An introduction to this year’s Lent book
Thy Will Be Done, by Stephen Cherry
I came across a review of Thy Will Be Done in King’s Parade, the magazine for alumni of King’s College Cambridge, where Stephen Cherry is Dean of Chapel, and Ayla Lepine is the College Chaplain. So we have some nice personal connections.
The review included an extract which looked promising. The topic of the book, an extended study of the Lord’s Prayer, was itself attractive, since it is of course deeply familiar to us all, but not something we have studied together recently. The length of the book is not too daunting (some 200 pages). It is conveniently structured for Lent, in six parts – Heaven, Earth, Bread, Forgiveness, Temptation, Glory – and each part is broken down into six short chapters which can either be read day by day or all together once a week before the group meeting. The extract was enough to convince me that the style and content would be both readily accessible and at the same time sufficiently stretching to engage the attention of a thoughtful and well informed congregation.
So I recommended it to the Vicar, who has agreed that it would be suitable, and he will shortly be using the weekly worship e-mails to invite us to sign up for one of the three groups, to be led by himself, Jan and me, which will meet on Zoom at different times during the week. Stephen Cherry himself has very kindly promised to join us on Zoom at some point, and meanwhile he has helpfully provided a set of questions to stimulate our discussions. We haven’t ever run a study group on Zoom before, and it will be sad not to meet in person, but it will be good to take part from the comfort of our own homes, and I hope that it will prove a good Lenten experience for all of us. Lent starts on 17 February, so if you want to get a head start, you can order the book now from the Church House bookshop, or from an online supplier such as hive.