Quo Vadis

There are times in parish life when everything seems to move smoothly and even swiftly, and there are times when they don't. I have more of the latter, or at least that's how it feels - the projects which don't come to anything, the discussions that prove fruitless, the undertakings made that are never followed up, the people who seem about to be useful to the life of the church who then disappear for various reasons. 

There are two major initiatives in my mind at the moment. I would like to install a new audio-visual system in the church to allow more flexibility in the presentation of worship, so people don't have to go outside the parish to find that if it's what they want, as increasingly they seem to. And there's the matter of a musical director, which we've talked about for years, someone to take a haphazard group of singers and turn them into a choir, and to recruit young singers and musicians and increase the presence of music in the life of the community at large. There is someone I would dearly like to take on that role, but I have to present them with a credible package to stand any chance of detaching them from the prominent London church they sing with at the moment. 

Both quotes for installing and screen and associated projection system in the church are now in, and they hover around £20K, which is about twice what I hoped. We could find that, especially with a grant, perhaps, from the diocese's growth fund, but it's something that we need to decide consciously that we really want to do. As for music, I had a tip-off about what might be a helpful trust run by a business figure from within the Anglo-Catholic world, but can't seem to contact them, and this may be (as the bishop who is on the trust's board told me) because they've disbursed all on their grant money on a big youth project at present. So I don't know where to get the cash from for that.

I suppose we should think about getting the windows repaired first!