I was sitting in church feeling the weight of my sins and transgressions of the week. Setting accounts aright. It is the beginning of the Spring Term for my church, which follows the four-term school year: the church started 14 years ago this week.

We worship in the centennial hall of a borough that has long ago disappeared. Our minister has just returned from a sabbatical, where he interviewed those who led him to faith, and who now fear for their faith as they see the Presbyterian Church falling away.

Losing influence. Becoming the liberals at prayer, but not quite as liberal as the Anglicans. Our minister returned again and again with them to Christ, and reminding them that Christianity as about Christ and not our denomination.

And in the talk this week, as the main church across the road (eighty years old, and unsafe according to earthquake regulations) gets demolished so it can be rebuilt) he discussed how this week another woman said she would not attend, because her church was being destroyed.

But the church is not the building. It is not the liturgy. It is not the praise, nor the rituals of sacrifice, of eucharist, of confession and absolution. It is to walk humbly with our God.

And that needs to be new every day.

“With what shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?
Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

(Micah 6:6-8 ESV)

For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, like men sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men. We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute. To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are poorly dressed and buffeted and homeless, and we labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we entreat. We have become, and are still, like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things.

I do not write these things to make you ashamed, but to admonish you as my beloved children. For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel. I urge you, then, be imitators of me.

(1 Corinthians 4:9-16 ESV)

I am not a fan of the building fund. I agree with the pastor, who said that we need to be able to pack up everything the church has on a suitcase and move on. Or, at most, a van. The fact that we are spending about two million dollars (and needing to raise half of that) for a building irritates me. (And I did not like the old building: there is churches in Dunedin that are very good examples of Victorian Gothic, but the old Highgate Mission is not one of them.

I think churches should, like crossfit boxes, be sheds in industrial areas. So we can make noise, make mess, fill swimming pools and baptize, and turn the volume down, or up. This lets much beauty go: some of which I love. It is very hard to play Mozart in such a place, particularly when the rain is drumming on a tin roof.

You see, the time of Mozart has passed: when all were part of the church, and there was such a thing as Christendom. The High Church is no longer Anglican, or Roman, or Orthodox. Mozart is not played as music for the eucharist (it hardly ever was, due to the number of musicians required).

We meed tp embrace the plain, for we have lost our glory.

Back to the sermon. This is the beginning of the new term. The holidays are over, for good or for ill. We have to put that which is past behind us. We must instead push on.

And since I am no apostle, i would say, like the minister. look to Christ, who was born a babe, in base humility, not even within the home, so that he may redeem those who hated and opposed him.