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Church
What is our Harvest Service really all about? Signs & Symbols: Floor Tiles Leaving on a jet plane – it is now a sin? Calling on our church’s young people – to GetOUTMore! Sunday trading decision a victory for Britain’s families Crisis in the Anglican Communion – where do we go from here?
What is our Harvest Service really all about?
The focus for Harvest Services has changed down the years. Fresh food used to be brought to church, which was then distributed to the infirm and housebound in the area the following day. As time went by, and technology developed, gifts of canned food were encouraged, which could be given to callers in need during the year.
The thought that food could be distributed over months, not just the following week, led to thinking about the re-distribution of food; the better-off brought produce so it could be given to the worse-off. And for those congregations which thought globally, gifts of toothpaste and soap were encouraged, so they could be sent to parts of the world hit by earthquakes or other disasters. And so celebrating Harvest Thanksgiving became an atonement for Harvest Guilt; we weren’t grateful for what we had, just guilty for having so much.
But if Harvest is only about re-distributing wealth, then why not just donate money through your bank? That way, you needn’t even have the trouble of going to church at all.
Other churches have turned to thinking of a Harvest of Talents. Congregations use their skill to raise money for those charities which work to feed the hungry. But that has little to do with the original intention of Harvest: thinking of the earth and our reliance on it.
The picture of sheaves of golden corn can seem fairly irrelevant to our culture; but it isn’t. The hugely complex food importing and distribution industries, along with our ever more exotic diets means that we rely on more harvests, not fewer.
The failure of one or two of these harvests may no longer be a matter of life or death to us, just minor inconvenience, but it may well mean life or death to those whose crops they are. Yet our survival still depends on enough food being produced overall.
Feeding the hungry and using our talents to help others is important. But in one way or another, we should be doing those things every week, all year round.
Harvest Thanksgiving should remain what it was originally meant to be: a simple way of saying a thank-you to God that another year has passed without our going hungry, and acknowledging that, despite all our agricultural sophistication, we are still dependant on the gifts of the earth.
As the Psalmist reminds us: The earth is the Lord’s. Everything we have came from him.
Signs & Symbols: Floor Tiles
Originally the floor in all buildings was simply beaten earth; compacted so hard that it could be swept clean. Sometimes rushes or straw would be laid on it both for cleanliness and to sweeten the smell in the room. Stone or plaster were used in later years but it wasn’t until the 13th century that glazed tiles, durable, hygienic, and adding a new decorative element, were introduced to make pavements.
Decorative floor tiles began to be used in royal palaces, and the homes of wealthy citizens and it wasn’t long before they made an appearance in abbeys and rich parish churches. So what is a tile? Basically, it is a shaped segment of clay which has been fired - or baked. By 1300 two types of paving were well established. The first was single colour tiles, cut in various shapes, often using only two colours: very dark green being used for a black effect and a cream for white. They were fitted together in geometrical patterns, using the colour contrasts and the shapes to give the decorative effects.
The second style was formed by making square tiles and decorating a number of them, whilst leaving others plain. They were then arranged by placing the decorated tiles together within a border of the plain tiles.
The decorating of individual tiles - encaustic tiles - was a process done by cutting into the surface of the unbaked tile and putting a contrasting colour of clay into that indent. So that when baked the two clays showed as different colours. They were often reddy-brown with the design in buff.
Over the years decorating tiles has changed enormously, with the pattern now generally being placed, by hand, machine or photographically (with or without a computer!) on top of the already baked clay tile and then being covered with a transparent glaze to protect it.
The crucial invention which allowed the mass-production of tiles was made in 1840 by Richard Prosser. He discovered that it was possible to compact dust clay using a press, and thence to make tiles, rather than using damp plastic clay. The tiles were less moist, giving a faster drying time, and warped less during firing.
This month Visit a church or cathedral (or even a museum) which has floor tiles and have a good look at how they are made and set together. How is your faith made? Is it a layer over you or have you been cut deep and it poured into you?
Leaving on a jet plane – it is now a sin?
Did you fly anywhere for your holiday this summer? Did you feel you were sinning in doing so?
While you may have been 30,000 feet up over the Mediterranean, the Bishop of London, Rt Revd Richard Chartres, was giving an interview to the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme on the moral dimension of environmental issues - and the Church of England's 'Shrinking the Footprint' campaign.
Bishop Chartres, who wrote in a recent article in The Sunday Times that “making selfish choices such as flying on holiday or buying a large car are a symptom of sin,” went on to explain his position.
“It is very important that people should be helped to take responsibility for the decisions they make, and people of faith - Christians certainly and others as well - regard 'living in sin' as an idea which has sometimes been presented in rather a small way; living in sin is really living a life that is turned in upon itself.
“We're meant to be connected, we're meant to be responsible, to God, to the creation, to our neighbour and to our own wellbeing, and so as we try and understand our responsibilities it's extremely important to put it in that context.
“I launched a campaign called 'Shrinking the Footprint' - which I might say is addressed to the Church. As you begin to audit your own use of energy, decisions about which car you use and the way in which you use air travel clearly are very vital. I don't want to issue fatwas, because some people need large cars, they have large families or they live in the countryside - so it is a question of individual decision and people have got to be helped to make those decisions responsibly for themselves.”
Bishop Chartres went on: “I think the language of sin has sometimes been shrunk too small. The language of sin is absolutely right as we look at our responsibility as people living in what we believe to be a creation, the responsibility to their neighbours, especially the poor of the world, and our responsibility to our wellbeing.
“So I think it is very proper to put these questions in the context of our moral responsibility. And that's what a Christian understands sin to be - sin is living a life that is turned in upon itself …
“Our energy use is something that has an impact on the creation and on other people; and seeing that, and seeing it as a really important moral issue, is one of the ways in which the Church has to respond, I think, to the conditions of today.”
