I’ve joined Instagram.  It’s the only way I can communicate with some of the guys at the gym.  My IG page has a few photos of me from former lives and clearly some gym “bros” have found them.  Last week one of them—I’ll call him Steve—came over and said “so you’re a priest”.   “Indeed so” I intoned, “though now retired”.   He said “I’m a Christian.  Which churches were you at?” I told him.

I asked Steve if he had a home church.  He told me he used to attend a big independent evangelical church in a nearby town and then for a while a smaller one nearer home, but no church at present.  “So you’re looking for something that suits you?” I said.  He nodded.  

Steve is tall, good looking, in excellent shape, mid 30s, well-spoken, highly intelligent, literate, imaginative, thoughtful, enthusiastic and vigorous.  He runs local businesses catering largely to people of his age group.

Can I suggest a local C of E church?

Not all local churches are the same: some are bigger in every sense and more active than others. Questions go through my mind, some relevant to this church, others to that.

What would Steve make of a huge church with at most twenty people?  Where there’s nobody under the age of sixty-five?  Where music is under-rehearsed and singing half-hearted?  Where readings are inaudible and some readers barely literate? Where preaching lacks a clear message? Where proceedings are unseemly? Where there is no sense of the numinous? Where cringeworthy in-jokes abound?  Where the heating is woeful?

What would Steve make of a congregation that says it’s welcoming, but that in truth welcomes only those who fit its preconceptions of appropriate appearance and behaviour?  What would he make of people cowed by conventions that have resulted in joy and spontaneity being replaced by repressed timidity?  What would he make of a church that’s become an arm of the Evergreen Club or the Women’s Institute?

Steve aside, for he was open about his faith, I wonder about most of his generation.  

Does anyone who had their formative experiences after the late 1960s have any need for God at all?  Ruined castles and abbeys have more meaning for them than cathedrals and churches which are, like homes and gardens featured in Country Life, merely showpieces in the landscape.  

Post-WW2 generations have no need of church for religious and numinous experiences, for these are provided by hobby groups and other associations.  Football is an example.  It has its own cathedrals, bishops, priests, wardens, acolytes, rituals, chants, denominations, rivalries, and public displays.  And football clubs do astonishing work in schools and the local community—far more than churches do.  People of Steve’s age are at least as altruistic and active in community welfare as are churchgoers.  But fund raising in church is about paying the bills and propping up the diocese—there’s nothing left for altruism. Anyway, what decent person of any age would support an organisation that has shielded abusers and whose hierarchs try to wriggle out of responsibility when victims seek truth and justice?  And yet the C of E thinks in its entitled arrogance that a few gimmicks will lead to people like him flocking to church.

I met Steve in a gym, so let’s consider gyms.  Church and gyms have things in common: community, rituals, teachers.  Both focus on ideals: spiritual and physical.  Let no-one suggest that the pursuit of physical health is solipsistic or self-obsessive: care of the flesh is at least as important as care of the inner kingdom.  Churches, in contrast, seem deliberately to foster ill-health with their farinaceous fare and, in some, gossip that murders the spirit.  

Churches claim to care for the mental well-being of members.  I fail to see how the emphasis on being unworthy and miserable sinners achieves that end.  Gyms do better: disciplined physical activity is well known to aid mental health.  Many of us are there for precisely that reason.

I’m amazed at how many gym members confide in me—far more than in churches where it seemed people were terrified that they might reveal something of themselves.  What have we priests done to wound people so?  There is not a great deal of discussion of ethical issues in the gym, but then neither was there in churches, and the urban churches from which I retired were so exhausted trying to survive that there was no energy for other matters.

Gyms encourage discipline and a sense of achievement as we aim for and reach goals.  There is no fat-shaming or any other kind of shaming.  There is no behind-the-hand whispering.  Is this true of churches?  Gyms include all sorts and conditions—women, men, young, old (at nearly 73 I’m not quite the oldest), fat, thin, muscly, skinny, tall, short, 4-limbed, 3-limbed, deaf, partially sighted.  There is no criticism or judgment, just support. 

Does church offer anything that the gym does not?

