Confessions of a bad football supporter

This is the February article from Scawby magazine:

We're just over half way through the football season and I have been to three matches. That may not seem like very many, but it's about the same as my total for the previous four seasons put together – and unusually two of those matches were to see my team play! I'm a Tranmere Rovers supporter and so since they dropped out of the same league as Scunthorpe, I've had limited opportunity to see them play until this season when they joined the same league as Grimsby and Lincoln.

It's often said that football is a bit like religion. Aside from the tribal nature of supporting teams, the matches themselves share similarities with religious services. Both the players and supporters have match-day rituals, the supporters tend to sit in the same place (and would do so even if they didn't have allocated seats), there is adulation of players past and present and there tends to be a rose-tinted view of 'glory days' in the past, when everything was much better. Then of course there's communal singing and the friendships formed between fellow supporters, and you can probably think of other similarities.

If supporting a football team is similar to being a religious believer, then I am a football supporter in a similar way that a lot of people are believers. The Roman poet Horace described himself as “A remiss and irregular worshipper” (Odes 1.34) and I feel the same about being a Tranmere supporter. If people ask me I'll tell them I support Tranmere, but I don't follow their progress closely, I don't know where they are in the league, and sometimes can't even remember what league they're in. I don't often go to see them play and when I did go to see them play this season I realised I didn't know any of the players and I didn't even know who their manager is! I used to be a season ticket holder and went to most home games and the occasional away match (especially if it was at Wembley!), but even then I wasn't really an avid fan. I'm a Tranmere supporter, but I do very little that would count as 'support' and it hardly ever affects my life.

And a lot of people are the same about Christianity: if asked they would say they are Christians, but aside from occasionally coming to church it hardly ever affects their life. But perhaps worse still are those who come to church most weeks but it still doesn't affect their lives – that's like going to watch Tranmere on a Saturday but wearing a Liverpool shirt for the rest of the week!

Lent is a good time for us all to reassess where our priorities and loyalties really lie. It's a chance for us to explore and deepen our faith, however 'remiss and irregular' we are. It's a chance to reaffirm our identity as Christians and take seriously the need for it to affect our whole lives. Like being a Tranmere supporter, being a Christian isn't always easy and attracts a lot of ridicule, but unlike being a Tranmere supporter the future is certain and it's glorious!

[The motto on the Tranmere crest above means "where there is faith, there is light and strength"]

950th Anniversary of St Mary's, Broughton

This is Broughton's Parish Magazine article for February 2015:

You will hopefully know by now that 2016 is the 950^th Anniversary of St Mary's Church and that we are planning a number of events to celebrate. Indeed the celebrations have started already with our Anniversary Songs of Praise on the first Sunday of the year.

One of the readings from that service was Psalm 84, which contains the words: “How lovely is your dwelling-place, Lord Almighty! My soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God...Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere” (verses 1-2, 10). The Psalmist speaks of his love for the Temple in Jerusalem as it is the place where he can meet with the living God. For the Jewish people the Temple was very important as is was the place where God was present in a special way. However, by Jesus' time it had become a place to make profits and also the seat of political authority dressed as religious authority; Jesus opposed both of these abuses.

But what made Jesus really radical was that he taught that the Temple itself was no longer needed, and this was one of the themes we looked at in our Advent course on the biblical letter to the Hebrews. The sacrifices that were made in the Temple would be no longer necessary after his sacrificial, once-for-all death and resurrection. And the true location of God's presence with us was not a building but the person of Jesus himself.

As we celebrate the 950^th anniversary of St Mary's it is right to give thanks to God for the building. It's right to thank God for those who have designed, built and paid for it. It's right to give him thanks for all those who have looked after it and beautified it over the years, as well as those who continue to do that today. But in all our celebrations of such a fantastic and historically important building, we should not be like the people of Jesus' day, who forgot why the Temple was there in the first place.

St Mary's is first and foremost a place of worship, a place for people to come to meet with the living God. Centuries of prayer and praise have soaked into the walls of St Mary's giving it the very tangible feeling of being a special place of God's presence. The size of it reminds us that God is strong and lasting, and it's position in the town reminds us that he wants to be right in the middle of our lives. But God is not limited to St Mary's, he is everywhere and can be found anywhere at any time. Jesus says “Listen! I am standing and knocking at your door. If you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in and we will eat together” (Revelation 3:20). May this year be a special year not just for St Mary's but for you, as you meet with the living God through Jesus his Son.