For the church mice, this is another crazy week, with John in Oxford to help launch a book, then on to London; and Olive in Fife and then the Scottish Borders. So not a lot of mouse conversation time, except in text messages and emails. Not a bad time then to continue our Lent reflections, focused around the Sense making Faith theme being promoted by the BBC, and which came to birth through the work of the Mission Theology Advisory Group of which John is co-chair (along with Brian Castle, bishop of Tonbridge). As well as the radio programmes and associated materials on the Sense Making Faith website, there’s also a blog which you can find here. Regular readers of this blog might like to contribute some thoughts to it. This week’s theme is imagination, which we generally find pretty easy – translating our big imaginations into some sort of reality can be a bit more tricky though!
And here’s something to think about. A report published today shows that in the US 15% now say they have ‘no religion’, which is pretty much the same percentage as in the UK. Of course, other statistics are still different, not least the growing numbers of people who say they are ‘evangelical’ – though the authors of the report conclude that this is a word that is getting more and more ambiguous, as people who claim that allegiance seem to make their own definitions of what it means. For those who question whether the US churches are facing the same challenges as those in Europe, though, it will make some interesting reading. The whole report is here.
