Our speaker at last week's Tuesday lunch was Nick Holtam, vicar of St Martin's in the Fields. He told us about the work at the church, andthe ways in which the story of the church drew on and refelcted the story of their patron saint, St Martin. And during his talk, he looked over and asked "Do Baptist church have patron saints"
Of course, on the whole, the answer is no, not officially, and not usually referred to in our name. We tend to be called after our street or district.
But his question has started me wondering. If we were to have a patron saint, who would it be?
Nick demonstrated how the story of St Martin, a soldier, who was later baptised and worked for peace, a man who gavehalf his cloak to a beggar, somebody who practised hospitality had shaped the practices and indentity of a church which looked after soldiers travelling through London during the wars, while praying for conscientious objectors at a time when most people denounced them, and then developed the welcoming work into their fantastic work among the homeless of central London.
Whose story is reflected in our life - and whose story would we like to be part of? So far, I have come up with Martin Luther King Jr, largely because of his visit here; Deitrich Bonhoeffer, whose theology has been so important for many of us; Hildegard of Bingen, a German nun who wrote wonderful music, and was convinced that God's care for creation was part of the glory of loving God; Dirk Willems, an Anabaptist who saved his guard when the guard was faced with drowning.
But the choosing of a patron saint is surely a communal activity. What suggestions do you have? Please let me know.

At the weekend, the BBC Website published an article on the call among some atheists for a service of de-baptism; a way of officially renouncing promises and an identity "imposed" on children through infant baptism. A certificate has been produced that people are able to display, and, although, as a spokesman for the Church of England has pointed out, there is no way of unrecording the historic fact that the service has taken place, there is a suggestion that a note can be inserted in the baptismal record to record an individual's wish to renounce what their baptism.
While feeling a proper Baptist response is probably, "well, this is one of the reasons why we are not committed to a practice of infant baptism - it has a place as a freely chosen response, not something done on behalf of another, either by parent or by church" - I am not yet sure that this is to say enough.
For the most telling point in the response that the church spokesman has offered is that what has actually happened cannot be made to unhappen.
We are feeling this particularly in this church at the moment. Last week we were coming to terms with - and announcing - the death of somebody. Except that we have discovered that he is not dead. The details are unimportant here. What link this, for me, with the de-baptism calls is that what has been done, said, made public, cannot be as if it has not. We cannot live backwards. However much we might, at times, want to go back and make not what has been, it isn't so in the universe as we live in it.
Much of that which has been and which has shaped us individually is good and life-giving - but there are always the bits we didn't want, didn't choose, want to deny. But denial, as any therapist will tell us, is not a good place to live. Living in the light of the past - the good and the bad - is a sign of an integrated and healthy identity.
And at the heart of living such an identity is the conviction that wherever we are in it, the story hasn't finished yet. There is always something more to come. And we can't tell what it will be. That has been our experence in discerning death and life in the story of our member - whatever we expected to hear and to have to come to terms with, it certainly wasn't what we actually encountered.
And again, it brings us face to face with resurrection. Because whatever else resurrection is, it is not what we expect. Living in the light of and coming to terms with what has been cannot mean unmaking it, but it can mean living in openess to see what will come of it.
As for unbaptising, I don't think the church has a duty, as some are claiming, to devise such a ceremony. What has been cannot be made as if it has not been. But there's nothing to stop organisations that want to identify themselves by rejecting the faith of the church developing their own process to do it. I don't know what resources are there for those who do not express a commitment to Christian faith to make sense of living creatively with the past. But for those of us exploring faith in resurrection, whatever the story has been up until now, in its light and its darkness, it is not over yet.....

