Do you follow Jane Wheatley’s rather good Valley Girl column in ‘The Times’ Saturday magazine? Last Saturday she wrote:
I love a church, particularly an empty one: best when you come upon it on a country walk and can sit quietly in a pew by yourself, smelling the cold stone and the acrid whiff of last Sunday’s chrysanthemums. I like the silent austerity of it. And I am alarmed by the prospect of clattering teacups and brightly coloured pin boards and, I don’t know, all sorts of activities.
But I am a fair-weather Anglican and wanting a church just to be there is not only selfish but, as many people recently have told me, wrong-headed. Churches never used to be reserved only for worship: it was the Victorians who dictated the sit-up-straight, eyes-front approach. Pre-Reformation, they were a hive of activity: market stalls, school rooms, courts of justice – even beer brewing and cockfighting in the churchyard.
It’s a really good opener to an important conversation about how to balance the church-as-sanctuary (so many people do like to go in when its empty not full) with the church-as-community (without which, as JW realises, you can’t have the first anyway).
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article5452873.ece
Filed under: Thoughts for the Day , community, MAP, re-ordering
