Tower and Town, March 2023 (view the full edition)Clergy LetterCan you act out this nursery rhyme? Here is the church and here is the steeple; Open the doors and here are the people! At Emmanuel Church, we are thrilled to have bid for and purchased the building of Christchurch. What great shoulders we stand on! We thank God for over 200 years of thriving Methodist ministry at or near this site. We are so grateful for the kind hospitality the Methodists have shown Emmanuel since the pandemic left us homeless. We pray for the Methodist fellowship which continues to worship, now alongside the Anglican community within St Mary's church. But, while we're pleased to be able to serve from our own building, I've a niggling feeling that the nursery rhyme isn't quite right! In the Bible, Paul writes to Christians in Ephesus: 'In [Christ], you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.' Paul is telling his readers that it's them, and not the building, who are God's dwelling - the church! How amazing that God should stoop by his Spirit to live among people like us! That, as we depend not on our performance but on Jesus as risen Saviour and Lord, we find such forgiveness and undeserved welcome! That God should even make ordinary people his dwelling - the church. It's like a really old Halifax advert, in which people jumped on each other's shoulders to make a human house. The church is the people, not the building. My children have taught me a revised rhyme, but with the same actions: Here is the building and here is the steeple; Open the doors and here is the church! It doesn't rhyme, but I think the theology is better. It's a great reminder that God is interested in our ministry more than our masonry and in our repentance more than our religion. As Jesus says in the book of Revelation: 'I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice, and opens the door, I will come in and eat with them, and they with me.' Reuben Mann |