This evening I sat in a Methodist Church listening to sacred music for Easter. The choir sang the ancient version of the Lord's Prayer as in this video and it has nothing directly to do with Easter Week. Yet it reminded me - perhaps it is the beautiful simplicity of the unaccompanied music and the familiar words - that Easter is a time when I feel much more Christian than Baptist. And in a Methodist church, as somewhat a fan of Evangelical Revival - Whitfield and Wesley and all that has issued into Victorian and contemporary evangelicalism and pentecostalism - I am still a Christian first and every Easter I know that afresh.
When these words were sung in Elizabethan England there were no Baptists anywhere and no Evangelical revival called by that name. Despite my denomination's current self-examination (because it has a financial deficit) my faith is rooted not in it but in the Lord of Easter who taught us to pray saying . . .
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