Priesthood of all believers

You may have seen two articles I contributed to in the Swindon Advertiser recently on Lent. The first one was a Faith in Focus column just before Lent started and the second one was a report put together by a trainee reporter on whether Lent had any significance for people today.

I have to say that the Adver is pretty good at giving the Christian faith some coverage. So it was good of them to publish the article about Lent. Unfortunately, the young reporter seemed to mix things up and confused Lent and Easter. (If she’d read my Faith in Focus piece the week before she’d have got it straight!) Nevertheless, the second report did get across the message that for most people outside the Church, Lent doesn’t have any meaning. And if anything for most people, including many in the Church, Lent is about giving something up for Lent. Following the tradition of fasting during Lent.

Lent is of course about remembering the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness being tempted. And in the Christian calendar we come out of Lent and immediately think about Holy Week and Easter. We can forget that for Jesus, his 40 days in the wilderness were days of preparation for his beginning his ministry not its end. In other words, the Christian calendar suggests that following his 40 days of prayer and fasting Jesus entered Jerusalem in triumph, was arrested and executed and then rose from the dead. It was not like that at all.

There is a phrase that is trotted out sometimes about Methodism that it is a “priesthood of all believers”. In other words, all people whether lay people or ordained, play a part in serving God and proclaiming the Gospel. It is not just those called to ministry who have this function.

That is an important concept and one I wholly endorse. All of us have a part to play in bringing into being the Kingdom of God. Not just those of us with dog collars. And I have to say, with only three ministers in the Swindon and Marlborough Circuit come September, the priesthood of all believers will be very important.

We are already well into Lent. But that does not mean that all for us cannot use this time of Lent to reflect on how we can prepare to serve Jesus whether by deciding to pray more regularly, or study the Bible more regularly or in some more tangible way.