come and see

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The Sunday before last, we celebrated Harvest.  All the usual chaos of an all-age service, with the added challenge of my using the West facing altar for the first time.  Or rather:  the West facing credence table.  The card-table altar we have scares me:  it rocks and shakes, and is too wide for the space it is meant to go in.  The credence table is of course too small — both for balancing all the necessary bits, and for looking wholly dignified; but it is the best we can do for now.

… and the advantage is, it leaves lots of room for gathering around.

Well, that’s an exaggeration.  The geography of St Mary’s is difficult:  long and narrow all the way, with unhelpfully spaced steps at the crossing and a bottle neck at the choir stalls.  There is never lots of space for gathering.  But the too-small credence-table-altar offers the best bet.

At Harvest, somewhat on a whim, I invited the children to gather round so that they could see.  It was mostly the 8-12 year old girls who came.  I hadn’t thought it through properly, and I didn’t have words for them, so I juggled as best I could between presiding and helping them follow along, probably confusing everyone slightly.

This past Sunday, I hadn’t any particular plans for the young church.  But as it happened, they arrived fractionally later than usual, and were greeted by me saying ‘is that the Young Church entering?  Oh good.  We’ll just wait till everyone’s here to start the eucharistic prayer.  Do come to the front…’  and so on.

But when they got to their usual pews at the front, they didn’t stop.  The girls asked if they could stand with me again — and of course I said yes.

I urge any priest who is thinking about children in worship to try this.  It’s a revelation.

How can they join in, after all, when they spend the first half of the prayer trying to find where they are in the bookie?  (assuming they even have a bookie, and even if it’s a special order of service for the day).  Do they know they prayers that everyone says?  And is there a hope in any-warm-place-of-your-choosing that they will be able to sing the tricky choral Sanctus that even the choir seem to struggle with sometimes?

I think not.

So I am beginning to rethink this whole thing.

They need word sheets of their own, easy print, and with no extraneous words.  Things that say: ‘watch the priest, and listen for the words ‘this is my body… this is my blood… do this in remembrance of me’, then join in: ‘we now obey…’   There will be pictures, of course.  And prizes for those who memorize the prayers (I’m considering a fierce competition here:  which group will be able to go ‘off book’ first:  the adults or the kids?)

Do you sense a flurry of gold stars?

For a while now, we’ve been talking about inviting adults (2 at a time) to join Young Church for a day to see what it’s like.  At a ministry team meeting the other night, someone helpfully suggested it could work both ways:  adults could invite Young Church members to stay with them in church — and then help them through the experience.

Proximity matters.

I thought I knew what the barriers were to young people feeling involved, but I was forgetting some very basic things.

And now, I have adults wanting in on the game:  ‘can we stand up there and watch too?’

Oh yes.

Yes of course.

Now, does anyone have a good source of hungry wood worm for the pews?

sharing a vision

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Monday night was the first of our series called Deepening.  The series needed a vague sort of title because it is a catch all:  a fortnightly something-or-other that will have a running theme each season, but that crosses the boundaries between bible-study, faith-development, theological reflection, and ‘taught’ topics.  This term’s theme — if one dares call it that — is God.  (images of… , experience of… , language for… , telling our story of…)

So, this week, we played around with lots of pictures, using them as a way to begin talking together and to get to know each other as a group.

During the evening, we each spoke about an image we reacted strongly to, chose an image that we would use to help show someone else our understanding of God, and played devil’s advocate questioning and opposing the analysis of the images that was first offered.

So far so good, but I was nervous about the next task.  Would it work?  Would they dare?

I asked the group to see if they could come up with an image of God for St Mary’s.  If someone walked into church for the first time on a Sunday morning and stayed for both the service and coffee, what sense of God would they get?

The goal was ‘reality’ — the image of God we actually project… though I promised we would then go onto the ‘dream’.

I thought it would be difficult.  I thought that the first images offered for negotiation would be too diverse.  Well, they were diverse; but the people who chose Christa (Christ on the cross, represented as a woman) and the children’s-bible image of Jesus (dressed in white, with a blue-bird on his hand, surrounded by half-grown animals) had no intention of pressing their point.  Very quickly one image emerged.  It’s an image that I ‘read’ very differently to the group, and personally don’t like — but I didn’t press that point, since what the rest of them saw in the image was consistent.

Image first, I think, and then some of what was said about it.  If anyone who was there wants to chime in, I’m sure I’m forgetting lots.

deepening 1A image 1

The group choose this as an image of welcome and embrace.  The arms were seen as God reaching out to us — and as a sign of the community’s willingness to reach out to one another.  There is welcome — but the welcome is given by one who has known pain; by those who have known pain.  The thought was that this was a hidden truth — one that only became clear as one got to know the congregation more deeply.  The dove(s) were welcomed because several of the group had spoken of their sense of God as being ‘Spirit’ and ‘not being a person’.

I was uneasy with the image, but fascinated by what people said.  But most of all (of course) I wanted to see what they chose for the dream.

At first, the group thought that the image above said all they wanted to.  We were already living the dream.  When pressed a bit, there was a clear vote for another image:  one that said many of the same things, but moved us on a bit.  This one I love:

deepening 1A image 2

Here we were ‘all in it together’, there were still themes of welcome and embrace, and that embrace still held the cross,  but now ‘we were going somewhere’; the image wasn’t static;  there was space for those who were afraid or unsure, and the faith that Christ was in our midst. And of course there was still a dove…

Once the dreaming had started, we kept thinking of more and more things we wanted to include:  a sense of the holy, a willingness to laugh, the joy of the dance, and the centrality of children.  You can find the pictures below the fold.

It was a good conversation and I wished I’d invited it sooner.  What the congregation says about itself is remarkably consistent — not least the initial sense of satisfaction with the church as it is.  But I find it a relief that just a tiny bit of prodding led to a tumble of dreams.  That lets me breath easy.   I would far rather we were a bit restless than overly settled in what we already do well.

Continue reading “sharing a vision” →

visitors

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Each evening, when I go to lock up the church, I check the visitor’s book; and there is always a thrill when in the half-light I see another line is full.  Today’s was inscribed in bold neat strokes:

N.N.   Edinburgh.   A peaceful time for me.

We have a visitor’s book and a prayer tree.  The prayer tree is almost always anguished.  In my head, I think of it as the cancer tree.  I sense pain there, and the panicked prayers of desperation.  But in the visitor’s book, page after page shows me that people come to be with God.

If we did nothing else at St Mary’s but keep the church doors open I think we would be serving the community well.

I walk away each evening feeling slightly guilty:
guilty because I never write in visitor’s books
guilty because all my good intentions for words of welcome and prayer prompts and resources for our visitors still have not come to fruition.  But perhaps that doesn’t matter.  It’s not resources they come for, but time to be without distraction or demands.

Today while our visitor sought peace, I have sought angels’ wings. It’s the risk of ordination:  one falls in love with Michaelmas.

In my case, the angels took flesh in the murals at St Ninian’s, Pollokshields.  I still miss them.

angel 400_edited-1