More information on the Shrinking the Footprint can be found on this dedicated website: http://www.shrinkingthefootprint.cofe.anglican.org/
Calling on our church’s young people – to GetOUTMore!
24 September is Church Army Sunday – and that weekend will be a chance for the young people in our church to get off the pews, roll up their sleeves – and ‘get out more’ – into our community.
Now is your chance to show your Christian faith in some very practical ways – from cleaning up some gardens to clearing rubbish to washing windows.
Church Army is urging young people throughout the country to engage in such youth action weekends where young people do practical work to improve their neighbourhoods.
The aim is to enable young people to show their communities “Jesus’ love in practical ways.” A spokesman explains: “Church Army is at its best when challenging the church to get out of its comfort zone and its buildings.”
If you are a young person, and would be able to spare a few hours that weekend, please contact……. We’d love to hear from you!
Sunday trading decision a victory for Britain’s families
This summer’s decision not to extend Sunday trading has been hailed as ‘a great victory’ for British children and their families.
Dr Michael Schluter, Chairman of Keep Sunday Special said: “We are delighted - it is a significant victory for millions of children and families, for local communities, small independent retailers, trades unions and religious groups that would all have suffered from any extension of Sunday trading hours.’
“The tide is turning away from our love affair with big business and shopping convenience to rediscover the importance of family, friends and well-being.”
A late attempt by lobby group Deregulate to launch a fresh PR campaign under the new name ‘My Sunday, My Choice’ faltered in the face of evidence from USDAW that 94 per cent of shop workers would prefer not to work longer hours.
287 MPs, including 80 per cent of English and Welsh Labour back-benchers have signed a motion against extending the trading hours, instead stating to ‘cherish the importance of Sundays as a collective day of rest and worship and as a day for families to spend together.’
Crisis in the Anglican Communion – where do we go from here?
The Archbishop of Canterbury tackled the problem in his recent address to the General Synod of the Church of England. Here is an extract from what Dr Rowan Williams said.
When I said (recently) that the (Anglican) Communion cannot remain as it is, I was drawing attention to some unavoidable choices.
Many have said, with increasing force of late, that we must contemplate or even encourage the breakup of the Communion into national churches whose autonomy is unqualified and which relate only in some sort of loose and informal federation. This has obvious attractions for some.
The problem is that it is unlikely to bear any relation to reality. Many provinces are internally fragile; we cannot assume that what will naturally happen is a neat pattern of local consensus. There are already international alliances, formal and informal, between Provinces and between groups within different Provinces.
There are lines of possible fracture that have nothing to do with provincial boundaries. The disappearance of an international structure - as, again, I have observed in recent months - leaves us with the possibility of much less than a federation, indeed, of competing and fragmenting ecclesial bodies in many contexts across the world.
… Some mischievous forces are quite capable of using the debates over sexuality as an alibi for divisive action whose roots are in other conflicts. And churches in disadvantaged or conflict-ridden settings cannot afford such distractions…
So I don't think we can be complacent about what the complete breakup of the Communion might mean - not the blooming of a thousand flowers, but a situation in which vulnerable churches suffer further. And vulnerable churches are not restricted to Africa... But if this prospect is not one we want to choose, what then? Historic links to Canterbury have no canonical force, and we do not have (and I hope we don't develop) an international executive. We depend upon consent. My argument was and is that such consent may now need a more tangible form than it has hitherto had; hence the Covenant idea in Windsor.
But if there is such a structure, and if we do depend on consent, the logical implication is that particular churches are free to say yes or no; and a no has consequences, not as 'punishment' but simply as a statement of what can and cannot be taken for granted in a relationship between two particular churches.
…In other words, I can envisage - though I don't in the least want to see - a situation in which there may be more divisions than at present within the churches that claim an Anglican heritage. But I want there to be some rationale for this other than pure localism or arbitrary and ad hoc definitions of who and what is acceptable.
The real agenda – and it bears on other matters we have to discuss at this Synod - is what our doctrine of the Church really is in relation to the whole deposit of our faith. Christian history gives us examples of theologies of the Church based upon local congregational integrity, with little or no superstructure - Baptist and Congregationalist theologies; and of theologies of the national Church, working in symbiosis with culture and government - as in some Lutheran settings. We have often come near the second in theory and the first in practice. But that is not where we have seen our true centre and character.
We have claimed to be Catholic, to have a ministry that is capable of being universally recognised (even where in practice it does not have that recognition) because of its theological and institutional continuity; to hold a faith that is not locally determined but shared through time and space with the fellowship of the baptised; to celebrate sacraments that express the reality of a community which is more than the people present at any one moment with any one set of concerns.
So at the very least we must recognise that Anglicanism as we have experienced it has never been just a loose grouping of people who care to describe themselves as Anglicans but enjoy unconfined local liberties. Argue for this if you will, but recognise that it represents something other than the tradition we have received and been nourished by in God's providence. And only if we can articulate some coherent core for this tradition in present practice can we continue to engage plausibly in any kind of ecumenical endeavour, local or international.
I make no secret of the fact that my commitment and conviction are given to the ideal of the Church Catholic. I know that its embodiment in Anglicanism has always been debated, yet I believe that the vision of Catholic sacramental unity without centralisation or coercion is one that we have witnessed to at our best and still need to work at.
That is why a concern for unity - for unity (I must repeat this yet again) as a means to living in the truth - is not about placing the survival of an institution above the demands of conscience. God forbid. It is a question of how we work out, faithfully, attentively, obediently what we need to do and say in order to remain within sight and sound of each other in the fellowship to which Christ has called us. It has never been easy and it isn't now. But it is the call that matters, and that sustains us together in the task.
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