Christmas 2024 ...

... it would be easier to say, was the same as nearly every year, except there are always variations on a theme. Every event was better attended than in 2023, in fact better than for several years. The Crib Service has never been quite the same since the tragic loss of our friendly donkeys (don't worry - it was only tragic for us, nothing malign befell them), but this time we were standing-room only which was very gratifying. The slightly quieter and more intimate model of Midnight Mass suited the fifty-plus attenders, and on Christmas Day itself - which I had been concerned was dying off - we numbered 14 at the Missa Ad Gallicantu and over 80 later on. This would have been fairly unremarkable about twenty years ago, but it's quite pleasing to experience now in these dark days. 

This is especially so because I'd been feeling a little ground down earlier on. Not for the first time, the usefulness of the Office struck me: its quiet concentration on texts contrasts with all the whizz and bang around it, and allows clergy especially, I think, to focus on what the season means. There is a deep wisdom in arranging that the transition from Advent to Christmas should happen with this undemonstrative liturgy - undemonstrative even if you belong to a religious community such as a cathedral celebrating it as Evensong, and all the more so a parish priest on their own like me. You're not really going to be nourished anywhere else.

Outside the church after the Crib Service I noticed Robert and a group of other fellows whose children have passed through the church (and I fear out of it, but such is life) together. The grown-ups still come to this service even if the children are elsewhere. And the chaps, at least, have for years marked the occasion by downing a shot of Croft Original supplied by a hip flask Robert is charged with carrying. I've never noticed this quaint custom before. Then at the midnight I greeted one young man on his way out - it was Iain, who ten years or so ago belonged to one iteration of the fluctuating group of youngsters who used to cause havoc in and around the church. I think he may have had a young woman with him. But I don't mind what brings them in!

Picture from Smallham Chapel as we sing to the sheep. 

Easter 2024

Holy Week at Swanvale Halt was bookended by syncope. Lillian, our former Lay Reader, keeled over during the Palm Sunday mass, and at 8am on Easter Day a pregnant young woman who I’d never seen in church before but came accompanied by two older women one of whom I recognised from the streets of the village, also found standing up and sitting down in order too much, and passed out briefly. She was ever so embarrassed.

This was how it all worked. I decided to do a healing mass on Monday evening, Compline and Benediction on Tuesday, and Tenebrae on Wednesday, as ever, low-key services which brought the expected handful of faithful souls (not quite the same handful on each evening, but nearly). The bigger Triduum observances of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday had lower gates than the unusually high numbers of last year, but it wasn’t bad to get 23 at the dawn mass on the Sunday the clocks went forward (most of the conversation in the vestry beforehand orbited around how little we’d slept and how we couldn’t remember which of our timepieces would automatically update), 18 at 8am and 100 at 10am for the first time since 2018.

For the first time in some years I remembered to order a garland for the Paschal Candle from the local florists: if only I’d also remembered that I had to carry on watering it after the great excitement was past, the daisies would have survived longer than they did. 

Christmas 2023

It was pretty similar to last year in terms of numbers, the Cribbage and Midnight very much the same, 8am a bit down, and 10am a bit up. The fact that it was one of those years when the Fourth Sunday of Advent magically transforms into Christmas Eve at mid-day didn't seem to make that much of a difference to anyone except me and the team of souls who staff the services, who were spread a bit thin between six services, not to mention Carols by Candlelight last Friday night. 

After last year's experiences, I rethought the Midnight: rather than attempt a grandeur we can't manage, we went for intimacy instead, abandoning the old high altar, not having anyone in the choir (two choristers were present but sat in the congregation), and having subdued lighting and lots of candles. I was just thinking that for the first time I could remember the service had gone without any mishap at all when Margaret who was one of the eucharistic ministers knocked one of my huge pillar candles over and sent wax spinning over the dais the altar sits on. At least it hadn't been Tim the crucifer as, in his polyester robe (we still use the ones a churchwarden made in 1975), he would have gone up like a candle himself. 

