SIMON PHIPPS

May is an exciting time in the church calendar. We have moved through the expectant waiting of Advent and the joy of Christmas. We have entered into sorrow in Lent and celebrated the overthrow of death and sin at Easter. In May we come to the formation of the Church at Pentecost, and the eschatological (final) promises in the Ascension of Christ. At Pentecost, we as the church are formed and empowered to do Christ’s work on earth. The promised Holy Spirit arrives and gives great boldness to those first disciples. The people around them all thought that they were strange (in this instance, drunk in the morning), and society has found the church, when acting as it should, strange ever since. As our society moves more in a post-Christian reality the church begins to look more and more strange. The governing stories that have dominated the imagination for over a thousand years are shifting and changing. Students of disciplines such as art, history, and philosophy are having to learn the