HARVEST FESTIVAL FOR A NON-CHRISTIAN FRIEND

With many churches around the country combining Harvest Festival with Back to Church Sunday, Cranmer’s Curate would be very pleased to invite a non-Christian friend to a service with the following features:

• The church building is decked with tins of baked beans, fruit ‘n veg, cereal packets and flowers, revealing a pro-active Christian community that has pushed the boat out for its Harvest Festival, if it has chosen to hold one. You can go over the top with the ‘we are no longer an agrarian society’ line. A photograph display featuring a woman in a hard hat and a man baking a cake just doesn’t make the same impact as a home-grown pumpkin occupying an end-pew – even and perhaps especially in an urban area.

• A clear message via the hymns, the prayers, the Bible readings and the sermon that the God being thanked is not the father and/or mother of everyone irrespective of what they believe, but the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ and of believers in Him. With the cultural pressure to promote ‘faith’ in a general sense, a church service that proclaimed the significance of the Faith in the one true and almighty God would be a breath of fresh air.

• The inclusion of ‘We plough the fields and scatter’ and the Book of Common Prayer’s General Thanksgiving (in a modern English version). Why that prayer is not more widely used is a mystery to cc. It prays the Gospel. Here it is in its 1662 version:

Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we thine unworthy servants give thee most humble and hearty thanks for all thy goodness and loving-kindness to us and to all men. We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory. And we beseech thee, give us that due sense of all thy mercies, that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful, and that we shew forth thy praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives; by giving up ourselves to thy service, and by walking before thee in holiness and righteousness all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom with thee and the Holy Ghost be all honour and glory, world without end. Amen

Your curate would be more than comfortable inviting an unchurched, non-Christian friend to a Harvest Festival that does what it says on the tin.