As they sat on the churchyard wall of a big English gothic parish church, a group of young people were asked what they thought a church was.  Their answers betrayed a total ignorance of what it stood for or what went on inside.  As far as they were concerned it was an empty dead monument to a past age.  The majority of young people in England have never been in their local church let alone know what it’s for.  Perhaps an answer that might mean something to them is that it’s a place where you can go to improve your muscle tone.  No, not your pectoral muscles or develop your ‘six pack,’ but a place to develop your spiritual muscles.

You may know that feeling when someone invites you to play tennis after 30 years of never having touched a racquet.  You discover muscles you never knew you had.  That’s the sort of feeling many people get in church, discovering bits of their inner self they never knew they had.  Perhaps discovering they have a soul.  Now that is something!

So what is church for?  Besides the things that children usually recite about church – a place to say your prayers, a place to sing, a place where you get married (for some), a place where somebody reads at you and so on, a church is, or should be, a place where you do theology.

You may not think of yourself as a theologian.  You may not even know what the word means.  It sounds a bit like a nasty disease in an inaccesible part of the human anatomy, but it is in fact ‘the systematic study of the existence and nature of the divine and its relationship to and influence upon other beings’ or ‘the systematic study of Christian revelation concerning God’s nature and purpose, esp. through the teaching of the Church’ (Collins English Dictionary).  I cannot believe that any human being is so desensitized that they never ever dwell on matters of life and death; asking themselves that this life is all about; is there really a God somewhere out there and if so what is he (or she!) like and what difference does all this make to my relationships with other people and the wider world?

Theology is a way of life and that is why we go to church and theology is what we do when we go there.  We do it weekly and sometimes daily because life, full life, depends on it.  And notice, theology is something we DO.  We study and seek and wrestle and exercise and struggle with the whole concept of God, the world and life and death until the day we die, and then we see it all clearly because we shall be that much closer to God who made us for himself, or so we believe from the scriptures which are the tools of theology.

In the next weeks and months at St. Christopher’s our DOING of theology goes back to basics.  For most of September our focus will be on the heart of Christianity – Jesus.  In October with its traditional emphasis on harvest we shall consider God the Creator.  Then in Novermber we shall begin our focus on the other great activity of God in human life – redemption.  This takes us nicely up to Christmas which for all Christians ties together the concepts of ‘Jesus’ ‘Creation’ and Redemtion.’  If you are really honest perhaps you don’t fully understand these words.  Then perhaps you have better come along week by week and find out to ensure the muscles of your soul do not remain flabby and useless for want of doing a bit of theology.

With every blessing, Alan Hayday