Inbetween day

An awkward, inbetween, day recovering quickly from returning from Yemen yesterday and quickly gearing up for the trip to Australia the day after tomorrow. It’s Sunday and I am desperate to go to church but find it difficult to get to one which was open on a Sunday evening. In the end we had communion at home as a family which was really very moving. My daughter explains to her visiting boyfriend that we don’t normally do things like this which is true. Like many Christians our fiath is either in church or on our own.
This is so very different from faith in Yemen where people are comfortable to have prayers blasting out over loudspeakers, to break off into prayer in the middle of meetings. It’s not that they are more spiritual than us, they have their equivalent of hot and cooler Muslims nor is it that they have a more demonstrative faith, in many parts of the world Christianity is equally a public. It is something cultural: Britain has become a place uncomfortable with public expressions of faith.
If we are to make our proper contribution to society we need to work out what’s going on. Church and state need a new way to talk to each other because apart we can do so much less than we can do together.