L' Ecumenisme en Plein Air

As nobody else had volunteered with just a few weeks to go, I ended up organising the Churches Together annual open-air service at Hornington Bandstand, which mighty demonstration of divine love and ecumenical togetherness took place last Sunday. The main issue was that almost everyone was away. Not only were most of the ministers who took place last year absent or had moved on, we would normally rely for musical accompaniment on the musicians from Tophill, who were also away. I was steered towards a gentleman from the Baptist Church who gathered a range of friends, so that all worked out OK, even if it took us close to the wire. Then someone asked about sound production and I realised the Tophill folk had always brought that with them. The minister at Tophill (one of the many who wasn't going to be around) arranged to have a gigantic amp/mixer available which I picked up and somehow manoeuvred in and out of my car several times, and then got it down to the Bandstand by 9.10 on Sunday morning long before anyone else arrived. We didn't even use it in the end.

One of the absences was the entire staff of the local ecumenical Christian youth work team who would normally deal with any children present. I emailed round the ministers to see whether some other children's or youth worker could do it - 'You don't want me doing it', I warned, but the world was deaf to my admonitions and when the time came I gathered a group of five bewildered children around the steps of the Bandstand and had a rather stilted conversation with them about the story in the Bible reading. One of my colleagues later sent me an email congratulating me for 'so wonderfully and enigmatically engaging with the children' which I have to assume is an autocorrect quirk. At one point an angelic little girl of about three turned to her dad and said 'I don't like this bit'. I wonder whether the mic picked her up.

I was also thanked for 'moving all the chairs' which normally reside in a tiny shed belonging to the Council just on the edge of the field. In fact I didn't as there were others helping, though the gentleman who enthusiastically ran off with the parcel trolley and deposited a towering stack of chairs in the nearby car park was less help than he intended to be.

I will never, ever, ever do this again even for Jesus.