the emmaus community and the abbeychurch | Ancient Faith. Future Hope.

Join us for worship Sunday - it's the Feast of Trinity Sunday! Celebrating the God who has revealed Godself as three persons, One Being!

There are seven principal Feasts in the Christian year - Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity, and All Saints Day - so after this week we enter a long season of Ordinary Time, but not before we celebrate the Triune God revelealed to us!

Lynn preaches, Michelle presides, there will be prayer stations and an opportunity to receive anointing/prayer/a blessing.

The band leads us in joyful song...

There will be bread and wine. Christ's Table is set and you are invited! Come ...

The order of service leaflet is available here.

This church would not survive without its members' participation. To sign up for scripture reading or other helping roles, please click here or chat with Margot, our rota coordinator.

At the AbbeyChurch we try to be sensitive to the ways language of God and about God has been often historically interpreted and used to maintain certain relationships of power and privilege... Especially along lines of gender and race, several male-dominant images of God are invoked throughout Scripture including that of King, Lord, and Father. The Church's over-reliance on these three images is deeply problematic and paints a picture of a distant God who rules from on high (King), or one who exercises total authority over their realm, but may or may not ever encounter us as subjects (Lord). And in the case of Father, we cannot help but insert into that image each of our experiences with our earthly Fathers. So if your dad was kind and patient, you may think God is much the same. But if your Dad was aloof and distant, it will be equally the case that we read God in this way.

One answer to this is to dispense with the images we find painful or less helpful. God needn't be Father at all - let's call God Parent! And there are times where such a move is a necessary and appropriate way for us to grow past some of our own hurts which may prevent us from seeing the broader nature of God revealed to us in Scripture. But on this Trinity Sunday, I want to suggest it is insufficient for us to do away with problematic images of God, including that of Father. Rather, we need to include those difficult images within the wider set of images given to us in Scripture, allowing the minor voices to critique and correct the more dominant ones.

So try this: God may be Father, but God is also Mothering Hen (Psalm 91, Matt 23:37, Luke 13:34), longing to gather together all of her chicks, to lovingly brood over her eggs, literally giving them life by her own warmth! For weeks a hen will brood over eggs, and she cannot leave them for more than one hour at a time or risk their lives. I've seen hens hardly eat or drink, reduced down to feathers, in order to see their brood through to hatch. And once hatched, she guards and protects and draws them in deep under the shadow of her wings. (Ps 36:7, Ps 57:1, Ps 63:7). Father, yes, and Mother Hen as well. What a stunning image!

God may be King, ruling form afar, but God is also our Clothing (Galatians 3:27). We who have been baptized into Christ have been clothed with Christ. Lauren Winner tells the story of taking up running at middle age and finding herself a little uncomfortable with how the running clothes fit differently than they once did (I can relate!). But in encountering this verse she found herself breaking free from the shame around her body. For Christ clings to her body - to your and my body - as close as those running tights and tops. Moving with our every step, closer to us than any human in space or time, moving with us, never leaving us, intimate and present and oh so very near - even when we are sweaty, dirty, tired, broken - we are covered, every part of us lovingly covered, in Christ. God is Lord, yes, and our Clothing as well. Let that image sink in a while.

So on this Trinity Sunday we will invoke that old language of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - not to the exclusion of the many other beautiful and necessary images, but to honour that these are central images by which God has revealed Godself to us, and which our tradition has handed down to us as part of the wisdom of God's self-revelation. If that language is unsettling to us, and for many of us it is, let's widen our arms to hold the whole set of images Scripture gives us for the One God we come to worship and to know in Jesus Christ, by the Spirit.

for a helpful introduction to the wider images for God, check out Lauren Winner's book, Wearing God, 2015.