Colourful Dreamer

This week like every Palm Sunday we are invited to journey with Jesus down the Kidron Valley from Bethany into the temple joining the ambivalent crowds who have come to Jerusalem for Passover, and on through the maze of streets and events until we reach Golgotha and the cross. We are invited to notice how we respond as we enter this week and how this story helps us see our world differently and to live compassionately. It begins with a small crowd from the country waving branches welcoming their “king” who rides a donkey into the city. They cry Hosanna!! Each Sunday we join them crying Hosanna as we gather around the eucharistic table. Hosanna is both our plea for God to save, and a shout of praise and exaltation. As we join that procession what is it we long to be saved from? And for what do we give thanks and praise? This king is unlike most other kings. Pilate and Herod Antipas enter on war horses surrounded by cavalry and infantry and symbols of brutal power. Jesus rides a donk...

  5 th Sunday in Lent- Year A - 2026 Readings: Psalm -                         Psalm: 130           First Reading -            Ezekiel 37:1-14 Second Reading -        Romans 8:6-11 Gospel -                       John 11:1-45   What I want to say: I wonder how we are at this moment. - How many of us feeling like field of dry bones in Ezekiel – in need of breath of God? We are reminded by our gospel reading (John 11:1-45) that with Mary, Martha, and Lazarus we are invited to know Jesus as the “resurrection and the life.” Explore what this life might look like in our struggling church. What I want to happen: Where do we meet Jesus’s breathing lif...

Andy explores all these themes further in Churches and the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology for a Secular Age. I really enjoyed this book .  I enjoyed how he threads the story of young Karl Barth when he was a pastor straight out of seminary, working in a working class parish in Switzerland. In his struggles with post WWI Europe, having rejected the pietism of his father, and been let down by liberal theology in the face of the industrial killing of WWI and the economic collapse that followed, Root tells of how Karl Barth found faith in God, hearing the invitation to let God be God. You can read a longer summary here . Into this story he weaves the story of a real church that failed in its attempts to innovate and be more relevant and closed after last pastor left. He then wonders what might have happened if they had stayed open. He uses these two stories to explore all the themes described above. It is not a how to book but offers a theological framework to und...