Friday, 12 October 2012

• Thoughts on Church Sundays

  Sundays are a special day.
  
  It's the anti-thesis of the individualism that we encounter on a daily basis. From disparate worlds of our weekly lives, scattered around the inhuman city, working our jobs and going to our school. Yet, on the first day of every week, we come together as one body in one building, united in a congregation to sing in one voice for one Kingdom. It's the strings that come loose during the week as we scatter into the world, coming together, and tightened in a knot.

   

  There is something special when the Apostle Paul talks of how we should not give up on meeting together. It is poignant, in light of how isolated from the fellowship of the Body we become through the week. It is this act of coming together, with the glue of Jesus Christ that fixes our selfishness, and our constant need to find something that benefits us. 

   

  Sometimes going to church is disheartening. It is a struggle to get out of bed, and it is easy to neglect the Bible, a book which we have heard from our earliest days in Sunday School. It is a struggle sometimes to do something that doesn't earn us any money, nor it doesn't advance our career. Church is not a direct bringer of happiness, but it creates conviction, and it creates change in our lives which is a barrier to satisfaction a lot of the time. It is a bother really. 

  
  Though I feel the familiarity of the church family, is the diametric opposition to a world that is obsessed with the new. Church is the forgotten third place of our culture that languishes in the corner of our collective mind. Really, Church is the antithesis of the newest products being offered in shop windows--the latest smartphone, the latest fast-food, the latest infomercial on the television--but in this ancient ideal there is a newness of life promised. It is the illogical nature of the bible, that something so old can bring something so new. That our battered and sinful souls could be brought new, whiter than the newest iPhone, and these old bodies may someday be renewed more than the latest skin-cream.

   

  Centuries of change and sanctification that have brought us to where we are today, we are living in a legacy of theologians of years past. In spite of thousands of years of exposition, there is a still a newness in Scripture, that our views and attitudes are being purified continually. Scripture therefore is more often than not destructive, reversing our normal ways of lives, and the comfort and routine of our weeks, months, years, and life-scapes. It is in this small and still chapel that our slowly growing love is refueled for another week of the mundane through the most humblest of means.

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