I have had a certain figure which has banded about my head since I first heard it, and I have mentioned it in conversation on several occasions. Seemingly, it was first voiced on some day-time television show, that only 22% of people in Britain have any idea of what Easter is about; only 22% of people in Britain had any inkling of what Easter was all about.

So then, let’s presume, this includes at least Church-going people knew something about Easter, and then there are some who had enough general knowledge to know some basic Christian teaching and...that’s it!

The corollary of that, of course, is that 78% of people in Britain had no idea at all of what Easter was all about; 78%!

Is it any wonder?

I look around at our churches and I think it is remarkable that as many people still come to Church as they do! Truly! To a very large extent, our church seems to exist in a kind of bubble, and often it has no relevance to people’s lives; in fact for 78% of people, according to this poll, it has no relevance whatsoever!

You may have to forgive me, because I am rather anti-church at the moment - we all go through phases of it; clergy just as much as lay people, in fact, if truth be known, perhaps clergy even more so!

We all go through trying times, some people call them ‘testing’ times, but the Sunday after I came back from a bit of a break and I was due to preach, I really thought to myself, ‘I don’t know what to say?’ That Sunday, in case you’re interested, I latched on to the poem entitled ‘Invictus’ and the film of the same name which told the story of Nelson Mandela and the 1995 Rugby World Cup final in South Africa – the unconquered soul; Invictus.

But to listen to or to read at the moment about what on earth the church is doing and saying, and the way it is behaving, is for me to think that the church, as an organisation, is living in some kind of parallel universe! We have mainly kept quiet about the awfulness and hurt that has been caused by a distorted Roman Church (and I don’t mean that in a ‘them and us’ situation; we’re all part of the church), apart, that is from the Archbishop of Canterbury. And now a priest in Rome has suggested how paedophilia and homosexuality are part of the same thing. I sometimes wonder where these people are coming from?

In all the years I have attended Clergy Conferences and have gone expectantly to hear words of wisdom and to sit at the feet of great Christian thinkers of our time, I think only two have ever been memorable. One was Walter Bruggeman, a prolific Christian writer and another was, more recently, Philip Yancey, another hugely popular author of such classics as, ‘What’s So Amazing about Grace?’

And I think they are both so memorable to me personally because neither of them was afraid to ask difficult questions.

Philip Yancey, classically asked, ‘If all of this is meant to be true, if all the teachings of the Church are meant to preach the truth, then why doesn’t it work better?’ Why doesn’t it work better?

To put that question into this morning’s context, how is it that 78% of Britons have absolutely no idea of what Easter is all about?

Is it really any wonder, when the church largely exists in a parallel universe; completely detached from what’s going on in people’s lives.

The Church has its uses; it’s a perfect framework on to which we can hang such things as Baptisms, Weddings and Funerals, the beginning, middle and end of life (Hatch, match and dispatch; we’ve talked about that before). However, for most, these are ‘brief encounters’, but what else do we have? Are we returning to the time of Voltaire, a pen name he adopted for himself in 1718 and as part of the European Enlightenment, he was a lively critic of the Church, who wrote thousands of literary works; some 20,000 letters and 2,000 books and pamphlets. But one of his most famous sayings was, ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him’. What would we do without all these structures and mechanisms that have been handed down to us by the church over the centuries? Would we have to invent something to fill the void? In his defence, Voltaire’s famous aphorism isn’t actually as cynical as it is often taken to be and it is actually more a retort to a group of atheists.

Yet even the ‘Super-Churches’, the all singing, all dancing, hyperactive churches are largely transient churches.

Or I should say more accurately that they have a transient population. There is a core of highly dedicated disciples, but most people come and go quite freely. Even the famous All Souls Church in Langham Place is called the ‘Visitor’s Church’, not maliciously, or as a nick-name, indeed I’m sure they enjoy the title, but it implies that people are constantly moving on, and not only moving on, but moving out! (Perhaps that is a bad example because All Souls is in the centre of a major metropolis, but there are many ‘super churches’ much closer to hand.)

Where does that leave us all? I think it leaves us in a very sorry state. I have no doubt about the continuance of the Church and the truth of the Gospel, that’s why I still do what I do and that’s why you’re here this morning, but as an organisation, as an institution, it had better wake up and, as they say, ‘smell the coffee’. I just read recently a quote from Woodrow Wilson, the US President during World War 1 who said, ‘One of the proofs of the divinity of our gospel is that it has survived preaching’. The fact that we’re still here must mean a great deal.

John’s last chapter of his Gospel (a chapter which seems to have been added on, if you read the very end of the previous chapter) tells of the building of the Church and the commission to Peter. Jesus tells Peter to do just two simple things for his church; Jesus tells him to feed them and to take care of them. It sounds straightforward enough, but perhaps we, as clergy particularly, have failed Christ on both counts, from the top down.

The Church needs prayer, and it needs us all to make it work a lot better.