The Parish Church - October 2011

By the time you read this Harvest Festival will have been and gone at St Mary’s. I hope that the church looked wonderful, and that the rural surroundings in which we still live - just! - were well-reflected in the variety and beauty of the produce displayed. Thanks go to everyone who brought things along or who helped decorate the church, and thanks to Ashwell School for all that they did, too.

Being relatively new to the Church of England myself, I have been reading a little about how to get to know it better. We Anglicans are a strange mixture really, and anyone watching the news about the Anglican church around the world will have noticed that the world-wide church is struggling very hard indeed to work out how to be the Anglican Communion, and also, sadly, what sort of things make it impossible for a church to belong to the Communion.

At the last Deanery Synod we debated the Covenant. Perhaps not an immediately thrilling piece of news, but even the humble Buntingford Deanery Synod added our voice to a conversation that will continue around the whole world. We heard various points of view and then took a vote which proved that this Synod was not convinced by either the ‘Yes’ or the ‘No’ campaigns, although we were almost convinced to say ‘Yes’. That conversation and its outcome will be heard by the Diocesan Synod, and so we have played a part even if we feel like the speck in ‘Horton Hears a Who.’

What does it mean to be an Anglican? One answer is that we don’t tend to go in for great statements of what we believe. There isn’t a one-line definition. We say the creeds in one form or another at most (but not all) services. There are ‘the historic formularies’, there are the Thirty-Nine Articles. As valuable as these are, if someone came along and told me that they knew what it felt like to drive a car because they had read the Highway Code and the Owners Manual I’d be delighted that they had taken an interest, but would much rather they had actually done some driving too. We don’t find out much about being an Anglican unless we come along and actually do it, several times, and talk about it with other people afterwards. Understanding grows by experiencing stuff and by discussing it with others, and how worship feels is a vitally important clue to what a faith and a church is like.

We are looking at our Mission, about what we are here for and why we do what we do. I hope that our worship - in all its variety - gives people an idea about these big questions. What does our worship feel like? What does our worship say to people about who we are and what we are here for, about who may belong, and about where we belong in a much wider world church? Come and worship, several times, and say what it feels like for you.

Chris

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