Confirmed!

We hadn't hosted a confirmation service at Swanvale Halt for years; nor had we had many people to offer as confirmation candidates for years, I think five since 2000 to be precise. So I was very keen indeed to secure a Deanery confirmation service for the refurbished church, regardless of how many people we actually had ourselves to offer forward. As it turned out, there were eventually five of them, all adults - a civil servant, a school caretaker, a plumber, a mum and school assistant, and a civil engineer - and we had a really good series of sessions in preparation. They joined another ten candidates from across the area, and enough of their families and friends to fill the church. The only elements over which St Rita of Cascia made her presence felt were the thurible coming open and spilling incense and charcoal over the floor (thankfully during a hymn so the frantic scrabbling around after bits was possible to disguise) and the bishop's microphone going haywire so that, from behind at least, it sounded as though he was doing a passable impersonation of the late Norman Collier. It was, however, lovely. I insisted that we not water down the service to the usual middle-of-the-road common-denominator and instead give everyone something to remember, which is just what happened. I also insisted we put on a really good spread after the service was over, and that happened too. Heaven knows how much that cost, but I can think of few things better to spend money on than a party to celebrate fifteen people making a public declaration of faith.

However once upon a time this wouldn't have been anything much to get excited about. The modern custom of confirming people (and baptising them if need be, as two of ours were) and them taking communion at the same time has only arisen because numbers are small enough to make this feasible, whatever the Church may argue in terms of this being the right way of doing things, which is of course true as far as it goes. I checked back through the old confirmation register in our strong box, and discovered that Swanvale Halt had on its own produced 48 confirmation candidates in 1960, 18 in 1961, 40 in 1962, 34 in 1963, and 48 again in 1964. Of course the majority of them were aged under 16, but not all - the number of adults being confirmed was never below 7 in any year. Equally striking was the gender imbalance: the figures hovered around one-third men and boys and two-thirds women and girls, except in 1964 when 83% of the confirmands were female. That tells you a lot about the sociology of the mid-century Church of England.