Souls & Stars is the title of our next Late Worship, on Friday 7 November at 10.30pm in church.

We'll pick up on the November theme of remembrance, focusing on the remembrance of our loved ones who have died, and on God's love for all that he has created.

You can get some idea of the 'feel' of the worship here; calm, meditative, atmospheric, providing a safe space in which to encounter God's love and grace.

I reached out to the nearest buttress, grasped a handful of stone, and showed it to Bishop John.

Then I closed my fingers and squeezed it gently.

It dissolved into sand. The grains trickled through my fingers. Some of them sprinkled onto the bonnet of the Bishop's shiny almost-new car, sounding disproportionately noisy in the quiet of the evening. (OK, it wasn't quite sandblasting, but you get the idea.)

'That's what this building is made of.'

Sand.

The foolish man built his house upon the sand. My Victorian predecessor, the Revd John Craig, would have been familiar with those Gospel words. He'd have known that the wise man built his house upon the rock. Nevertheless, he chose to build the house of God out of sand. All Saints is an ecclesiastical sandcastle - albeit a very impressive one.

Later, I reflected. The entire Church is made of sand. Not just our magnificent building, with its lamentably soft Warwick sandstone construction, but the Church as the People of God. The Church is made up of human beings, all of us flawed, all of us carrying a weak and sinful nature, We're called to be like 'living stones', built by God into a spiritual house (1 Peter 2.5); but the stones of our lives are so often crumbly and unreliable - or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, so hard as to be unworkable. We do things wrong. We get into pointless arguments. We collapse under pressure. We fail to persevere when times are hard - or when they're easy - or when they're merely indifferent.

Yet that isn't the end of the story. Just as scientists recently developed a chocolate teapot which really can be used to make tea, so the Church can live and work and grow despite the poverty of the materials used. Moreover, it has two thousand years' experience of doing so. The whole is far greater, holier, and more effective than the sum of the parts. Together, we can surpass ourselves, and become nothing less than the Body of Christ in the world - broken, certainly, but even (and perhaps only) in our brokenness, able to share the good news of his redeeming love.

There is a caveat, of course. The foundations have to be in place. The Church is built on the foundations of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself being the chief corner-stone (Ephesians 2.20). But when that's secure, even the mediocre building materials of our lives can be shaped into something miraculous: the earthly temple of the eternal God.

When my two children were very young - about 18 months and 3 years - they developed a new game. One of them would share out imaginary strawberries - 'One for me, one for you...'. Each imaginary strawberry received was eaten with imagined enjoyment. But eventually, one of the children would complain that the other had been given a larger imaginary strawberry than their own. An argument would ensue, becomingly increasingly heated and un-imaginary, and it would often end in tears which were all too real.

What we imagine affects us profoundly: our actions and reactions, our relationships, our ambitions, our priorities. It's no exaggeration to say that we live in a world shaped by imagination. Out of imagination arise vision, schemes, plans, strategies, which change the way things are for good or ill. Out of imagination emerge great works of poetry, literature, art, architecture, music. Far from being an escapist activity of children, it's fundamental to the working of human lives. 'Imagination is more important than knowledge', wrote Einstein. 'Everything you can imagine is real', said Picasso.

That's why Jesus called on his hearers to exercise their imagination. He spoke frequently of the (imaginary) Kingdom of God; a kingdom which was still to come into being, which as yet was largely in his imagination. He called others to share the vision and, most importantly, to make it real by living out what they could imagine. And he fed the imagination of others through the telling of stories, parables, often leaving them unexplained in order that his listeners would reflect imaginatively upon them and draw their own conclusions.

Christian faith is about imagining a better way of life - and then working to make it real. It's about imagining how we ourselves can become more Christ-like, and then working towards that aim (however inadequately most of us manage it). And in the case of parents and godparents, a Christening is about imagining for the child how they can be nurtured and nourished in the faith - and then, over the days and years which follow, turning that imagination into reality.