Do we see Mission clearly as we look outwards?
As members of DVC attending this year's bible studies on I Corinthians already know, there is something almost unsettling about reading the text today. Not because it feels distant—but the exact opposite. It speaks to today's world, church and our own lives and priorities.
“For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror...”
This is a letter written to a young, energetic, gifted community... that is also fractured and distracted. It is
Corinth was full of hustle and bustle, and everyone had an opinion. People aligned themselves with
personalities. It was not always easy to pursue the truth. With characteristic honesty, St Paul does not offer
vague encouragement but clarity. He certainly does not mince his words.
That line alone could have been written for an age of mobile phones and gadgets. We are surrounded by
images—carefully curated, endlessly compared, rarely questioned. We see, but do we see clearly?
And then there is the famous passage on love—so often read at weddings and funerals that we risk
forgetting its original setting. It was not written for romance. It was written for a divided church. Love, Paul
insists, is not sentiment but discipline: patient, truthful, enduring. The kind of love that refuses to ignore
people or walk away.
What makes this letter speak so sharply to today’s generation is not just its honesty about human
behaviour, but its refusal to give up on community. Paul believes the church can do better. The Church
should always be a community where differences can be overcome and where the God given gifts of all are
treasured. Any weaknesses are to be transformed.
“At the heart of it all,” Paul seems to say, “is not who you follow, what you achieve, or how you appear—
but whether you are becoming people of love.”
As all of us in the wider Digswell Parish and at DVC world - I Corinthians
Fr Rob