BH Bulletin - Monday 16 August 2021

Thought for the Day by Phil Moon (Vicar)

Provider or Body to which we belong?
Last Monday my train was cancelled so I found myself with a spare hour on Worthing station, and read Christopher Ash’s ‘The Book your Pastor wishes you would read’. As you might expect, I think it’s very good!
Here’s a quote from it:
“What if we see church as a provider to meet our needs, rather than a body to which we belong. It may be a provider perhaps of preaching or of music or of an experience that makes me feel good, or of a pastoral context in which I will be well loved and cared for.”
So how do you see church? As we have negotiated the pandemic it’s been extremely easy to treat church as a provider, to meet some acknowledged needs. But it can never be just that, and now were moving away from periods of lockdown and so on, let’s re-assess how we view church.
Provider or a body to which we belong?
And of course that has implications, because no true Christian can just ‘go to church’; we need to belong, be part of, meet, and serve.
So, BH. Merely your provider, or the body to which you belong?