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Organ Appeal At St Giles we hear sounds from the organ that our predecessors, including Byron, Shelley and John Soane, have heard for more than three hundred years. This historic organ urgently needed sympathetic restoration more>

In multicultural twenty-first century London familiarity with what Christianity is about can no longer be assumed amongst people who live and work and pass by St Giles, or any church. As Christians who value the experience of God’s love for us shown definitively in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and wish to share that experience with our fellow human beings, we need to be attentive to opportunities of sharing our faith with other peoples and familiarising them with what Christianity is about. One of the simplest ways of doing this is for us to encourage people into church and to join us in church. It is in church, when we are gathered in the presence of God, that we best illustrate to people what Christianity is about.

Being a Christian is about being together, as St Paul put it, as the body of Christ, into which we were baptised, focussed on God as God revealed himself in Jesus and responding to God by, together, thanking him for our individual collective experience of his love, care, and forbearance and forgiveness, by hearing the story of God’s dealings with humankind, and so becoming, ourselves, part of that story, and by offering ourselves in God’s service. This is what we do in church together, Sunday by Sunday, when we are quintessentially the Church in St Giles. This is one of the prime ways of showing people what Christianity is like, what the Church is, and, all being well, leaving them thinking that they would like to be part of it.

Our worship, our church services are one of our most significant opportunities for mission. Our worship therefore ought to be the best that we can offer, for in it not only do we focus ourselves on God, we show other people what our faith is about, and we reveal the very nature of God. The central act of our worship is what Christians have been doing together Sunday by Sunday since the resurrection, breaking bread together and sharing a cup on the first day of the week. What we do together in the Holy Communion, the Eucharist (which is the Greek word for ‘thanksgiving’, which is at the heart of the Holy Communion service) reveals the nature of God, and the essence of Christianity. This is why the Holy Communion, the Eucharist should be the central act of worship in a church on Sundays.

It should demonstrate that we are together celebrating what God has done in Jesus for us, and what God is, through Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit for us, and our hope of eternal life in God’s love. Our Holy Communion, our Eucharist should demonstrate that this is something in which we are all involved together, participating, playing a part, not being detached observers, in which we attentively listen to the story of God’s dealings with human kind, and identify ourselves with the story, and making it our own, as we listen to the Bible readings and the sermon, and sum it our belief and hope in the creed, and then respond to God by bringing before God the needs of the world and of individuals. It should be clear to people that we are offering to God, bread and wine, tokens of the ordinary things of life, and of our own lives, which God takes, accepts, blesses, and returns to us renewed, so that we respond to and receive the risen Christ in our lives, to transform our lives, with God’s grace, week by week.

We need to make sure that we are fully participating in this expression of God’s presence in our worship, that we are playing as full a part as we can in this act of worship and thanksgiving. We need to ensure that what we are taking part in is as transparent and accessible as possible to anyone who happens to come in on a Sunday morning, in the hope that they too may be drawn into an awareness of God’s presence, and be drawn into active participation, alongside us, in the Body of Christ.

Bill Jacob.

Special Collections

On Sunday, 7th February 2010 £423.19 was raised for the Passage, a London based homeless charity, which we will be supporting for six monthly collections throughout the year www.passage.org.uk. On Sunday 7th March, the collections will be donated to the Bishop of London’s Lent Appeal: Transforming Lives - 'ALMA’s Children'.

Since 2001 the 'ALMA's Children' fund has enabled our partner dioceses in Angola, Lebombo and Niassa (in Mozambique) to respond to one of the greatest challenges they face: ministry to young people – when over 50% of the population is under the age of 18. ‘ALMA’s children’ has supported work with Orphaned and Vulnerable children, the building of schools and nurseries, and funding health centres and health education. London’s Lenten discipline in 2010 can play an important part in transforming the lives of even more children and also in contributing to the dynamic witness of our partners.

www.london.anglican.org/LentAppeal

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