What do you say to a closing church?

Yesterday saw me preaching at a church in the circuit for the first time - nothing unusual there - but also for what will be the last time. The church in question has decided that it is no longer able to continue meeting, and so they are ceasing to worship with the final service actually being next Sunday (30th November). So I am one of the last people to have preached in the building.

This had the potential to be a difficult service, and I had been wondering quite what to say. Should I "just" do a normal Sunday Service, on the grounds that the final service is the following week? It's somewhat outside my experience too; I have not been a member of a church that has closed down, the nearest thing being when I was asked to officially be part of a Church Council that was doing that a few years ago but lacked the numbers to make it official - even then, the decision had been effectively already been made and it was rubber-stamping what was going to happen.

The Lectionary however was my friend. Last Sunday's Old Testament reading was from Ezekiel 34 and spoke about how God would gather together the scattered sheep of Judah, which had been invaded by Babylon, and bring them together under a new shepherd - "David", usually taken to mean a descendant of King David. For a church about to close, with a congregation including several who had been part of another church closure a few years back, I tried to use these words from Ezekiel to bring a message of hope: that they had not been forgotten by God, that they were OK to wonder where God was in their situation, but that God was still there and that they were part of a larger flock.

I don't know how helpful it was to everyone, but I know that at least a couple of people appreciated what was said.

What has happened to this church in some ways raises questions. It's well known as a place that offers much to the local community; many groups come in and use the premises, and in fact they are looking to keep the building going for several months to allow the groups time to find alternate places. It's a building that is obviously appreciated. However that appreciation hasn't extended enough to actually coming along, and the gradually dwindling congregation has been pressed harder and harder to keep everything going. So how do we engage with the people that come in to use the building for secular purposes? How do we encourage people to see that we're about far more than being a sort of community centre? I don't have any answers, but these and other questions certainly need to be asked.....

College Retreat

Last weekend was the Hartley Victoria College Retreat, at Parcevall Hall in Wharfedale. Off I went into what seems the middle of nowhere, for a chance to recharge the batteries a bit.

When I say the middle of nowhere - there's no mobile coverage (or very slight maybe), and it's so far into the countryside that you have a torch by your bed to use in case of a fire alarm or power cut! However it's also a beautiful setting, and with terrific food as well it's a good place to go for a retreat.

Probably the thing that I liked best though was the opportunity to do something creative for the worship on the Sunday Morning. I'd taken the camera, and took a number of photos in and around Parcevall Hall; several of us came together to arrange these into a slideshow and then speak some reflective words over the top. The result should be visible below - sorry about the lack of volume!



I can't take any credit for choosing the words - that goes to Bob, Jacqui and Jan. In order that they appear, they are:

1) A meditation by Alistair Maclean. It can be found in the Northumbria Community's Celtic Daily Prayer as one of the day of the month meditations.

2) A poem from Spoken Worship by Gerard Kelly.

3) A couple of sentences from The Cry of the Deer by David Adam.

4) A meditation from Times and Seasons, also by David Adam.

5) A passage from God at Eventide, an adaption of God Calling by Two Listeners, edited by AJ Russell.

In some ways, the fact that this was the part that I liked best is a bit of a challenge: how often do I include opportunities to create and contribute in worship? And is there anything I can do about that?

It's all over the front page....

...you give me Road Rage" as Cerys Matthews once sang. Right now I'm calming down after a day or two of the sort of trouble that makes you wonder why it is that we devote so much time, money and effort to the automobile.

It started on Friday really, with the discovery that I had actually been driving without an MOT for a month - my own fault of course. So the car stayed on the drive while I booked it in for the test on Monday.

Come Monday Morning, and it's Houston, we have a problem. The battery is flat, and it's only after we've got into position to try a jump start that we realise that actually the battery in the other car is in the wrong place to do this. Cue much aggravation (and like the Hulk, you won't like me when I'm angry), attempts to push the car back up the drive, and phone calls. I remove the battery and stick it on to charge; late in the afternoon I put it back and it starts fine. No problem, it's having a full service as well as an MOT so it should be fine.

When the garage rings back the news is not great, with an extra bill in the hundreds which we can ill afford - but I need the car, so....

