We stand today on the threshold of yet another new year, but is 2023 just another new year? I have never had much interest in New Year’s resolutions, because if I have ever even attempted to make them, they have normally only been a success for about twenty four hours. My wife made a new years resolution in January 1981 to stop eating sweets and has never eaten a sweet since, and she has my utmost admiration that forty two years on she has managed to keep going, she obviously has much greater willpower than I do. 2023 is a significant year for me. Soon after I started working at the age of sixteen, in a moment of boredom I calculated that my year of retirement would be 2023 and that seemed an eternity away. I’m not sure how it happened, but suddenly, in what feels like the blinking of an eye, I am here at the beginning of the magical year, no longer my year of retirement, because the government have changed the rules and if I’m being honest I don’t feel old enough to retire! Correction, if I am really being honest, there are times when I feel ancient and would love to retire! The sooner the better.
I believe that 2023 is an important year for the Christian Church. The office of National Statistics published the results of the 2021 national census and Churches up and down the country latched onto the fact that for the first time since the first modern census took place one hundred and eighty years ago, less than half of the people of England and Wales aligned themselves with Christianity. It was assumed that there would be a significant rise in the other religious groups, but that wasn’t the case, the biggest difference in the last ten years is the rise in those ticking “no religion” and that feels to be quite a depressing figure, and seems to concern the mainstream denominations. Please allow me to be a little more positive. According to the office of national statistics the population of England and Wales is a little over fifty-nine million people. Allow me to do the sums for you, that means that there are twenty-seven and a quarter million people in England and Wales who still align themselves with Christianity. Given that Jesus sent twelve men out to minister to Jewish Palestine these statistics should excite us rather than depress.
Don’t worry, the statistical stuff is over, the point is that I think that the challenge for the Church of 2023 is to try to think how we strengthen links between the Church and twenty seven million people, because it seems to me that whilst people align themselves quite happily with Christianity they seem to have an issue with Church. For a long time, I have been concerned that people are not interested in what we have to offer today, maybe I have been wrong? The Church of 2023 needs to learn how we can be relevant to half the population of the country. We are taking that challenge seriously in Ipswich and I hope that throughout this new year you engage with “thought for the day” and if you haven’t seen it, why not have a look at Bite Sized Church?
I pray that the New Year is a happy and blessed time for you all wherever you are.