Kendal Bopping

On Saturday, October 26th, a 'Silent Disco' comes to Kendal Parish Church. The music will be 80s-themed, so ladies and gentlemen of a certain age can re-live their long-lost youths and bop about to their hearts’ content and their limbs’ levels of tolerance. Doubtless, the parochial treasurer will be eyeing the filled coffers, and the church wardens will delight in the prospect of filling their church with people, even if it’s for just a night. Perhaps some liberal curate or half-witted deacon will smile as he thinks of all those ‘community engagement’ boxes ticked and ‘meeting people where they are’.

Yet is this really the purpose of a church building? Can anyone consider the silent disco and be sincerely satisfied that filling it with aged dancers pleases the God for whose worship it was constructed? Kendal Parish Church has a pretty informative website, to be fair, which even has a section on ‘Who is Jesus?’, a personage whom many British church websites seem to carefully avoid mentioning. However, I read this with interest:

Jesus’ message and actions were challenging and controversial to the Jewish and Roman authorities. To them he was a trouble-maker. So they arrested and tortured him, then executed Him by crucifixion. He was in his early thirties when he died.

Is that last remark a simple historical fact thrown in for good measure? Or does it bemoan his premature death as terrible tragedy, a lamentable waste, an unfortunate end? He came to our world in order to die; Christ died for the ungodly. Without that atoning death, this writer must pay for his own crimes in darkest hell. Christ deliberately died for our sin, including those of turning His Father’s house into a den of raves.