Culture primarily offers churches the opportunity to display and celebrate as a community the joys of life.

Culture is important because it has the power to provoke our imagination – to inspire us to  think above, beyond and outside what can easily become a small high walled box. Culture within churches can be found within our liturgy through music as we express our worship in song. It can be found within churches as works of art that help us to re-imagine the Christian story in our generation through stained glass windows and paintings.

Culture can also be found in churches where the building is opened up to the wider community for performances of orchestral music, of poetry readings and for exhibitions of art by local artists.

At times in Christian history the church has sought in cultural terms to distance itself from what it sees as the tainted world outside. It is as if it wants to  identify itself with the pure water of the river in contrast to the salty water of the sea. A much better image would be that of an estuary where the salt water of the churches can meet  with the river waters of the world. The church then is a meeting place of the divine and the human, of the gospel and culture, of timeless truth and embodied experience.

By gathering around artefacts and musical compositions, created by humans,  our imaginations are stirred so that the church and world can interact and find beautiful things in common and create wonderful things together