Advent: Blogia Adventus Urbana

I’m a sucker for Christmas; decorations, carols, mulled wine, the whole festive thing. Many of my favourite family memories tie in with Christmas, as do some very significant and life-changing disappointments. However, as one year passed to another, I felt a growing dis-ease with the marriage of a high day of the Christian calendar and the high-point of the retail year.

My experience of evangelical church in Australia was not helping either. Sure there were Christmas services, cantatas and events, but there seemed to be an abruptness to it all and a lack of critical reflection. The simple fact was that one church service, however special, is never enough to engage all the themes that Christmas brings up as well as the cultural issues that demand attention.

Upon moving to London I encountered Advent for the first time. A four-week season that gave time to reflect upon the deeper meanings of Christ being born into a sin-sick world. In dark cold winter (as opposed to the blaring summer sun of an Australian summer), the idea of the light coming into the darkness took on new layers of meaning.

Of course, I don’t really claim to understand advent the way someone brought up in a liturgical church would get it. My sense of what advent could mean for us in the urban-global church is fragmented, partial and quite possibly incoherent. However, it is my hunch that holding onto the season of Advent can give us a powerful resource for engaging our culture and our faith.

So please check back over the next days as I attempt to blog through the Advent season, first from Delhi, then from London, engaging the steady slide towards Christmas.