You can't make it up

You can't make it up.

You really can't if, like Jacob our new curate, you're going to be a minister in the good old CofE.

At the start of their ministry in any parish, a minister has to be what Jacob did today at St Anne's and then at St James: read the Declaration of Assent (left).

It starts of by saying that the CofE is not the one true church, just part of it: '"The Church of England is part of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, worshipping the one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.'

Then it spells out what it believes, namely: "the faith uniquely revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds..... Led by the Holy Spirit, it has borne witness to Christian truth in its historic formularies, the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, The Book of Common Prayer and the Ordering of Bishops, Priests and Deacons"

The Declaration 'public and openly made...in the presence of the Congregation assembled at the time of divine worship'

It is that great deposit of faith, revealed in the Scriptures, set forth in the creeds, witnessed to in the Articles and the Prayer Book, that Jacob and all of us are called to 'proclaim afresh' in this generation.

Not to to make it up, but to proclaim faithfully 'the faith once delivered to the saints' (Jude 1.3). May God help him and all of us to do that.