Church encourages people to wait for what they want this Christmas

The Church of England has launched a new website encouraging people not only to reflect on what they truly want this Christmas but also to rediscover the joys of waiting for it.

The website was launched at the Archbishop of Canterbury’s official residence, Lambeth Palace, on Monday.

The launch was joined by the Bishop of Reading, the Rt Rev Stephen Cottrell, who has published a new book for Christmas entitled ‘Do Nothing: Christmas is Coming’, which advises people to step back from their busy lives over the Christmas period. Reflections from the book are one of many features on the new website designed to help people look afresh at Advent.

“The real meaning of Advent – even inside the Christian community – has got squeezed out,” he said at the launch.

“As we look forward to the coming of Christ we need to be people who watch and wait and have a different perspective on living.”

The website features an Advent calendar with a difference, giving visitors access to helpful tips and podcasts from the Archbishop of York, the Most Rev Dr John Sentamu, Oxford Professor of Psychology, Dr Mark Williams, TV presenter Mark Dowd of Operation Noah, and theologian Dr Jane Williams.

In a video message on the website, the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams invites people to go beyond the common association of Advent with chocolate-filled calendars to use the weeks running up to Christmas as a time of deeper self-reflection and repentance.

“It is rather a pity that for the few weeks before Christmas we are saturated with Christmas carols,” he said. “We don’t have quite the sort of quiet we need to think, well, what would it be if Jesus really came as if for the first time in my life? What would it be for the Good News really to change me? Because for that to happen I need some reflective time, I need some peace, I need to slow down, I need to take my time about things.”

He suggests that people’s inability to wait for the things they want was one of the driving factors behind the world’s present day crises.

“All those bits of our contemporary culture which are about rushing to get gratification, getting the results straight away, all those habits of our culture which so drive the crises of our culture, whether it is the credit crunch or the environmental crisis, all those things we have to cast a rather cold eye over during Advent and say slow down, take time, let yourself grow and open up.”

Dr Williams challenged believers in the video to see what change Jesus could really bring by letting Him into their lives “that bit more fully, that bit more radically”.

“During Advent we try to get ourselves a bit more used to the truth, the truth about ourselves, which is not always very encouraging, [and] the truth about God above all, which is always very encouraging,” he said.

“The one who comes will come with a great challenge to us. It will be like fire on the earth, as the Bible says. And yet the one who comes is coming in love, is coming to set us free, and that is something well worth waiting for.”

The launch was also joined by Dr Paula Gooder, Canon Theologian at Birmingham Cathedral and author of ‘The Meaning is in the Waiting’.

She said that waiting need not be passive and boring.

“One of the things I discovered a few years ago was that waiting can be a really active thing, not only a passive thing. Waiting is about being immensely active, but internally rather than externally. Proper waiting allows you to begin to prepare properly for Christmas and to understand its importance,” she said.

She added that recognising the need to wait was as important a message for Christians as it was for people outside of the church.

“It’s a message for everybody. Both within and outside of the church we have lost that sense of why waiting is important and what waiting can give us. We can tap into that lost art of waiting and begin to understand that waiting is transformative and not something that’s just passing the time between one point and another point.”


On the web: www.WhyWeAreWaiting.com