The Archbishops of Canterbury and York have joined forces to tell Anglicans to get down on their knees ”“ and polish their neighbour’s shoes.
Dr Rowan Williams and Dr John Sentamu are backing a church Facebook group urging members to find time in their busy lives to complete 50 actions over the seven weeks of Lent, which begins with Ash Wednesday next week. The aim is “to help you become a better neighbour and transform your world for the better”. Actions include polishing someone’s shoes on Maundy Thursday, a reference to Jesus’s washing of the feet of His Disciples; making someone laugh; and leaving a thank-you note for the postman.
Most are deemed “appropriate for those of all faiths or none”.
imagine if Jesus followers were known first & foremost for our love
I always wonder, when I read that something is “appropriate for those of all faiths or none,” if people with no faith (or some other faith) really do take the Church up on whatever it’s suggesting. I’d be interested in knowing if a Muslim family, or a Wiccan family, or a religion-less family decided to do any of this.
While of course there is nothing wrong with polishing your neighbor’s shoes or leaving a thank you note for the mail carrier etc., I’d like to know if any of those 50 actions suggested by the two archbishops in England had anything to do with fostering a person’s spiritual growth and inner transformation into the likeness of Christ, or if they only amounted to forms of serving others with the idea of making the world a better place. That is, of course we are called to love our neighbors as ourselves. But let’s keep first things first. The first and great commandment is to love God with all our being.
Yes, authentic love for God always gets shown somehow in love of our neighbors too, but this sounds suspiciously like mere altruistic do-goodism, or a one-sided social gospel emphasis. I hope this is just another case of a distorted media report that filters out the specifically Christian part of whatever the archbishops suggested as practical Lenten disciplines we could undertake. I hope ++Williams and ++Sentamu also urged creative ways to pray and fast and read Scritpure more and so on.
David Handy+
Actions which are “appropriate for those of all faiths or none†are of no particular interest to those who seek to live by faith (in Christ, that is). If there is any point to Lent, it is to strengthen oneself against temptation and to grow in Christlikeness.