Lay Led

'The thing about the informal service pattern', Giselle the lay reader said to me, 'is that what's informal for Swanvale Halt would be very formal in most other places'. That's nothing more than the truth, I thought, and there and then I determined that we should work towards having a team of laypeople planning and leading one of these non-eucharistic first-Sunday-in-the-month services. Giselle was the obvious person to organise it. We are not used to services here that aren't led by clergy: a Family Service in the month before I arrived back in 2009 was taken by Paula the Pastoral Assistant (who is used to speaking in public anyway), Lillian occasionally led Compline in Holy Week when she was lay reader, and the last time I was down with Covid Jack the retired former teacher did the talk at Messy Church. But that's about all. Part of me knows that to break things open a bit I need to be willing to step back and let others take a lead, but another part suspects I am selling the church short if I don't give them their money's worth out of me.

I certainly couldn't have stomached going so heavily on the Coronation theme as Giselle's team did this Sunday (not that there was anything sycophantic about the service - it focused on heavenly kingship as earthly), and it all went fine though Matthew who led some of the responses was a bit quiet (his microphone seemed to be working OK, however). I knew that the people involved were normally quite reticent souls with a genuine spiritual life who I could trust. In fact it was me who got things wrong. I'd managed to run off some copies of the service leaflet with two pages out of order, thought I'd junked all those, but hadn't, and so we began one hymn with half the congregation singing the wrong thing and had to stop. Shades of the 1727 Coronation - but there the resemblance ended.