A homily for Easter 3 Year A at St Paul’s, Burton on Trent

Acts 2:14a, 36-41; Psalm 116:1-4, 12-19. 1 Peter 1:17-23. Luke 24:13-35

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God .…  And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us … full of grace and truth.

And a very happy Christmas to you all.

No, I’ve not lost my marbles. I’m drawing your attention to a wonderful exchange in which, as St Irenaeus wrote, “the Word of God … did become what we are, that He might bring us to be what He is Himself”. Or as Charles Wesley wrote in the hymn we’ve just sung “Made like him, like him we rise”.  Fr Columba Marmion, an Irish Benedictine, wrote a few decades ago “What the Word Incarnate gives in return to humanity is an incomprehensible gift … In exchange for the humanity which he takes, the Incarnate Word gives us a share in his divinity; he makes us partakers of his divine nature”. The Divine assumes the human in order to lift the human to the Divine.

This is the wonderful exchange recalled privately by the priest in the moments before Holy Communion. 

Today on the road to Emmaus the disciples are gloomy like Eeyore, and obsessing about the past, not recognizing their fellow traveller. Then just as they do so, he vanishes.

For me this is the completion of the wonderful exchange. He vanishes because he is incorporated into them—into all humanity. Or maybe all humanity is incorporated into him. Either way it’s a metaphor for us being made divine as the Divine and the human merge. There’s no more need for Jesus to be visible because he is part of us all, though in some cases rather well hidden by our pride.

Now, if you accept all that—and I think it’s a lovely idea—you should ask: “so what?”.

So this.

The theme of Easter is renewal. The Holy Week story is about a group of people who were so threatened by new ideas that they killed the originator. Look at the world today and see the same forces at work, all because governing cliques are threatened by new ideas. It’s a failure of imagination, a lack of courage, and most of all it’s about the entitlement and pride of the powerful.

At Easter Jesus opens the tomb of imprisonment in the past so that we can rise with him. At Easter Jesus tells Mary Magdalen not to cling to him—not to cling to the past if you like—for he has work to do. As we heard last week, Jesus disposes of the past when he says to the frightened and ashamed disciples “peace”. He forgives them. He wipes the past clean. 

Today I see the the disciples obsessing about the past, unable to see what is before their eyes, blind to the present and future. When their eyes are opened they begin to see things through his eyes. I hope we do too. “Don’t be afraid. Stop clinging to the past. Use your imaginations—you’ve got work to do.”

And that is what I want to say to you as you soon, I hope, advertise for a new incumbent. I’ve said it to St John’s and now I say it to you. 

Remember that though Burton has many good points it is not high on the list of desirable places to live. For every vacancy in the south east there may be five or more applicants, but north of a line between Gloucester and Ipswich you’ll find maybe one or two, or even none. The interviews are more about applicants judging you than about you judging the applicants.

So I ask you:

• Are you forward looking? Or do you want to stay stuck in the past?
• Are you hankering after the certainties of bygone days, or the ways of other churches you once attended?
• Are you willing to imagine what the future could be?
• Are you willing to ask young people what they would like or are you going to tell them what you think they need?
• Given all the things people could be doing on a Sunday, is it worth their coming here? Is it safe? Is it comfortable? Is it warm? Is the PA system adequate? Are the readers, musicians and servers competent?
• Is there joy in this place?

For example, when people our age start thinking about modifying churches for community use, they think of kitchens and bogs and not much else. All that is decades out of date. What you should be thinking about includes:

• making space by getting rid of pews and clutter;
• having the church fitted for Wi-Fi;
• being able to send text, pictures and documents to people’s phones. Today’s people are not used to handling paper—they have screens in their hands. 
• And more.

That’s just one example of the way in which congregations of crumblies like us are unable or unwilling to grasp the opportunity that modern culture presents. 

You could sit tight and carry on as you are. St John’s could do the same. As the local population becomes less and less Christian, which is inevitable, then I would predict that within 10 years, only one of the two churches will still be open for regular services.

Or you can grasp the opportunities offered by today and make the best of them using your imaginations and listening to the people you’re trying to attract. 

Jesus says: cast out into the deep; fear not; take risks for the Kingdom. 

Are you going to be stolidly human or divinely imaginative?

The choice is yours.