The recent festival celebrating the 750th anniversary of the institution of the first Rector of Minchinhampton was called Faith in the Community. It was deliberately intended to have a double meaning. It could be interpreted as referring to both the presence, existence and tradition of faith - and particularly the church - within the community of Minchinhampton over 750 years and also to having faith, confidence and trust in the general community life of Minchinhampton. What took place during the festival beginning on Ascension Day, 13th May, culminating on Trinity Sunday, 30th May, provided abundant evidence that both interpretations could stand up.

In 1994, Grace Davie, the Professor of Sociology at Exeter University published a highly influential book entitled, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging. As a sociologist of religion she was keen to explore the changing face and pattern of faith and belief in contemporary culture. While it was abundantly clear to her and many others at the time that commitment to the established forms and structures of faith was in decline, it was also evident through surveys that belief itself wasn’t. Large numbers of people might have stopped going to church, but the vast majority of people professed a belief in God, understood in broadly Christian terms. It was this phenomenon that gave Professor Davie the subtitle of her book, Believing without Belonging.

The pattern of religious faith, belief and practice in 2010 is rather different now from what it was in 1994, just sixteen years ago. Whereas the secularists were predicting that religion would be dead within a generation or so, that prediction has clearly been shown to be false. Indeed, it could be said that interest in religion is very strong in the contemporary world. The number of candidates studying religion in schools to GCSE and A Level, for example, has increased exponentially during the last few years. At the same time, Islam is undoubtedly on the rise, as is Christianity, especially in Africa. Buddhism, too, is becoming quite fashionable among some people. While some expressions of religion may give rise to alarm in some quarters - fundamentalism, for example - what can’t be denied is that religion, and interest in religion, is not dead.

This does not mean that the Church can sit back, relax and live as if everything was as it always was. As I’ve suggested, the pattern has changed within even the last sixteen years. Paradoxically, although interest in religion is strong and increasing, it could also be argued that there are fewer people than ever who actually understand what Christianity is really all about. At the same time, although it’s undeniably true that we live in an increasingly materialistic society, and many look to an exclusively materialistic philosophy to provide them with all that they seem to want in life, the recession - amongst other things - seems to be calling a halt to the notion that we can go on and on looking to ever-increasing wealth to meet our deepest needs and longings. Many people have a sense - although they may not be able to articulate this clearly - that there is something more to life. There’s an intuition - or perhaps just a hope - that there’s a deeper meaning and purpose in life, a longing for joy and contentment, a desire to transcend our isolated, limited, egocentric selves.

Belief, though, implies some kind of commitment, something that many find difficult in all aspects of life today. Belief suggests that we’ve thought about something, have made our minds up about it, and have then committed ourselves to it. That is what seems to be the stumbling block for many. This is why I believe that we may be moving to a situation and pattern rather different from 1994, when Grace Davie articulated the sense of religious consciousness in this country at that time as ‘believing without belonging’. What appears to be the case more and more now is that people desire to belong before they believe. I don’t think that we can just reverse Grace Davie’s neat phrase to ‘belonging without believing’. It’s rather something like ‘belonging before believing’ or ‘belonging to believe’. This is where community is really important and where Christian faith and practice - and belief, too - has much to offer.

Community lies at the heart of what it means to be human. From the moment of birth we depend upon others for our very lives. We need from them love, food, warmth, shelter, a sense, indeed, that we belong. In this case we belong before we believe. No one says to us as we emerge from the womb, ‘Before you go any further you have to make your mind up about whether you want to be part of a family’. By virtue of being born, of existing at all, we are already part of a family, inescapably in relationship with other people, indeed with the human race and the whole of creation. Without other people we would not and could not live. The need for relationship doesn’t disappear as we grow. Rather, the nature of our relationships changes. We enter into friendships, committed relationships or marriage. All these relationships express a fundamental human desire to belong, a desire which precedes all else.

We have become accustomed to thinking of ourselves as isolated individuals but this is a very secular, western, relatively recent development. Desmond Tutu, the former Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, often speaks of Ubuntu, a concept characteristic of African spirituality. It’s difficult to translate but it really means something like, ‘I am because we are’. It points to a deep inter-connectedness. In other words, relationship and community are the defining marks of what it is to be human.

This awareness lies at the very heart of the Christian faith. Human beings are created in the image and likeness of a God who is Trinity: a communion, a relationship, a community of love. We belong to God before we ever have any conscious awareness of God or before we believe in God. We belong to God by virtue of existing at all. Christian faith and practice is there to help us to grow into the fullness of that relationship of love. Above all, the Church is a community of people existing across the boundaries of space and time, which seeks not only to proclaim the truth that we are inescapably related to God and one another, but also enables us to live in response to our deepest longing to belong to God and to one another. The Church is a community of faith which has faith in the community because it understands the communion of divine love to be the ultimate reality.

The festival brought all this together in a very particular way here in Minchinhampton. I shall never forget Saturday 22nd May when we had the Pageant, the Plinth and the Barn Dance. This was a wonderful example of how different communities overlap with other communities in a larger community. The Pageant represented the historical presence and present reality of faith in the community over 750 years and more. The Plinth provided an opportunity for all sorts of different community organisations to present themselves to the wider community. The Barn Dance was an occasion when absolutely anyone could join in having fun with everyone else in the whole community. On this day, as on so many others, believing and belonging illuminated each other.

I should like to thank every single one of you who took part in the festival in whatever way, either by planning what happened or simply by participating in it. May we all go on having faith in this community, so that it continues to be a place where people belong, where we discover more fully the truth that we belong to one another because we belong to God, and that we always have been and always will be loved by God.