I suppose it isn't a huge surprise that shepherds have featured frequently and strongly in our ADVENTure displays. After all, they are quite central to the narrative - in Luke's account, at any rate!
Tonight's display in Norfolk Avenue showed shepherds gathering around the warm, red glow of a fire. In the skies above the angel was hovering. Marc Smith clearly has a gift in creating shepherds - one of them was built on a mannequin, but the other was perfectly formed without so much as a frame (built, I believe, around a chair!).
So perhaps I'm running out of things to say about shepherds and sheep. But Nick Baines, Bishop of Leeds (and formerly of Croydon) has written a wonderful piece in the latest edition of Radio Times, in which he draw attention to the fact that it was groups of people who first came to see Jesus - and presumably, that meant that they could talk about it all when they went away. So, he says, shepherds had an encounter on the hills with choirs of angels - "no-one-on-one experience" for them, observes Bishop Nick. His point is that shared experience is always more powerful than private browsing.
I think that is the point of what we are doing in ADVENTure - it is about shared experience. We Christians have good news to tell. We could keep it behind the closed doors of our garages, along with all the other stuff we keep there. But we've chosen to throw open our doors and share the good news with friends, neighbours and local residents. The shepherds couldn't keep the good news to themselves - they went about sharing it. Neither can we keep it to ourselves - the good news of Emmanuel, God with Us, is something that deserves a proper airing!
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