On Christmas Day I attended the Churches Together Christmas Lunch, ending up giving three of the guests a lift after various people went down with a norovirus. I ended up sitting with a Nigerian gentleman, a woman from Sierra Leone and her small daughter, and a Sri Lankan nurse working in one of the local care homes. Somehow we began talking about Reformation history, and it was quite agreeable to explain about Lady Jane Grey and Henry VIII's wives to people who wouldn't have been able to pick me up on the bits I'd forgotten about. They still knew more about the history of the British monarchy than I do about those of West Africa or Ceylon, though. They had no idea about the UK Christmas tradition of the monarch's speech. The Lunch organisers had some trouble with the audiovisuals and so we ended up watching Chucky Boy on the TV while his words were played through a mic off someone's phone, with a delay of about 3 seconds which was most disconcerting.

Down in Dorset for Boxing Day, I, my sister and elder niece went for a little walk over Turbary Common, that charismatic landscape of my childhood. As I and Lady Arlen discovered last year, there are cows there now, and they were there today. I can't tell you how odd it is to see these bovine presences so close to a very suburban environment I am very familiar with.

Messy Revival!

Just a very quick update this evening. Our last Messy Church in September had the lowest uptake since we started the event some time before I even arrived in Swanvale Halt in 2009 - just twelve children. Today we had 43 children and some 80 souls altogether, which is the highest figure since about 2015 (I think) and the second-highest attendance ever. Completely unaccountable!

Viva La Muerte ...

... was how I greeted the two Catrinas I shared the train with as we disembarked at Waterloo on Saturday and got a big skeletal grin in reply. Later, while I and the others were at the Hoop & Toy not far from the V&A on Saturday afternoon I could glimpse a little anomaly on a picture frame next to our table: it turned out to be a very tiny ghost.

It's the season of the dead. I normally expect about 40 attenders at the annual Memorial Service on the afternoon of the last Sunday in October, and as the number of funerals we take declines, I always wonder how long this event has got to go, but this year roughly 60 souls turned up. The candles went up to the high altar to burn down as usual. 

Because of how the dates fall this year, there will be a number of occasions to mark the season at Swanvale Halt church should anyone feel inclined. We normally have a midweek mass on a Tuesday morning, joined on this occasion by a eucharist for All Saints tomorrow evening and then the All Souls Requiem Mass on Thursday. I wonder how many will venture out as Storm Ciarán gets going. But the swede lanterns are ready for action, even if they get blown out (as they often do). 

An Absence of Presence

This morning I had the rare experience of getting ready for the 10.30am midweek service and having no congregation. I followed the standard practice of reading the service through to the Creed and finishing with the Prayer for the Church Militant, which you’re supposed to do just in case anyone turns up at the last moment. After that, you'd be into the Canon of the Mass, so newcomers have had it really.

This midweek service is the last relic of the time when Swanvale Halt, like many others, was a ‘daily mass church’ with a service of holy communion most days; and that wasn’t all that long ago, the tradition finally ending in the late 1990s. The Tuesday service survived because it was the one that had most people attending, but it’s gone up and down over the years. When I arrived in 2009, the church was trying to build it up into a social occasion for older people with refreshments and board games afterwards, but that never took off. Sometimes there have been just a couple of us present, sometimes as many as 15. The congregation tended to be older people who found a long Sunday service too much, and others who happened to be around at that time. At the moment we don’t have many people that applies to.

I’m committed to the idea that the holy eucharist should be offered on a weekday, but I wonder if 10.30am on Tuesday is the right time. Over the years I’ve floated the idea of celebrating the service at a variety of different points – early morning for people before they go to work, after school drop-off, lunchtime, or the evening as folk head home from work – anything that would make it easier for people to build some time for God into their busy lives. No suggestion has ever resulted in much, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be made again.

As today was St Benedict’s Day, this is a precis of what I was going to say in my homily, so it doesn’t go to waste: I sometimes tell myself, ‘well, I can reuse that in a few years’ time’, but I never remember!

