laudable Practice

My three favourite books of 2025 were not only all written by Anglicans. They also have each something significant to say to contemporary Anglicanism.  Fergus Butler-Gallie's Twelve Churches: An Unlikely History of the Buildings That Made Christianity is an excellent reflection on place within Christianity. Church buildings, particular locations, national identity: the theological significance of each is considered. The book, then, provides a most welcome and necessary alternative to those voices who would suggest that none of these actually matter for Christian faith. But the thing is that as soon as a person encounters God in a place, it becomes a somewhere. Christians call these 'somewheres' churches.  God in Christ, we might say, makes Anywhere to be Somewhere. To be more precise, God in Christ makes every Anywhere to be Somewhere. This, the book suggests, is the significance of the Incarnation occurring in the provincial backwater of Bethlehem: Bethlehem, therefore, i...

For many us, this coming Sunday will be be marked the service of Nine Lessons and Carols. The late Sir Roger Scruton described it, in  Our Church  (2013), as "that quintessentially Anglican ceremony". With this in mind, and to aid the "quintessentially Anglican" character of this glorious expression of popular Anglicanism, I am offering a laudable Practice check list for the service, heartily formed by my own prejudices.  1. Keep the traditional readings. There are, of course, alternative reading schemes. Common Worship offers 'Good news for the poor' and 'The Gospel of Luke'. Both are rather trite and entirely fail to rival the traditional scheme's proclamation "of the loving purposes of God from the first days of our disobedience unto the glorious redemption brought us by this Holy Child". With four of the readings from the Old Testament, the traditional scheme ensures that the Lord's Nativity is rightly understood within the c...