St Peter’s Day 2011
[Dr. Peter Davie at St Peter’s, Canterbury, 3rd July 2011]
‘On this rock I will build my church’ (Matthew 16.18)
Many years ago I was a theological student at the College of the Resurrection at Mirfield in Yorkshire. Part of our training was to go on a parish mission week conducted by one of the Mirfield Fathers. Fortunately, I didn’t have the Father who used a coffin as a visual aid, but my mission was gruelling enough: Mass, meditation, team meeting, house to house visiting, mission service in the evening.
I had a large council estate to visit. There I learned at almost every door that ‘you don’t need to go to church to be a Christian’. I tried to point out that they only knew about Christianity because they had heard about as children at Sunday school. I had a point. Now few children go to Sunday school or have any contact with the church so grow up knowing nothing about the Christian faith. Last Easter two little girls came to the door offering to sing an ‘Easter carol’: it was about bunny rabbits.
So I was right. Yes, up to a point. Recently though I’ve asked myself why many people had such a negative view of the church. Was it because they associated it with being nagged to be good and made to feel bad? A famous German theologian said the effect of a moralising sermon on Sunday morning is a difficult Sunday afternoon. The preacher realises he made a lot of people miserable; the congregation feels depressed.
What’s the answer? Not superficially bright and breezy services. The real answer is to rediscover what the Church and the Christian faith are really about. At the heart of the Christian faith is the teaching of the parable of the Prodigal Son. Life has a meaning and purpose because God is a Father who freely forgives us and accepts us as we are. An American theologian summed the Christian faith as ‘accept that you are accepted’. The Christian Church is the community of those who have found forgiveness and acceptance through Christ. They in turn are enabled to forgive and accept others and so mediate Christ’s love and forgiveness to them.
A classical scholar once asked ‘why did Christianity spread so rapidly in the Roman Empire?’ He came up with a number of answers but the chief one was that it was the quality of church life that attracted people to join. A Roman writer described the dreadful loneliness of the mass of people who moved from the countryside into the big towns to find work. Those fortunate enough to join a Christian community found their self respect restored and their lives given meaning. ‘Within the community there was human warmth: someone was interested in them, both here and hereafter. It is therefore not surprising that the earliest and the most striking advances of Christianity were made in the great cities ... Christians were in a more than formal sense “members of one another”’. They found themselves able to believe they were forgiven and accepted by God because they were loved and accepted by a Christian community.
After theological college I spent three happy years as a curate in an East London parish. Each Sunday parish communion was followed by a full breakfast in the crypt to which everyone came. About a third of the congregation were West Indians. At that time they had to put up with a lot of mindless racial prejudice: adverts for flats in shop windows would specify ‘no blacks, no coloured’. But at St Peter’s, De Beauvoir Square, they were welcome as an integral and important part of the community. One Sunday a psychiatrist came to the service and breakfast and was deeply impressed. Our basic human need, he said, ‘is to enhance the affection among us’. At St Peter’s he saw a community life that met people’s need for love and acceptance.
Theologians argue about the meaning of the word ‘church’ in my text. In New Testament times it didn’t mean what it later came to mean - an elaborate organisation dominated by the clergy - a community of persons who felt loved and accepted by God whoever they were because they loved and accepted each other.
People often comment on the friendliness and acceptance they experience at St Peter’s and St Mildred’s. The most exciting new expression of this is the 3.30 service on Sunday afternoons, which draws in adults and children who never appear on Sunday mornings. Those who take the service deserve all the help and support we can give them.
Peter Davie