LitBit: The Eucharist reminds us of the need for honest repentance – of the need to confront our capacity to betray and forget the gift we have been given. And that is why the Eucharist is not, in Christian practice, a reward for good behaviour; it is the food we need to prevent ourselves from starving as a result of our own self-enclosure and self-absorption, our pride and our forgetfulness.
Rowan Williams, Being Christian, p.52f
LitBit: [The Eucharist] is, as some modern Christian thinkers have said, what makes the Church what it really is. For that short time, when we gather as God’s guest at God’s table, the Church becomes what it is meant to be – a community of strangers who have become guests together and are listening together to the invitation of God.
Rowan Williams, Being Christian, p.58
LitBit: Sometimes, after receiving Holy Communion, as I look around a congregation, large or small, I have a sensation I can only sum up as this is it – this is the moment when people see one another and the world properly: when they are filled with the Holy Spirit and when they are equipped to go and do God’s work. It may last only a few seconds but there it is. It has happened and it happens again and again. And what is the appropriate response? …thanksgiving.
Rowan Williams, Being Christian, p.58
LitBit: The Eucharist reminds us of the need for honest repentance – of the need to confront our capacity to betray and forget the gift we have been given. And that is why the Eucharist is not, in Christian practice, a reward for good behaviour; it is the food we need to prevent ourselves from starving as a result of our own self-enclosure and self-absorption, our pride and our forgetfulness.
Rowan Williams, Being Christian p.52f
“instead of that picture of the Bible as a book held in the hands of a solitary reader alone in a room, have in your mind another kind of picture, one in which somebody is proclaiming God’s story to a gathering of diverse people – and all of them asking themselves, and asking one another, ‘How do we find ourselves in this? How are we going to be renewed together by this reading?’ Because when that happens, the Bible is an essential source, as well as a sign, of the Christian life”
Rowan Williams, Being Christian p.39
“…reading the Bible is about listening to God in Jesus – which is what Christians ought to be doing in all circumstances anyway. It is letting the Holy Spirit bring you inside the story of how God related to the ancient Israelites and the first Christian believers – letting the Holy Spirit bring you inside that story so that you recognize it as your story.”
Rowan Williams, Being Christian p.36
“…when you see a group of baptized people listening to the Bible in public worship, you realize that Bible-reading is an essential part of the Christian life because Christian life is a listening life. Christians are people who expect to be addressed by God.”
Rowan Williams, Being Christian p.21
LitBit: The Congregation is the embodiment in one place of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, worshipping, witnessing and serving as a fellowship of the Spirit in Christ. Its members meet regularly to hear God’s Word, to celebrate the sacraments, to build one another up in love, to share in the wider responsibilities of the Church, and to serve the world.
The Basis of Union
The Uniting Church affirms that it belongs to the people of God on the way to the promised end. The Uniting Church prays that, through the gift of the Spirit, God will constantly correct that which is erroneous in its life, will bring it into deeper unity with other Churches, and will use its worship, witness and service to God’s eternal glory through Jesus Christ the Lord. Amen.
From Paragraph 18 of the Basis of Union (1992)
Download a high-quality image of this BasisBit for insertion into your pew sheet
BasisBits are intended particularly for congregations of the Uniting Church in Australia but could be easily adapted for general use by congregations of other denominations. The suggested use of BasisBits is as items in the “news” section of your Sunday pew sheets or regular congregational publications; some would lend themselves to incorporation into your liturgy order itself.
Preaching is a trinitarian event: enlivened by the Spirit, the words of the preacher draw the hearer into the truth of our need, into the encounter with the Crucified-Risen One and so into faith and hope in God, into the communal life that flows from the presence of the life-giving Trinity. The preacher articulates, in the terms of the texts, what God has done and is doing in the cross and resurrection of Jesus, in Baptism and Eucharist, and in the faith that these things sustain.
Gordon Lathrop, The Pastor, p. 50
