I hope that by the time you are reading this we are enjoying some summer weather. Imagine the hottest of summer days and just how refreshing that ice cold water feels. Cooling, refreshing, invigorating, all at the same time. That is how faith is meant to affect us, or at least our experience of God is meant to be something akin to it. One of the Psalms begins “As a deer longs for the running brooks: so longs my soul for you O God.” Unfortunately, the reality is often quite different.

Some Christian communities are full of joy in their worship, a joy which radiates out from them and is infectious and attracts many people, young and not so young. Other Christian communities seem to be living in strait-jackets which leave no room for spontaneity and a bubbling joy and gladness in the love of God. Many, particularly the young, find the world of traditional language church services with traditional church music and Victorian hymnody, alien. It just does not speak of God to them. The comment has been made that some Christians on their way to Church look as though they are going to the dentist, and on their way back home they look as though they have been to the dentist; to which could be added that in Church they look as though they are at the dentist.

The Bible says much about the demands of faith which cannot be ignored. One statement of the Christian faith says that the chief end of man is to worship God and enjoy him for ever. Our relationship with God is something that should bring us a deep joy which gives meaning and direction to our lives. At the heart of the Christian experience there is above all the news of wonderful joy. God is the great reveller who cannot be put down by death. ­He is the father of the prodigal son who, when the son  returns after squandering his inheritance, orders a great party for his child. Jesus goes to a wedding, not with a discrete bottle of wine as gift, but to make hundreds of gallons. God is the great life-giver not a kill-joy.

Worship has got to reflect many different moods and feelings. But if at least some of the time it does not bring joy in God, then there is something wrong somewhere. Offering people a stultifying tradition when they are thirsting for the living God just won't do. Perhaps some need to discover for themselves something of the reality of God; a reality which reaches the parts that even certain kinds of lager cannot, and find the spring of living water which fills with joy which overflows into all of life.

Stuart Evason