Time shifting

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 19 September 2004 19:50:43

This evening, I am enjoying the strange experience of listening on the radio to the concert I didn't go to a few weeks ago. That is to say, I had a ticket, but in the event, I wasn't well enough to attend.

Daughter (aged 7) regularly takes the bread and wine at communion in our church. She was encouraging son (aged 4) to 'try the wine'. The lady giving communion bristled, saying, "You don't try the wine. This is the blood of Christ." I could understand where she was coming from, but I don't think that you can expect a 7-year-old's theology to extend to transubstantiation, if that was what she meant.

I was quite depressed. Either you welcome children, and allow them to be themselves, or you arrange things so that they aren't present when communion is dispensed. On this occasion, the Sunday School had finished all their planned activities, and had to wait for the signal to come into church, presumably because the sermon was longer than usual.

For the same reason, we were late for our next engagement, which was lunch with friends. Perhaps it would be more honest to say that we were having lunch with a friend of wife. This was the first time that the respective husbands had met. Of course, we talked about just having been to church, and our friends told us that they don't go to church. It struck me quite forcibly how much our society has changed. When I were a lad, people went to church. Maybe they didn't like it much, but they went because it was the done thing. It is no longer the done thing.

Are our friends really worse off? God, seemingly, has no place in their lives. Sunday morning is a chance to catch up with the chores. I can't honestly say that church, in our experience, makes much of an effort to be the kind of place that people want to come to. I'm not decrying the genuine love which church people have for each other, and for people who happen to come along. But there seems to be an intensity of wanting to hold on to the way that things are done, so that for someone to whom this is unfamiliar, the whole thing simply doesn't make sense. Our rector has being saying recently that he intends to introduce changes to the way that we do things on a Sunday morning. But I wonder if the change has to be more fundamental. What are we doing on a Sunday morning, and why?