Readings: Proverbs 2.1-6, Luke 18.18-22

I didn’t know before preparing my homily that, after some years, a group of the monks at the monastery St Benedict founded and led decided they couldn’t bear him any more and tried to poison him. If you look at our icon of St Benedict in the church, you’ll see a broken chalice, which I think refers to that legend. Nobody has tried to poison me yet as far as I know, but the story shows rather graphically that living in a Christian community can be as far from easy as it’s possible to be. That’s what Benedict and his monks were prepared to undergo to follow the spiritual life. They’d already done what Jesus describes in the Gospel reading today and ‘given up all their possessions’, and you might imagine they could be tempted to say to God, ‘Isn’t that enough, Lord?’ but apparently not! It’s even more costly than that.

We’re prone to take prayer and the presence of God for granted because we can do it any time and any place. But in reality, these things are (as the reading from Proverbs says) silver and treasure, a gift which is the most precious thing we could have. Compared to what we receive from God, our richest possessions are dust, and the dangers we might encounter no more threatening than a mown field, if we see things rightly. What might we be prepared to undergo for the sake of that treasure? Amen.

No Use Crying

Never was anything so rightly characterised as a mixture of triumph and disaster as Christmas 2022 at Swanvale Halt. The chief instance of the first was the Crib Service, the first time we have followed the old pattern since 2019. I say 'the old pattern', but in fact this was the pattern devised by former curate Marion which we'd only actually done once anyway, and which I cobbled together from her notes. The keynote is the children bringing up the crib figures - nice, robust wooden ones - to form the crib scene. The children were led by Poppy with robe and candle, and that all went pretty swimmingly with a couple of hundred souls in church. But the Midnight - the Midnight was another matter. Now I have always regarded the Midnight Mass as one of the high points of the liturgical year and have worked to set it as a marker of proper Catholic practice, so I already feel a bit pressurised to get it right, not least because there are always going to be people there making an occasional, or even once-a-year visit to church. It's important. This year the choir could muster only two voices, thanks to illness and absences, and we had as organist Corinne who has only just begun playing again after a long gap. She wasn't the most confident of presences and the music was hesitant and a bit inconsistent. There were very few people there anyway - no more than 40 - and I was on edge enough by the time we got to the high altar for communion. Then I noticed Gordon the head server had managed to lose the new charcoal from the thurible, and it lay smoking on the Victorian tiles. The thing now only contained a charcoal that had long gone out, and so though I went through the motions of putting incense in it I knew it wouldn't burn. The altar itself was an inch or two too far towards the wall meaning it was awkward to lean over. And then, somehow, unaccountably, I managed to spill the wine - a big, significant spillage of already-consecrated fluid. I hadn't knocked anything, or caught my sleeve or anything like that: instead it felt as though something unseen had knocked my arm (demons, presumably). It took some time to recover. The tiny miracle was that, although I'd registered to my horror that there was no plastic sheet under the altarcloth and on top of the superfrontal, and although the cloth was soaked in wine, we discovered at the end of the service that none had gone through to the superfrontal. Washing winey linens is one thing; getting consecrated wine out of a piece of kit you can't wash is another. So I went home a little less horrorstruck and shakey, and clutching an armful of linens. 

It all makes me reflect that I may have to retreat from my ideal of how the Midnight works. We seem not to have the resources to run an event on the Lamford pattern, or even how we did it at Goremead that one year I was there. It needs a confident musical lead and if we can't find that, and have to scrape around to find servers and singers, we need to rethink.

The Christmas Day services were fine, thankfully!

Children Present and Absent

Messy Church at Swanvale Halt has been severely impacted by the pandemic, though we aren't entirely sure why this should be. Our numbers were steady right up to the very last gathering in March 2020, and now we are getting roughly half what we could expect before the Great Disruption. Some attending now are new, some are the families who were coming before, but there are just fewer of them. Saturday's theme of 'Holy Fire' chosen by the team was a bit of a challenge to try and illustrate in my worship time, but I gave it a go and I think everyone was happy even if I didn't end up actually lighting a fire. Today Poppy (rather appropriately) joined the serving team for Remembrance Sunday and her plus two children present with another family meant we had more minors present at an ordinary Sunday mass than for a long time.