One of our members died this week He had left London a couple of weeks ago to return to his home in Brazil, and while there, he had a stroke, and died. We got the news by an email late one evening. By the time we heard about his death, the funeral had already happened.
We are sad about his death, though not surprised, as he had been very ill. We recognise and understand the normal reactions to death – we deal with them regularly in a community.
But there is an oddity here, and it is to do with distance. Because he had gone home, and because the funeral had already happened and none of us were able to be there, we have not had our normal processes to acknowledge and make sense of the experience of losing somebody who is part of us.
And it has made me think about Easter – not just about the promise it offers us as we face the brute fact of physical death, but the way in which we encounter it.
We know about our friend’s death only through reports – and indeed, only through one report, which feels rather indirect because it is by email from somebody we don’t really know, and we can’t encounter the reality of the death in any normal way. For those of us who hear the stories of Jesus’ resurrection, there is something similar happens. We don’t see the event – we don’t see the body moving, the tomb being empty, even the encounters with the disciples. We have report. Somebody has told us. And not particularly directly, but through some written stories. It is not a direct experience, but a reported conviction of which we must then make some sense, and work out how we are going to live with the impact of these reports.
Because our friend had already left London, we were not seeing him regularly – and so his death does not change materially our day to day work. But, given that the reports are true, the world is a materially different place. It’s just that, for us here, it doesn’t yet feel it. We only have the reports, we have no direct encounter or experience.
And that is how we encounter resurrection if we encounter it all. We hear the stories. It doesn’t make the world look immediately different. But if it is true, then the world is not the same place – there is something changed.
We could not get to our friend’s funeral. But we will be holding a memorial. There are various reasons for this; it is right that those of us here who loved him have a place to say thank you for him, and to acknowledge his life as a gift from God. Memorials are important places to share stories and re-energise memories.
But in this instance it is also important for we need the ritual, the ceremony to allow us to experience his death and the difference it makes in our lives and in the world.
When we meet for worship as a Christian community, we are doing something similar in terms of resurrection. We need the ritual and ceremony of meeting, of hearing the story, of trying it on and seeing what a difference it makes to the way we know and live in the world, of making it real not just as a story but as something we experience for resurrection to have the impact it can have in our world.
It does raise for us, as those who lead worship, some intriguing question s and demands to do with what we think we are about.

The ministry team have had a whole series of conversations recently - both within and outside the congregation - about baptism, membership and what it is all about. It's been fascinating and exciting.
But, certainly from my point of view, it has also been, on some occasions at least, suprising. Firstly that it happened at all, in a culture where people keep telling me folk are not interested in faith, in baptism and in joining things. But what has really caught me out has been the nature of the questions. I have been brought up short by the reminder that my world and my words are not obvious to everybody.
It came into focus yesterday when I went into a sandwich shop I rather haunt. They recognise me, know what I am going to order, and we have some fun chats. Yesterday, the man serving me asked what I had been doing all day. It was the first time I actually identified myself as one of the ministers in the church over there. Oh, he said - what does that entail., So, I described a (sort of!!) typical day, and he asked a couple more obvious sort of questions - the kind of things I would have expected. But he then followed it up with "And who is the priest there?" "Well, I guess I'm one of them" Long silence. Now, there was a language and a gender issue at play here - but also suddenly the recognition that my term "minister" didn't mean anything - and even when we got to the term priest, although he knew the term, actually, what such a person was, what the church is and does - all the things I take for granted, actually meant very little to him, except as some strange esoteric hidden something.
It is a salutary reminder that what we are is not obvious, and who we are is not clear. It's easy for those of us who have been in this - or some other - church for a long time, to assume that everybody knows who we are, what we do, and what it's all about.
But it's not true.
In Disciples on the Way during Lent, we are reflecting together on mission - what it is, and how it works for us. And perhaps we need to start here. How do we demystify who and what we are - and indeed, should we?
I have been in a betting shop once in my life - accompanying somebody who was very at home there. I had no idea what went on, how to behave or what to expect. I was very uncomfortable, self- conscious and didn't want to go again.
Is that true for a church?
It was a helpful encounter, my trip to William Hills. It occurs to me at various points when I wonder about how we welcome people. Where would be a strange place for you to go - and, please, will you go there, see what it feels like, and bring that into our conversations about how we live the life of the Kingdom here.