Common Worship is good, the Lectionary is good and the hymn book is good. They are faithful and they are powerful. With them we can joyfully follow the Lord around the Christian year, and we can take our worship outside the church through the seasons. With them we can worship in church and we can take that worship out with us so its witness is seen and heard in any public space, outside church or any other public building. When we do this, we are doing the very best for our town and nation we can.
Any and every member of the parish can turn up and lead this worship. This public prayer is our central unchanging act. By it we may defy the spirit of the age and disarm the powers. Our service to England is to tell it that it is not bound, it need not be afraid, it can keep its hopes as high as ever. We warn it that the nation is full of agencies intending to reduce our options in some way. They all want something from us, all intend to get their suckers into us. The world is full of little power-brokers trying to raise their own status until it is so high that they are no longer accountable to us. Though they will not admit it, they want our worship. They want to be our gods.
Each Christian congregation must spell out in its public worship that only the true God keeps all these fakes and frauds accountable, and so prevents them from acquiring divine status, and turning us into their worshippers. We reject them and withhold from them the worship they want. We publicly re-direct all worship from the fake gods to the true God. That is the point of Christian worship.
So for you and me, the best thing we can do is to open the Hymn book, Lectionary, and Common Worship and sing, read and pray our way through them, every day, sometimes in church, sometimes outside church, visible and audible to the world around us, until we become a common sight in town, and our neighbours start to desert their fake gods and follow the only God who will do them any good.
