O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing .......

Gathering?

Gathering used to be what happened on a Sunday morning when the Church gathered for worship.

It happened on other days too, Saint's Days, Festivals, sometimes Confirmations and certainly, Ordinations.

There is something uplifting and enriching about being part of a large gathering sharing in Liturgy, hearing the great words of Scripture read and joining with others in singing the words of the Hymns.

To be a part of a congregation of hundreds, or as on one Easter Day I particularly remember, thousands is an uplifting, fulfilling and spiritually nurturing experience.

The Easter Day in particular was in 1985 at Holy Trinity Church in Boston, Mass. I was visiting Harvard on a Fellowship Programme and had been hired by Holy Trinity as an assistant priest to administer the Eucharist, on that Easter Sunday there were two Masses and at each Mass a congregation of a thousand people, after the first Mass, Brinks the bullion couriers arrived in the vestry to receive the collection which was taken directly to the Bank.

But as I have remarked in previous blogs the experience of being part of a huge congregation, being uplifted by the emotional and creative energy of other worshippers is less and less available.

I was Ordained Deacon forty six years ago in Sheffield Cathedral, the congregation filled the space and amongst the worshippers were members of my  own family who even now forty five years later comment on the experience, the emotional power, of simply of being a part of that congregation made up of the friends and families of the ordinands and the new congregations which they would join, the service they recall had drama in spades, emotional highs and what is especially remembered joining with others in singing the hymns as Charles Wesley captured it: 'O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing.

I guess that Ordinations still have that power although I haven't attended one in since leaving the Staff of Bradford Cathedral in 2000.

As congregations decline and the church deals in the 'two or three' gathered together, the experience of worship becomes thinner and less satisfying and so the two or three find it harder and harder to turn up and, if a new book on multi-congregation ministry is right, the 'ministry' they exercise will be lost.

One response to my previous blog was a comment that what I was describing was particularly true in the countryside but was beginning to be seen in urban areas as well.

It is of course true. Having served as a Parish Priest in both urban and rural settings I can see that what I describe is possibly more true of the rural church.

After a time spent in Birmingham working for the Home Office in a Drugs Project I moved to  small village in Rural Cumbria where the congregation was normally counted in single figures, the largest congregation attended a Midnight Mass one Christmas Eve when the village was snow bound and the Methodist's could not attend Chapel so we had both an Organist and a Choir and a congregation in double figures and suddenly we heard echoes of how it used to be and, because the pub stayed open and the police were literally 'snowed out' the Parish 'Breakfast' consisted of mince pies and brandy coffee at 2 00 am!

I always sensed that the village had the possibility of doing something special, it was a special kind of place and now it has and what it has done I somehow sense might be an indicator of where the Church should be looking or maybe it will simply become the substitute with which people find what they are seeking.

The Village has a Festival, Music on the Marr, (Marr I understand being old Cumbrian for  a village green or open space) sitting in a Marquee with hundreds of others listening to music becomes a communal and community experience, it offers much the same as might have been experienced when the church was the Church, it is a secular celebration, but it celebrates poetry, and in the power of the words and the music and the experience, the pub on the village green and the hog roast, it becomes a spiritual experience too and the Church is part of that experience in so far as it is both a venue and a quiet space for reflection.

This idea of where the modern 'Gathering' is to be found has been at the heart of a number of reflections on the 'Glastonbury' experience, commenting in The Guardian (29th June 2015) both John Harris reflecting on the political debates and Micheal Hann and Harriet Gibsone on the music each reflected that an essential element of the power of Glastonbury was the sense of 'Gathering' of being part of a larger whole whether debating the political issues of the day or a thousand tongues singing along with Lionel Richie.

Communality morphed into community morphed into a kind of secular spirituality morphed into a shared humanity.

A fragmented church, now broken and scattered into two or three, here and there, whilst aping the worship offered in a Cathedral a hundred years ago, (or Holy Trinity Boston 30 years ago) cannot compete nor should it.

It is time for a radical re-imaging of what the Church is and who it seeks to serve.

Another post from the post ecclesial front line .......

A new burger bar in our nearest town is offering a brunch burger, beef, bacon, egg, tomato for a tenner on a Sunday Morning between 11 and 1.

For an extra pound instead of the set drink you can upgrade to a Bloody Mary!

Hail Mary full of Vodka!

Well, that should give the churches a run for their monies, it should have the same impact on morning attendance as The Forsyte Saga had on Evensong!

Directly opposite the bar, (situated in the Old Post Office, the new post office is in W H Smiths if you need a stamp, but not on Sunday),  is a redundant church which is now an antiques emporium with a cafe and jazz on Fridays.

Further along the street another redundant church has been converted into flats.

It is a depressing litany of closure, failure, redundancy and decline.

A few nights ago I had a dream, in the dream I was revisiting a parish I knew, somehow in the dream I was aware that the parish was in Bolton where I served my second curacy, as I was preparing to join the procession from the vestry, (in the dream I had been  invited to preach at the special service), I was told by the vicar that there was a good crowd, at least thirty people in Church, my response was to express the opinion that thirty was not a good crowd or even a good congregation, the last time I had attended worship in that church there had been three hundred in the congregation.

So far this year, apart from the mid-week services at the Cathedral, I have been asked to lead worship in three different churches, two in Scotland and one in Cumbria, it is the same story over and over, as a seventy year old retired clergyman it often feels as though I am the youngest person in attendance and average congregations are struggling to make it into double figures.

And yet the hierarchy insist on business as usual.

I like to read the notices, it helps me form a picture of what is happening, the last church, with a congregation of nine, had, according to the notice board paid over £10, 000 to the diocesan central fund and, next to the egregious notice from the Bishop (by Divine Permission etc) suspending the benefice yet again, was a notice advising that a faculty was required to undertake various maintenance works to the church exterior which were urgently required following the quinquennial survey.

