Ok.   I set this blog up and I hardly ever write it.  Why is that?   Time to be brave.  Time to think big thoughts.   Time to ask:

Why do I feel I can’t bring other people to worship?

About a million answers tumble out of my head.   They will be bored.  They won’t understand the shape of the service.  They will hear things that exclude them.  They won’t like singing.  Even if they do they won’t know or like what we sing.  And in the end, in some way, they will be asked to sign up:  to say a creed, pay an offering, take bread and wine, commit their lives to Christ.  In other words to subscribe to something.  It was all a con.  I made out I was giving you something but really I just want you to do what I do.

We have turned God’s love for humanity into a club to join.

I didn’t grow up in a church, though God was never far away.  So when I came to worship regularly in my 20s, only my fiancee’s determination drove me through the pain barrier.   I think it took three years before it made any sense.  Three years of standing up, sitting down, working out how to sing unlike a croaking frog, wondering whether or not I should take communion (no baptism, fingers crossed, fit in with the gang) … or not (honest, but stand out like a sore thumb, and what’s the point when that’s the destination point of the whole service?).    It took fifteen years before it really started to make sense.

So when I wonder whether I can bring someone to church, I wonder whether I can tell them – give it three years, it’ll start to click into place.   Another twelve, you might really be getting somewhere.

I think our worship asks too much and offers too little.