On Not Being Able to Tell

The Family Service always worries me: even if the subject is heavy the children need to be involved in some way and it helps if it’s something people can’t remember us doing twenty times before. The games or illustrations usually involve me making something rather frantically on a Saturday afternoon after a trip to the art shop in Hornington.
This Sunday I began, got a couple of children up to the front to help me, and realised having got part of the way through that I’d left part of the stuff at home. This was after having had to start the service late because I thought I’d sent the reader the text being read, and discovering I hadn’t. There was no rescuing it: I had to send the youngsters back to their places and carry on as best I could. The congregation found my discomfiture very amusing – ‘It makes you human’ was the kind remark though when Mad Trevor referred to my talk, a very sketchy and knockabout take on the history of interdenominational relationships, as ‘the entertainment’, I felt I should have torn my alb. I really don’t like the idea of worship, even the more informal and unstructured kind, as ‘entertainment’ rather than something which directs us towards God.
Yet during the talk I mentioned how all human organisations can split and divide, from political parties to knitting circles, and how the fact that churches usually manage to keep going despite all the differences between their members is little short of a miracle. One lady told me her parents were nearly in tears having just begun re-attending their own church after a particularly acrimonious and horrendous falling-out. There’s no predicting where and how what you say is going to hit.