Richard Dawson, 12 August 2015

Church was a habit throughout my childhood. I didn’t struggle with the concept of God—this seemed to be taken for granted in my family, but I did wonder about families who didn’t know about this God. They seemed, on the one hand, to be able to have great fun on Sundays and on the other, to be able to sit apart from some of the values I picked up from Church. I also didn’t understand the antagonism the notion of God provoked when it was raised with some of these people. When some of my friends began to seriously attack my churchgoing I would listen to them and analyse their approach. Most of it seemed pretty shallow to me. ‘The church is full of hypocrites’ sounds OK until you realise that the rest of society has a few of them too. ‘What’s God doing about world poverty and disease’ - was a tough one until I learned that whatever God was doing about it, the Church had initiated some significantly world-changing approaches to these issues throughout its history. Inventing a medical system for treating the wounded in war and instituting a school system-for-all in Britain were just two examples.
The real challenge for me came through times when I was asked what I was doing about these things. This was perhaps the greatest lesson and puzzle for me, for I constantly found that at Church I couldn’t escape this question. What was my decision in regard to both Christ and His world? What would I do about them?