Advent

Advent is about reflective waiting.

Isn't it?

Is it not a haven from the madding crowds of Black Friday, every subsequent Saturday, Sunday and Thursday late and through to Christmas eve?   There is something appealing about retreating into a Carmelite Christmas.  (It will be less expensive for a start . . .)

"Baptists are too activist," Baptists say.  This has become an early 21st Century Received Truth and it is a slightly suspicious Truth for two reasons:

1.  It is not said to us but by us.  Many colleagues in other Church groupings seem a tad envious of our activism.

2.  It is quite convenient.  So perhaps worth questioning.  By being less active we have more opportunity for, well, shopping and, er, restaurants and, um, travelling.  My sense of people who 'rest' from church is that they do not fill that time with spiritually useful things as a rule.

William Booth was an activist.  You don't start an expression of church that becomes called The Salvation Army with the intention of being overly reflective.  Strangely (or perhaps not) when we think of Christmas we immediately think of The Salvation Army.

William was not a man to ignore the spiritual.  To the contrary he regarded formalised religion, Advent and the like as too often lacking the Spirit.  Nor was he a man to down tools to dwell in a waiting that might be otherwise interpreted as a mite too convenient.  How did he hold it all together?

Well in a way he did and in a way he didn't.  he saw the paradox through which every believer in an unbelieving world must travel in Advent or any other time:

He said,

Work as if everything depended upon work and pray as if everything depended upon prayer.