CHILDREN’S definitions of church are always fascinating. One of my favourites is that of the child who said that a church was “a place where people sing a lot of hymns and walk about in patterns”.

For those contemporary expressions of church which owe more to the conversational idiom of the television chat show and where worship takes place in bland settings more analogous to lecture rooms than sacred space (with a corresponding loss of those essential elements of worship — awe, reverence and mystery), it is a description that may seem outdated.

Nonetheless, what processions and hymns represent is deeply rooted. Laps of honour as victorious sports teams are welcomed home or carnivals and even marathons, let alone the more traditional forms of regimental marches or the Lord Mayor’s Show, many accompanied by music, show that there is something archetypal about a human need to join in a symbolic movement from place to place.

Brides enter churches in procession in a symbolic movement into sacred space, in which in traditional marriage liturgy the father — the old family to which the bride belongs — hands the bride over to the priest, who hands the bride to her husband as a sign that he receives her as the most precious of gifts not only from her own family but from God. One of the oldest parts of funeral liturgies is the procession — obviously practical to take a body, the mortal remains, from the place of death to the place of burial, yet invested in countless funeral rites with prayers that speak of a greater and deeper journey. This is summed up in the ancient Proficiscere anima christiana! — “Go forth upon thy journey Christian soul!” — immortalised for many in Elgar’s powerful setting of Newman’s The Dream of Gerontius. Pilgrimage and movement, journeying to shrines and holy places, people in Ancient Israel “ going up to Jerusalem” singing the Psalms, which are “songs of ascent”, are found in every culture and in every place.

Patterned movement is sacred dance. In the ancient Orthodox church of Ethiopia the choir of debteras, holding their T-shaped monastic crutches, dance in a rhythmic pattern to haunting drums and the metallic beat of the sistrum reminding worshippers of the hammering of the nails into the hands and feet of Christ at the Crucifixion. In the cathedral of Auxerre in medieval France the bishop and clerks danced to the plainchant of the Easter sequence over the pattern of the labyrinth in the floor of the choir, tossing the Easter ball to each other in a sacred pattern of rejoicing.

Stern Christians, nervous of corybantic excesses, disapproved of dancing. But others saw in the drama and movement of the sacred dance of worship a real rejoicing in God. St Gregory of Nazienzen, one of the great early theologians, tells his people that they are to dance the dance of David before the ark of God. His contemporary St Gregory of Nyssa speaks of the round dance of love as the very life of God the Holy Trinity, a dance into which men and women are to be caught up and transformed. St Paul speaks of Christ leading the powers of evil captive in a triumphal procession, and St Patrick praises the risen and ascended Christ “riding up the heavenly way”. Christ is, as Sydney Carter wrote, “Lord of the dance”.

In Victorian England, when there were protests against the revival of ceremonial in the Church of England, a recovery of the dance, one of the celebrated “Ritualist” priests, Father Mackonochie of St Alban’s, Holborn, replied that it was only “the barest alphabet of reverence for so divine a mystery”.

That revival of drama and movement and symbol in worship went hand in hand with a recovery of hymnody in the Church of England. At the Reformation worship in English meant the loss of ancient Latin hymns, and hymns were even illegal for Anglicans because they were not in the Book of Common Prayer.

In Hymns Ancient and Modern (1861) hymns by new writers were brought together with translations of hymns from German chorales and older treasures from Latin and Greek so that Christian faith could be taught by singing.

This year we keep the centenary of another great collection, The English Hymnal, a resource and treasure for choirs and congregations alike. The Russian teachers of prayer tell us to “draw down our minds into our hearts”.

The great English hymns are a treasury of faith-enabling words of prayer and praise to be engraved on our hearts and so be there in time of need, and when we become so frail that we are no longer able to walk about in patterns, or indeed walk at all.

It is thin gruel for the soul if this treasure is discarded for the ephemeral emotion of passing fashion simply because it is old. Mantras of modernisation can too easily cut us off from deeply rooted spiritual wisdom.

The Right Rev Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe