A church, in fact, when it’s working, when it’s alive and healthy, is a place that tells you the world is too small. That may sound a rather odd way of putting it, but the church should be a place that tells you that the world is too small. That is, the world of rational calculation, the world of profit and negotiation, the world where we know exactly how to measure success and failure, and the world which teaches us ways of successfully managing the uncomfortable edgy feelings at both extremes so that we don’t have to pay too much attention to them. A church says that that’s not enough, the world is too small. You need bigger words than the world will allow; you need a bigger heart than the world would allow because you need words for gratitude and ecstasy just as you need words for terror and pain and misery. And the world is not going to give you that space. And the church is, because the church celebrates a hospitable God in whose embrace is room enough for the whole of you.
Archbishop of Canterbury at the CTE Forum in Swanwick 2003
Next Friday evening (27 April 07) Archbishop Rowan Williams is speaking on discipleshipship at Fulcrum in London. See you there?
