Summer disruption

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 17 July 2006 21:33:08

As has probably been noted by now I tend to spend alot of the weekends during the summer chillin' in fields listening to music and one way or another doing a reasonable impression of a rapidly aging middle-class hippy.

This does mean that the normal pattern of Sunday worship gets heavily disrupted; I tend to be away from church as much as I'm there in the summer. Also during various of these excursions I come into contact with what would once have been properly described as alt worship (but now is as about alternative as indy music is independent - i.e. not very because it's been consumed by the mainstream).

On one level it's great and opens my mind well beyond the hymn sandwich and Sunday morning treadmill but on another I suffer from the lack of continuity and find September hard as I settle back into more "traditional" regular worship. I had tended to put this down to (i) a general disillusionment with the church (local, specific) or (ii) the Greenbelt effect but upon reflection am thinking it is to do with the summer pattern I have just described.

People like me manage though & eventually always settle back in - largely because we are the hardcore, but it has got me thinking. In the modern world many people have disrupted lifestyles where they are not able to attend Sunday morning worship in the same place as often as they are. What systems are in place to recognise their lifestyles and help them to feel integrated when they are about and somehow still connected to the base when they're not? Or do we rather moan about a lack of regular commitment without taking time to understand peoples lives and decisions? Not sure I have any answers but if we are going to get serious about those on the edges of our churches who are semi-regular attenders I think these questions need thinking about.