22 July 2026

God is good!

God is truth!

God is beauty! Praise him!

These are the last three lines in the refrain  of Percy Dearmer’s famous hymn, ‘God is love: his the care’.  Jesus came to show him. We find him in  others. He saves us by the truth. His  love is our pattern, showing God in beauty.

In 1919, Percy Dearmer reflected on the fact that fewer people came to church after the First World War than attended its services before. Although we do not have the trauma and barbarity of a First World War to excuse us, attendances now are much smaller than they were ten years ago. Dearmer’s remedy is worth pursuing.

‘Yet our course is clear and simple. It is to serve God for his own sake: to serve him in spirit and in truth, to worship him in the beauty of holiness, and in the holiness of beauty: to give up all that is unreal and insincere, ugly or depressing, tedious, artificial, or mawkish, unsocial, narrow, quarrelsome …’ he wrote.

Where is the beauty to be found in the austerity of the Kirk’s traditional worship? It is in the people united together in song – the metrical Psalms, the Paraphrases, the ancient hymns of the Church as well as the new songs which have burst into our repertoire over the past sixty years.

There is beauty in the reading and the preaching of the Word when the one is done with clarity and understanding and the other has been done with diligence, sincerity and truth. There is beauty in the Sacrament and the minimalist drama of the action when the minister breaks bread and raises the cup intentionally.

The ornate and the baroque hide as much as they reveal. There is much to be said for the symbols and symbolic actions which have within them a simplicity of form,  a sincerity in  performance, an immediacy of engagement, a beauty which stirs the heart and carries the worshipper out of time and into sacred space.