A couple of stories which offer some clue as to where we might be heading:
The Revd Dr Miranda Threlfall-Holmes suggests a refashioning of the Church's calendar from Advent to Lent [here] so that it might follow a simpler and straightforward 'dramatic narrative' - presumably, as in a popular novel... no jumping around with the sequence of events; the target audience, poor things, won't be able to cope with it. By way of contrast, the Evangelists themselves were considerably more sophisticated.
Never mind, of course, liturgical scholarship and the complex layers of meaning and symbolism which would be sacrificed in the process of such an act of patronising vandalism. Never mind that it would put us out of step with Catholic Christendom and the tradition of the ages: we must always refashion ourselves to passing western social trends - where have we heard that kind of misguided and toxic unilateralism before? Arrogance and ignorance combined make a lethal cocktail ....
More amusing but revealing of our present crisis is the comment made by someone on her blog which suggests that fasting could be moved to January because that's when everyone else is doing it.
On that basis, let's hear read the gospels of the call of the Apostles by the shore of the Sea of Galilee in August when, after all, most people are at the beach ... the possibilities are endless... Any suggestions?
Lord Carey of Clifton, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, considers the work of ARCIC to be an irrelevance to most Christians [here] He's probably right, but should acknowledge some considerable share of the responsibility for having made it so ....
Unfortunately Lord Carey has spent the last twelve years making himself irrelevant and helping to destroy the credibility of those he obviously still thinks he is leading.
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