When Jesus announced the Kingdom of God in the Bible, He must have known that He was coming into direct conflict with all the power structures around Him.

Jesus seems to have deliberately chosen a way, which was bound to lead into confrontation with all the authorities, actual and self-appointed, all who exercised power. The way the world organised itself then, as now, was in terms of power, conceived as intimidation and fear, people lording it over one another.

But the challenge given us by Jesus could not be packaged in a saying, to be handed down and repeated by His followers. Not at all! Jesus’ message was a plan of action; His words explained the action he had already performed, and led up to the action He was to perform.

Wherever Jesus went, people who had been shoved to the margins of society found themselves invited to His party. He often celebrated the arrival of the kingdom of God. There were no bouncers at the door to keep out the undesirables.

Jesus in the Bible clearly envisaged His task as being to bring social, as well as physical and spiritual, healing to His people. He knew to do so would be at considerable cost to Himself. He went out of His way to make them welcome, explaining His action in terms of a doctor visiting the sick rather than the healthy.

If the church of today is indeed to be Jesus’ agent in bringing His whole agenda to His whole world, it needs His own Spirit at the centre.

All Christians involved at the leading edge of the church’s mission to bring healing and renewal to the world, must invoke the Spirit of Jesus in our life and worship and as we go about our tasks, lest we be betrayed into the arrogance of our own power plays and self-centeredness.

What is required then is a renewal, of the old-fashioned Christian virtue of love. When Paul wrote about this in 1 Corinthians 12-14, it had little to do with emotional feelings towards other people. It had everything to do with the glad acceptance, across traditional culture and racial barriers, of other people who also confessed Jesus as Lord.

Liturgy, properly undertaken, enables us as humans to relax, and to focus our mind and heart, and be humble. Many of our old and young, whose experience of God has been in the context of dry and lifeless liturgical worship for too long, have been delighted to discover the joy of free and spontaneous worship, with a wide variety of music, old and new songs.

We must recapture something of that spirit, and let the renewal by the Spirit make its full contribution to our common life. We know that without the Spirit leading us we shrink. It’s as simple as that. If we rediscover the Holy Spirit in the Church, we can begin to grow again. It’s that simple!

All around the world there is new stirrings, new life breathed into old structures, new ways of worship arising to replace outworn, dry and sterile ones. Traditional liturgies such as those of Anglicanism have roots which run deep and strong, and anyone who cuts into them does so at their peril, not least in a society where intimidation, snide put-downs, control of others, and power plays are the norm.

Certainly, worship cannot be isolated from the totality of my Christian living. Worship belongs to all people. It becomes like that which I am worshipping; and I know one feature of the worship of God revealed in Jesus and by the Holy Spirit is that when I worship God I come to share in His concern for the whole world.

If we Christians had had genuine humility over these last few hundred years, we might well have had fewer cracks in the fabric of the new temple (1 Corinthians 3:16-17). So often the cracks in the church have followed the fault lines in societies: the divisions of language, race, class, power plays, and so on.

If these divisions are now being overcome, and Christians are welcoming one another with love and, in some quarters at least, with a remarkable absence of mutual suspicion, this can only be because God is enabling His people to see one another as brothers and sisters in Christ, sharing a common life, joy and hope which transcends the barriers that have kept them apart. Paul in Philippians 2: 2-4, 14-15 says clearly the unity of the church is not an optional extra.