The Duties of a Churchman St . Paul's Church, and St . Mark's Church. Halifax, Nova Scotia , Lent 1961 Living the Faith "I don't go to Church, and I am just as good as those who go." Or this statement from an article in a recent edition of MacLeans: "The Church has always meant a lot to me, and so I go whenever nothing else gets in the way. I like sitting there. I like the singing and the feeling of closeness and the whole atmosphere. It reminds me of when I was a little girl. Of course, I never listen to the sermons. I just close my ears to them. They are almost always silly or dull, and if I don't know how to live a decent life at my age no sermon is going to teach me." Behind these two statements lies a misconception of what the Church is, and what her task or work is. Some years ago the House of Laity (of the Church Assembly) of the Church of England in England set up a committee to report on the duties and obligations involved in membership in the Church of England. The sort of thing they had in mind was this: "Suppose a young man, bought up in an irreligious home, becomes converted, or at least begins to make enquiries about Christianity and the Church of England, what rules and duties should he be told that he will have to accept? In what ways should it become manifest to himself and to his friends that he is now a member of the Church of England, and what should he be told that it should involve for him? We know that there are people who tell us that if we have the right spirit we don't need rules. That sounds very well but in actual fact, because of our very nature, we need rules, and if we are going to "live the Faith " we must have a Rule of Life. Perhaps the report to the Church Assembly on "The Spiritual Discipline of the Laity" caused the revisers of the 1959 (Canadian) Book of Common Prayer to include in "A Supplementary Instruction" at the end of the Catechism this admonition: 41