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Rector's Letter July 2007 Dear Friends, Do you belong? To what? To whom? To where? – you may well ask before attempting an answer. But in general some folk always feel like outsiders and others seem natural ‘joiners’ and ‘belongers’. Perhaps it’s a bit like W.S Gilbert’s assertion that every baby “That’s born into the world alive/ Is either a little Liberal/ Or else a little Conservative”. When I was younger I always wanted to feel that I ‘belonged’. I’m not sure that I ever knew to what I wanted to ‘belong’ – perhaps it was to the human race – but it was certainly a vague aspiration. Perhaps my sense of ‘not belonging’ came from a sense of uncertainty as to who I was. Was I English or Scottish or just plain unacceptable to both? Did I identify with my upper middle class relatives or with the ones with the shared toilet down two flights of stairs and out the back through another family’s kitchen? Did I belong with intellectuals, having had a university education or with half my friends and relatives for whom education was not very highly regarded? These musings came to the surface at a meeting some of us went to, led by the Bishop, to look at the Diocesan Review. It was an upbeat meeting on the whole with a lot of positive thinking and optimism around. One of the things that really struck me was thinking about why people would want to come to church. The Bishop said, in passing, that our churches offer folk a place of belonging. In an uncertain world, especially where families are often living at distances from one another and people move jobs, towns and even countries so often, a church community where one can feel at home, accepted, is so important. But the church should not be somewhere where people cling together, trying to hang on to what they have, but a place where everyone stands in a circle holding hands but facing outward not inward. The bishop also underlined the fact that statistics show that a church that is willing to change is a church that grows. He says it isn’t a matter of getting the changes right but of an attitude that is willing to embrace change. Not that this change needs be dramatic – gentle, step by step change is all that is needed. After all, things do change, whether we resist or encourage the change. Looking back over the years, churches are not the same as they were – like it or lump it, as they say. The Church has given me a sense of belonging, but it is not just to the institution or even to the people, important though these are – (the people anyway, I can sit lighter to the institution). The really important sense of belonging comes from belonging to God, through belief in Jesus. This is truly to ‘belong’. Perhaps the vague longing to belong is one of the ways the Spirit calls us to acknowledge that we belong to God –‘Our hearts are restless till they find our home in you’. May you all know to whom you belong and come together to celebrate that sense of belonging. Janice |