Even though the decline of the church is rapidly approaching the precipitous and possibly irreversible the church in Cumbria is developing a concept of ecumenical mission communities under the title 'God for All' and has recently advertised two jobs at £38k per job: God For All Fresh Expressions Enabler and God For All Evangelism Enabler.

In the supporting blurb that accompanies the advertisement for these posts a support group will share a responsibility for ensuring that within five years everyone in Cumbria will have an opportunity to discover more about God's purposes for their lives.

This group will apparently be characterised by being: dynamic, light touch, risk taking, discerning, strategic, enabling, hard working, playful, creative, serious, prayerful and pragmatic.

Clearly the genius at work here had not only a Bible but a Thesaurus on his or her desk.

But what happens next? if it works then presumably all the redundant churches and suspended benefices will be reinstated? If it doesn't work what will the next desperate throw of the dice look like?

It feels to me that the hierarchy of the church need to be invited to join their own twelve step programme, get themselves a reality check or check themselves in for counselling. It all feels just too desperate that somehow you can gamble yourselves out of trouble with one more throw of the dice or spin of the wheel.

The image of the church is increasingly of a corporation or business which has retained its head office, the car park is still populated with late registration, top of the range cars, each senior executive has his or her own office, board meetings are held regularly and bonuses agreed. But out in the real world the factories are empty or idle, the warehouses full of old products gathering dust or have been turned into starter units for the new generation of the self employed, the transport fleet has been outsourced and the workforce largely laid off.

What in essence has happened and what shows no signs of letting up is the erosion of the broad basis of the ecclesia.

As a friend of mine and I once commented, the whole edifice is an inverted pyramid balancing ever  more precariously on one hour on a Sunday Morning.

And as those who meet on that one hour spend more time in maintenance, rushing as it were from the CD player because there is no organist or the organ is no longer playable, to take up the collection, serve the bread and wine to the retired clergyman to bless and break because the living has been suspended and you share a priest with five or six other parishes, so the mission of the church becomes survival hoping against hope that nothing more gives way, that no one else dies and that the supply of retired clergy continues.

It used to be that the thought was 'As for  me and my and my family we will seek justice and walk humbly with our God' sad to say that today it is far more likely that we will order the burger and upgrade our drinks.

Hail Mary full of Vodka ......

She who must be obeyed ......

She who must be obeyed was a rag doll which was used by the Nurse to the family of Rider Haggard. 

The Doll was 'brought out of some dark recess in order to terrify' the young Haggard and his siblings into behaving.

The name suggested itself to Haggard when he sat down to write the novel 'She': subtitled 'a history of adventure' which had at its heart the character of a woman Ayesha, or She (aka She who must be obeyed).

In the novel 'She' was born over 2000 years earlier amongst the Arabs and had become a great sorceress, granted immortality she 'bathed' in the fire from the 'Pillar of Life'.

Writing in his autobiography Haggard commented that when he sat down to write his ideas were of the vaguest kind, the only notion was of an 'immortal woman inspired by immortal love'.

Suddenly it seems she is at it again.

God it appears should be encouraged to be herself or is that, as one respondent has commented in the debate, heretical?

I must admit that I find the whole issue of God's gender something that I cannot bring myself to get terribly worked up about, although I can see that for some people constantly having God referred to as Male and therefore by implication, expressing largely Male values, might in some circumstances somehow undervalue female values.

But of God is S/he does that somehow undervalue, underplay or make particularly less of the essential God-ness of God?

If God is a community of persons as expressed in the idea of a trinity, expressing fatherhood, son-ship, kinship and the nurturing of the spirit then why shouldn't that community of persons reflect not only colour but gender alongside sexual difference and preference?

Somehow, I cannot imagine Mary and Joseph, with all that had been given to them and expected of them and surrounded by animals, shepherds, Kings and the glory of Angels really being very bothered about whether God was He or She as long as S/he was God and continued to be faithful.

Apparently Swordfish are having a crisis at the moment, overfishing, global warming, poisoned seas I imagine there could be a number of reasons why Swordfish are struggling, but they have responded, they are fighting back and in doing so it seems they are using a strategy known as parthenogenesis.

Apparently female sharks have also managed to achieve the miracle of virgin birth whilst in captivity and with no male sharks nearby relaxing in a post coital triste.


So it seems the birds and the bees (although no examples of avian parthenogenesis have been recorded) are doing it so its possible to imagine Adam and Eve, Adam arrived fully formed first and when offered a magnificent, beautiful, loyal, faithful partner to undertake all his shopping, cooking and keeping Eden swept he asked how much?

An arm and a leg came the reply from the Deity.

What could I get for a rib? Asked Adam!

The fact is that as society develops and advances so human beings are shaped and reshaped in the imagine of the divine, just like Swordfish or caged Sharks.

St Paul captured the theological irrationality of our claims about the nature of the undefinable and the deep mystery at the heart of the revelation that is Christ in his letter to the Christians in Galatia.

If he commented you are baptised, if you have 'clothed' yourselves with Christ then there is no Jew nor Greek, there is no slave or freeman, their is neither male nor female because you are one in Christ.

Well of course there is still Jew and Greek, there are slaves and there are freemen, there are both male and female and why is that and the answer seems to be, in another phrase of Paul the Apostle, because the whole of creation is groaning and travailing ..... the future is not here yet, the kingdom has been implemented but not realised, we are at the same time forgiven and still living under the cloud of human sinfulness and kneeling at the mercy seat, which is where we are sustained by immortal womanhood inspired by immortal love, S/he is both our father and our mother.