I hope that writing this blog whilst listening to that old classic “Modern Life is Rubbish” on the headphones will produce something more cogent than the last offering which on reading back looks awful. I could say the same when I look back at some of the sermons that I preached back in the day as a curate in Birstall some twenty years ago!

I suspect, however, that the urge to break out into some kind of middle aged dancing might get the better of me and there will be no noticeable improvement….but not to worry as no one has been duped into reading any of this yet so it is all still purely thereaputic……which is all well and good….. Air cushioned soles…she don’t mind..I want to stay this way for ever…blue jeans….Good to see DMs making yet another comeback, I have worn them for years….best boots money can buy, but I digress…..

As I was trying to say, very badly, the last time there is a tendency in some recent Christian thinking to paint such a black picture of the world that we fail to see when God is using “the world” to call the church to repent and re-discover what Gospel values actually are. I often think that in the future church historians will heavily criticize the Christians of today and of the past one hundred years. It will be seen as a new dark age in Christian history. One of the few bright spots in this dark age will be Archbishop William Temple who bucked the trend along with a few others in helping to set up the Welfare State. But whether it be votes for women, ecology, animal welfare, equal rights for all, future historians will consistantley tell of a Church that was always on the wrong side, in fact not just the wrong side, but an evil side. One of the reasons that they will identify for this will be the elevation of the Bible into a place way above its station. For as John’s Gospel reminds us it is Jesus who is the Word of God and not the Bible which is a library of books that should be read through his glasses….after all isn’t this what the early church eventually did when they decided that the Gospel was for the Gentiles as well? Isn’t this what the disciples on the way to Emmaus were doing when they walked with the risen Jesus? Had they just been reading it literally as so many are inclined to do, they would never have recognised Jesus at all.