual glimmers to Christ. After all, (and this is my last statistic), it’s surely down to God’s work that 86% of the UK population visited church at least once in 2005.
Elizabeth |
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