A recent report on church attendance in the UK highlighted the fact that, apparently, the decline has stopped and more people are going to church more often – and to churches of all types, not just trendy ones that try and make themselves user friendly. It even found its way onto the fashion pages of a tabloid newspaper this week.
Check this out. Not sure what we think of it: is praying for the right dress the same as praying for a parking space? And should we be doing either? Not according to an article in this month’s Expository Times, which suggests that in the early church (ie New Testament period) such prayers would have been regarded as sub-Christian, only adopted by pagans. We’ll blog more about that article another day, but this Daily Mail feature was too interesting to miss. Its real importance might be more in the fact that it appeared at all – and that in itself must tell us something about the spiritual search of our culture. Maybe we are starting to ‘do God’ in UK civic life, in spite of what some politicians tell us!
