Dads clutched small children by the hand as they gazed intently up at the great façade, there was an eerie respectful hush broken only by the clicking of many cameras. The iconic building was the object of an almost reverential attention filled to overflowing with memories, the bricks and mortar in the process of becoming history.

Something about the sheer extravagance and scale of a building like this fills the onlooker with wonder, we are dwarfed by its grandeur; it draws us in towards the greater group which congregates there and succeeds in filling the huge space physically and with the roar of their collective voices.

Highbury has closed and Arsenal are moving to their Emirates Stadium next season. They played their last game on Sunday at that iconic ground beating Wigan 4 –2.

Yet, on Saturday the ground was open for fans to go and pay their final respects. This comes from a reflection on the nature of buildings.

I heard on the radio, in the press, former players recalled how amazed they’d been by the 1930’s state of the art facilities: the high ceilings in the bathrooms; the under-heated floors. They remembered having been bowled over by its scale.

Former Arsenal goal keeper Bob Wilson reminisced: “I’ll never forget my first sight of Highbury, I remember coming down this tiny street opposite the main stand and thinking, ‘That is unbelievable!’. I was in awe; I have always said ‘Highbury is a cathedral not a football ground’.”

Thankfully, well thankfully for some, Highbury is to be retained, the bricks and mortar are to be turned into blocks of flats, very expensive flats no doubt, and you will always be able to see the façades of those main stands, but you will never again get the feeling of being at Highbury. That is gone and gone for ever.

So how can the next generation of Arsenal fans, assuming there is one, how can the next generation of Arsenal fans learn, about what is was like to be in Highbury? What it was like to stand there, yelling: ‘We’re the North Stand’, ‘We’re the East Stand’, ‘We’re the Clock Stand’?

One thing will be said again and again and again – ‘You had to be there’.

So it is for us who call ourselves ‘Christian’, for us who seek to be followers of Jesus, so it is for us. For Jesus was here but is no longer here, and we are charged with telling the story of Jesus without his physical presence.

We are left to tell others about the man. We are left to show others what the man is like, to tell those people what it feels like to be with him, to be alongside him, to know him and to be loved by him. But all too often from those who hear us, their perception is that too often we say ‘you had to be there’. They can’t be there anymore.

From the Gospel reading: ‘My Father is glorified by this’ says Jesus, ‘that you bear much fruit’. It’s not really politically correct to say that we want to stand in a place where others can judge us, where others can evaluate just how Christian we truly are, because our Christian faith tends to be one expounded in the personal realm. We want our personal faith to be kept personal. ‘Please don’t make me play out my faith in the public arena, that’s just too scary’.

Well, our faith is personal, yes, but our faith is never private and we are faced with those same questions that faced the Arsenal fans of today about telling the next generation about Highbury. How can we tell them about this most amazing thing?

This is an account from the diary of a minister who moved into a new church, hearing about only one lady.

It was interesting to me that before I even met her, everyone was telling me about her. They were saying ‘She’s such a religious person’. It’s true that every time she came to church she brought her bible with her and everywhere she would go, all over town, she took her bible with her. At the evening service we would call upon lay people to pray and she would always be the first to stand up and her prayers would be nothing less than exquisite. It seemed that the subject of religion was always on her mind, almost to a fault. I didn’t’ have any problem with that, the problem that I had was that when it came to people who were down in society, the poor, the unemployed, black people, gay people, divorced people, alcoholics, she was relentless in her criticism. She was without mercy or compassion. There was judgement and nothing else.

After a while, despite all of these outward appearances of religion and despite everyone calling her a religious person, I had to begin asking myself the question: does this individual really bear the fruits of Christian life? ‘

You may know your bible inside out and back to front and upside down, but faith is more than knowledge, it is indeed more than sincerity.

The issue is: how do you treat people? To say we have been rooted and grounded in Christ must bear the fruits of compassion, of love and of an attitude to one another that is Christ like.

We could look at the list of the fruits of the spirit that Paul gives, that our home groups looked at recently, Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, self control. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, self control.

How are we as a community when we evaluate ourselves against those fruits of the spirit?

As I say, the home groups have been thinking about this lately and I hope to be able to present their findings, their thoughts and reflections back to the church later on in the year.

And what about you as individuals? What about me? I stand here and you judge me according to those criteria, according to those fruits of the spirit.

Do I bear fruit? Do you?

Highbury Stadium has been listed as a Grade II Listed Building, so the exterior cannot be changed. Physically, it will be the same but the essence of it is lost, so there will always be an excuse that it can’t be as it was. We don’t have that luxury, we are still grafted into the vine, we have not lost our lifeblood. The Christian claim is that Christ is alive and lives through us, that in our action and by our living Christ can be seen and known and his love can be shared. The reflection on Highbury ended, the beauty and grandeur of Arsenal’s Highbury will continue to arrest our attention and make our spirits soar. It will be filled with memories, rich in history, a source of inspiration for those who enter, for those who pause in awkward reverence and for those who simply pass by.

Do we have a similar effect on those who encounter us?