With me due to be at College for the evening we let someone else do the cooking, so on the way back home I stop off at our local Chinese (very good by the way). I climb back into the car, and will it start? Will it heck!

On the plus side, our Breakdown Recovery (with GEM) proved to be well worth it, with a nice man on a motor bike appearing to not only get me started, but pinpoint the problem as being almost certainly the battery. On the minus side, the fact that the battery leads had been so loosely put back on by the garage that they could easily be pulled off by hand, and that the garage neglected to actually check the battery anyway (despite publicising free checks on them) does not fill me with joy. I won't name them as such, but suffice to say you expect better of a major national chain. I don't intend to let this go without having words with them, and if they think that just because it says "Student Minister" on my card that I won't have a go, they have another thing coming. I don't believe God calls anyone to be a doormat!

Somtimes it's great being a Methodist....

Listening to the Radio the other day on the way home from a meeting, I heard an interesting tale... it seems that the British Humanist Association have decided to run an advertising campaign on London Buses with the message "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." The person speaking seemed to think that this was probably the first Atheist Advertising Campaign, although she was rather hazy on whether this had been tried before - at one point there was some muttering that it hadn't been allowed before, which the interviewer picked up on and got her to admit that she didn't know whether it had ever been tried.

The article on the BBC Site includes a response from the Methodist Church in the person of Rev. Jenny Ellis, Spirituality and Discipleship Officer that is in many ways quite masterful: after thanking Richard Dawkins (yes, he's helped provide some of the funding) for encouraging a "continued interest in God", she is quoted as saying "This campaign will be a good thing if it gets people to engage with the deepest questions of life... Christianity is for people who aren't afraid to think about life and meaning."

I'm one happy Methodist after reading that! It's the sort of response I would have liked to have given myself. No doubt it will be ignored or dismissed by the more zealous atheists, but in some ways it shows that despite the best efforts of the atheist community to paint religion (not just Christianity) as being outmoded, outdated, irrelevant and even dangerous, we haven't gone away. We may not have as many followers, but we're still here. And, strange as it may seem, we haven't all left our brains in the box, or passed our decision-making to an institution and it's idea of morality. There are probably more thinking, questioning Christians around than ever before - many of us who have even read Dawkins' "The God Delusion" and are not convinced by the rhetoric within it, and some of us who can even appreciate what looks to be the satire of Dawkins proving that God is at best highly unlikely, echoing the claims of the Intelligent Design movement when it argues that certain biological structures are so unlikely to occur that they "must" have been designed....

Once in a Lifetime...

I wasn't exactly feeling too great about things yesterday. Not anything about the work in particular, more a combination of several things making life a bit annoying - not having hot water (possibly it now seems because we didn't know how to set it right on the system), trying to make the money in and the money out match up a bit better, that sort of thing. This on a day when I had written "Retreat and Reflect" in the diary as an opportunity to take some time out to reflect on what has happened so far and recharge my batteries! With the weather also conspiring against my original plan of going for a walk in the Peak District, I set off in a somewhat distracted way for my Plan B - Dunham Massey.

I'd been to Dunham once before, but a while ago; and these days, going round a house like this is often so stressful (due to the way toddlers tend to want to grab and sit on priceless artifacts) that it tends to be something we avoid. It was fairly quiet - one school party, and then what seemed to be just a handful of us wandering around the house.

It was quite fascinating to talk to some of the Room Stewards, who were happy to tell you about what you were looking at and volunteer information. I hadn't realised for example that the family were actually that of Lady Jane Grey - often known as the Nine Days Queen - and that the eldest daughter of each generation of the family was also named Jane. Then there was the connection with the Civil War, with a facsimilie of Charles I's Death Warrant. I spent a bit of time examining this, as I looked for names from a book called "A Conspiracy of Violence" by Susanna Gregory - a Historical Mystery set at the time of the Restoration, in which the names of several of the signatories are mentioned. Sure enough, the names of Challoner, Ingotsby and Barkstead are inscribed upon it.

