As is our tradition on the run up to Easter, our team has been tasting and scoring out of ten hot cross buns from different stores.

Our office table fare this week included new triple chocolate flavour, St Clements orange, apple and cinnamon and salted caramel and chocolate, as well as extra fruity and traditional spice and fruit.

As we oohed and aahed about the deliciousness of the triple chocolate confection – super excellent and a strong ten, if you’re wondering – the last thing we thought we were doing was contributing to the decay of Christendom and Christian culture.

Add to that the gin distillery that came out with a hot cross bun flavour tipple, and Morrisons’ hot cross bun flavoured cheese and the Church of England feels under attack.

Dr Gavin Ashenden, former chaplain to Elizabeth II, said he was fed up with Christian symbols being picked on.

Hot cross bun flavoured cheese symbolises the death of Christianity in the western world, he said.

“It’s as if anything Christian is being erased”, he said.

“What we are dealing with is the decay of Christendom and Christian culture… we have been told over the last 50 years that we live in a multicultural society, where everyone has a pitch, but that is wrong. It is everyone but Christians.”

It’s cheese – and doughy buns. Manufacturers inventing different flavours is all about spreading appeal for commercial gain in the real world.

We all know that hot cross buns represent the crucifixion. Traditional spices used in the buns represent the spices used to embalm Christ’s body after his death in traditional buns. That is not forgotten, dismissed or mocked.

But times are hard, and stores are doing all they can to peddle new goods and tempt those who won’t go within 100 yards of a sultana or spices in a customary hot cross bun by turning it chocolatey and gooey.

These harmless detours simply make hot cross buns more inclusive.

We still call them hot cross buns.

But Christian Concern – the clue is in its name - is not happy about cheese infused with cinnamon, blueberries and raisins a la hot cross buns.

Its group head of public policy, Tim Dieppe said “The idea of a hot cross bun is you have got a cross and all the various spices, which represent the suffering on the cross”

“I don’t really understand how you can turn all that into cheese.”

Because it’s theme, like mince pie ice cream at Christmas. It’s a commercial decision to try something new and is not aimed at causing upset or stomping all over the meaning of Easter.

Feathers (Easter chicks?) have also been ruffled this week because someone somewhere got in a flap at the sight of a sign advertising ‘gesture eggs’ rather than Easter eggs.

The interpretation was that the word Easter had been eliminated.

Mr Dieppe said Easter eggs were a "clear symbol of the Easter story and accused the store of trying to "erase the connection between Easter and eggs".

Come on. Easter eggs are given to others as gestures of kindness. Eggs are a symbol of Easter – although, I’ve never understood where the chocolate came into it if we are being pedantic – and the giving of the egg is the gesture, not the egg itself.

So, we give eggs, a symbol of Easter, as a gesture. How can anyone take offence at that?

Not that any of us have to explain ourselves to people who choose to be offended at salted caramel hot cross buns or spiced cheese amid of a world of horrors, real injustices and offensive behaviour that need objecting to.

Being offended by harmless intent to make something more inclusive can end up being more offensive than the original action that caused offence.

It’s this kind of attitude that makes the church, suffering falling congregations, even more remote from people’s lives.

The greatest gifts and characteristics are tolerance, understanding and generosity of spirit.

As a girl, I believed these were the embodiment of Christianity. Sadly, growing up, it was not always so and it came as a shock that Christian spirit could be quite the opposite with hoped for tolerance and openness presenting more as judgement, intolerance and closed.

This type of snippiness, splitting hairs and being disagreeable about what, in the scheme of things, is inconsequential isn’t the greatest public relations for the church.

We are a nation that values tradition. We respect the preservation of what Christians believe is sacred and is fundamental to their faith. We’re also an inventive country that likes to mix it up and venture into the new.

Does Dr Ashenden really believe that accusing supermarkets of picking on Christian symbols and feeling persecuted about taking the flavour of the symbol of Good Friday and adding it to cheese will contribute to making the church a welcoming place in the modern world?

Does his curmudgeonly response portray the church as the epitome of inclusion?

At a time of reflection, a solution to how the sacred and traditional could coexist happily with the new in the modern world would be a way forward.