Prejudices Confirmed

It is a rare privilege to be able to offer parishioners from Swanvale Halt for the sacrament of confirmation. In fact, with Wilma and Elaine, our two candidates this autumn, my average is now ever-so-slightly more than one for every year of my incumbency. On Sunday evening I took them to the church of Tophill where our suffragan bishop would anoint and lay hands on them and sacramentally admit them to the fullness of the life of the Spirit. It was a great pleasure I was looking forward to.

Tophill is a very inconveniently arranged church from whose impediments the congregation has only just liberated itself by ripping out the pews. The church has only put up with them as long as it has because its Evangelical tradition has led it to hold services in the local school hall as well as the church itself. But now the building is filled with nice chairs which don't actually look too bad. 

I have a longstanding prejudice against the use of drums in church worship. As we began the first hymn on Sunday it occurred to me that it wasn't going to be too objectionable after all, but the moment of hope passed very quickly as the percussion swiftly took over from the gentler instruments, hogging attention and buffeting the ears. We sang the same creed setting as we did at the Clergy Study Day a few weeks ago, and once again I found myself reflecting how pleasant it was until we had to sing some bits over and over again to no very great effect. 'I believe in the resurrection ...' 'Well, I believed in all of it when we started,' I muttered to a clergyman next to me, 'but now I'm not as sure.'

The altar still sits against a marble reredos at the end of the chancel, not moved forward. To my astonishment the bishop - arrayed admittedly in choir dress rather than mass vestments - moved up and celebrated the eucharist ad orientem. I made a point of mentioning it to her afterwards. 'Well, they said they usually do North End but I wasn't doing that,' she said. 'And pulling the altar back when you're the only person standing behind it is just ridiculous. I like eastward-facing. So many clergy preside like they're doing show-and-tell, rather than speaking to God.'

As we all chewed cheese straws and sipped wine some of the Swanvale parishioners who'd come along crowded round. 'We won't have to sing those hymns when we have a screen, will we?' grinned Sandra who runs Messy Church. I said that merely having a screen didn't determine what you projected on to it. Lillian the ex-Lay Reader was more concerned that whatever went on it had proper punctuation.