What is Lent?

 

Lent is now in its second week, and I wonder what we might make of this long and loosely defined season of the Church Year?

We discussed this at our Life and Faith group yesterday evening.  It soon became apparent, at least with those of us who grew up in non-conformist churches, that Lent hardly figured at all in our youth.

One of my predecessors at AFC, The Revd Neville Clark, helped change all that in Baptist churches.  For he belonged to a somewhat eccentric group of ministers called The Cassock Club, who introduced more liturgical worship into the British Baptist tradition during the 1950’s.  Alas, their impact was rather short lived, yet one of their lasting legacies would be that many Baptist congregations at least give a nod and a wink to Advent and Lent today.

So, over the next six weeks or so I’ll be wearing a purple stole (the liturgical colour for Lent), and we’ll sing hymns from the Holy Week and Passiontide section of the hymn book.  More than that, as we travel with the lectionary, we’ll reflect on the stories of Jesus as he made his way from Galilee to Jerusalem and The Cross.

In recent years there’s been a helpful idea that, rather than simply giving something up for Lent, we might take something up which is positive and helpful to others.

And, as one of our Life and Faith group so helpfully said, Lent is that annual opportunity to do some serious thinking about personal faith.

 For me, the most important question Lent asks is: Who was Jesus?  It’s a crucial question and well worth spending six weeks pondering.