A couple of hours later I was feeling a bit more chilled out, and I set out for home with some music playing from the iPod, a random selection. About ten minutes away from home, the song "Once in a Lifetime" by Talking Heads started playing, and I found myself going back to the start to listen to the lyrics again....

You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
You may find yourself in another part of the world
You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
You may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
You may ask yourself; Well...How did I get here?

Croxteth may not be a Shotgun Shack, but we're in a different part of the world; I was driving my car; the Manse is certainly a big step up, and of course I think the description of my wife fits... Well - how DID I get here?

By the time the song had finished playing, life seemed back on the level again and whatever problems we face didn't seem so big. A moment of grace?

Looking back....

It's been just over a month since I officially started in circuit, so this is probably a good time to reflect a bit on the ups, downs and occasional sideways bits of how I am finding things.

It's been interesting to see how people respond to me, or in some cases don't respond (more of that in a minute) as a Student Presbyter. In general, there is a difference to my time as a Local Preacher. It's not respect (or not as such) - that was there in any case - but something that's maybe a little more tenuous; I am "The Minister" and as such there are different expectations of what I am there to do. Of course, this is also partly because I am seeing people in different settings (and vice versa) - whether it's being at meetings, visiting people at home or coming along to the Coffee Morning, my role has changed and I'm becoming aware that this means that the response has changed too.

The "not responding" thing is something that at times can be quite entertaining. As I am not even a Probationer yet, I don't wear a Clerical Collar, and this means people sometimes don't realise who or what I am. On one or two occasions it's been quite funny, but there is also again something about perception there. If I put on a collar, suddenly people will know what I am, or who I am - and it can act almost as a badge of identity. For example if I am doing Pastoral Visits, a collar may be seen as making me somehow legitimate; lacking one, questions are more likely to be asked. (Put it this way, I now have some proper Business Cards partly to help with this.) Does the collar really change that much? I am the same person whether or not I am dressed in walking trousers and a polo shirt or in smart trousers and a clerical shirt with a collar; but that may not be how others see me. It will be interesting to see if this changes as and when I become a Probationer and start wearing a collar....

There's been plenty of support for me from my colleagues, and as well plenty of opportunity to find out about the sort of things that God is doing in Manchester - and some of the things are exciting to say the least!

In some ways one of the bigger annoyances concerns Church Notice Boards. Specifically, the ones outside the churches that I have mostly not been to yet, but which still have my phone number on them because I have taken over the manse of the person that looked after them. It's slightly disconcerting to find yourself having a conversation with someone who was expecting to speak to someone else, and once or twice someone has left a message, and then rung back to hear my message on the phone as they obviously realise something is amiss when they don't hear the name they were expecting....

Overall though I feel good about how things are going. The question is, will I still feel like this in another month? Or two? Stay tuned....

Feed my Sheep - a meditation on Peter

(This was inspired by my Daily Devotions this morning, which included John 21:16)

"Feed my Sheep." That's what he told me. My life has been devoted to that command ever since.

I was hurt. I was confused. I was getting angry. There he was, the Master, the one who I had followed faithfully through, well, almost everything. As we sat there on the beach, he asked me if I loved him. How could I not? How could he not tell? Hadn't I been with him all through the good times and the bad?

Then I realised. That dreadful night when they arrested him; my attempt to mingle with the crowd; my denial of him. At that dark time I hadn't been with him; I had been trying to save my own skin by pretending I wasn't one of his followers. He had good reason to question me. I have never forgotten since how I failed him, that night in the courtyard when all looked lost.

So I have tried to feed his sheep. I have tried to help others understand what I saw - that Jesus was indeed the Christ, that he did die, and that he rose again. It's not been easy; even those with us at the time disagree on what they saw, what was said, what happened after. I haven't always got it right either - more than a few times I've had to be put back on the right track.

"Feed my sheep." I have tried, and some might say I have succeeded - after all, there's a lot more of us now. More to feed, but also more to do the feeding. Sometimes I wonder if they realise what an important task they have taken on. It's been hard enough for me, and I learnt from Jesus first hand - how much harder it is for those who never met him!

"Feed my sheep." I have tried Master, weak though I am. Now help me to keep on going, to keep on feeding, and to not lose sight of your command....