When people ask how big our church is, I sometimes shrug casually and say ‘Oh, I guess we have a couple of billion members.’

That’s approximately how many of us will gather today to worship Jesus Christ, to learn from the Bible and to conspire together in prayer for a better, fairer, more beautiful world.

We will meet to do this in cathedrals, warehouses, bars, homes and often in secret. We are the most socially diverse community the world has ever known. A vast, ancient, revolutionary movement of love.

The great theologian Stanley Hauerwas says that: ‘The most interesting, creative and political solution we Christians have to offer our troubled society is... the #church. Here we show the world a manner of life the world can never achieve through social coercion or governmental action. We serve the world by showing it something it is not, namely, a place where God is forming a family out of strangers.’ (Resident Aliens)