Time for reflection

It’s been a busy few days, but quite deliberately a non-blogging week. From time to time it’s important to take a step back and take a look at life not through the prism of the internet and what seems like our compulsive concern with news and comment, most of which – I hope I can say this without giving offence – sometimes constitutes little more than gossip, chatter and endless speculation


Writing out a baptism certificate for tomorrow, I find myself even hesitating over writing beside the date ‘The Nativity of St John the Baptist.’ 
Many of us now hold ministerial office in a Church which seems determined to eviscerate its own life and to abolish any distinctions there may still be between itself and the world. We see this in the way modern liturgies are written and redesigned – the (unfortunately) revised ‘contemporary language’ Church in Wales baptism liturgy is a case in point, with its patronising reluctance to use theological language in a theological way. 
There is now little sense that in following Christ one is also entering another world, a world in which values and culture are different, a place in which the distinctions between time and eternity become blurred, a place where the veil is thin. 
'Accessibility' is now the only game in town, yet there is no sign that easy accessibility of language and concepts attracts; in fact, quite the reverse.  
The problem with being an Anglican blogger, and one with pretensions to doctrinal orthodoxy, is that the ecclesial environment in which we live and breathe has become for us so toxic that it’s increasingly hard to hold on to the hope to which we are all called in baptism. The present is bleak, the future unimaginable; where in our part of the visible Church do we find that hope? The temptation is to concentrate obsessively upon negative developments until the sense of crisis and bereavement enters one’s very soul. One doesn't need to have the dangers of that spelt out.
It could be that this blog, rather like the theological viewpoint it has sought - wholly inadequately - to represent, is struggling to an inevitable end, or else the struggle to survive could itself become all-consuming.
If this site has been of any kind of benefit to those in a similar predicament, or who have been in search of sources of information other than the increasingly ‘spun’ official channels, then it has served some kind of a purpose. 
As to the future, well, we shall see.