We've long since given up trying to do any traditional Sunday-School-type children's work, having tried so many configurations over the years. On Wednesday my colleagues in the Deanery Chapter shared their woes in the same area. Even the big, well-organised evangelical Tophill finds that its numbers of children have halved since the pandemic, and its vacant children's and families worker position is one of thirty-seven across the diocese. At Caringfield Rector Rebecca can't find anyone to fill her similar job, despite offering to juggle it to fit applicants who won't work with primary school children, or secondary, or work this or that time. She's propping up all her groups herself by doing all the preparation and organisation: 'I have just enough to make these groups viable in the hope that eventually someone will take them on before I go under'. At Wormton they had a very flourishing Sunday School but now can't tell whether they will get a dozen children or two, and I didn't feel like warning them that's exactly what happened to us: after few weeks where the children themselves can't be sure any more than a couple will be there, they will stop wanting to come at all. It's no fun with just the two of you, or even three. Meanwhile what parents expect, my colleagues think, is the level of children's work they are used to from schools, and there are very, very few churches who can provide that. 'Our outreach has gone back by ten years', said the vicar of Wormton. I think we are moving into a new and very different world, and there will be no going back to the old one at all - but that nobody really knows what the new will be like.

Analysing Mess

Dr Abacus would, I’m sure, warn all of us that we should pay attention to facts and figures and not our own vague impressions of things. Our recent Messy Church gatherings have been very modestly attended, and my recollection had been that this was quite a long-term phenomenon. But on actually tabulating the figures ahead of a staff team meeting where I wanted to mention it, I found that this wasn’t really the case. We’ve been holding Messy Church events since just before I arrived at Swanvale Halt in 2009 and in this graph you can see how widely attendance has varied: the top line shows the highest attendance of children in each year, the bottom one the lowest, and the one in the middle the mean attendance for all the gatherings in the year concerned. In 2011, 2016 and 2018 the bottom figure is less than half the top one, and it’s very hard to discern the reason why it varies quite so much; some Messy Churches were very sparse, though I think the one in May 2016 only attracted 16 children because I’d forgotten to tell anyone it was happening, so it was a marvel that we had a soul there at all.

The graph shows that the figures for the last few years before the pandemic were not, in fact, declining at all, but experienced the same ups and downs as the earlier period. The most recent peak in the middle of 2018 of 41 children wasn’t far off the all-time maximum of 45 in 2011. Bearing in mind that, counting all the church helpers, the child attenders are typically matched by the same number of adults, 80-90 people results in bedlam, and is really too much for our space and facilities. 70ish is a more comfortable result to aim at.

The latest few years’ results are of limited value: we only had two Messy Churches in 2020 before the first lockdown; two in 2021; and only three so far this year. But our extremely low current figures do seem to be a very clear effect of the pandemic. I think my impression that the decline was more long-term is related to my memory of other aspects of worship - that we’ve been unable to sustain a Sunday School for some years, or that attendance at the Family Service, which drew about a hundred people on a couple of occasions in 2014 and 2015, with 20-25 children, suddenly virtually halved in the course of two years, losing all its children in the process. Why this happened when nothing actually changed with the worship itself remains mysterious; and, in fact, while you can see that our Messy Church’s decline is related to the pandemic, the detail of that is also foggy. Nobody can give us a clear reason.

O Come Magnify the Lord with Me

For a couple of weeks our gates have been a bit low on Sunday mornings. I went through the list of the congregation and discovered that I knew why almost all the absentees were away, but that itself shows how our active membership has shrunk as a result of the pandemic, and even more so our penumbra of occasional attenders. I regularly go through little bouts of wondering whether I am doing any good, or doing any good here: the congregation would say Yes, but if it was the case, wouldn’t we be achieving more? What am I missing? What’s the key to changing things?

Curiously it was the state of the world more generally that made me think about it differently this time. I find it hard to think of the work of a parish priest in terms of rescuing souls from hell; though that might ultimately be the effect, I am too uncertain about the exact conditions of salvation in any case to be very definite about that. Instead we will need the virtues of charity, courage and faithfulness in the challenges the human race faces, and those are rooted, finally, in the victory of God. It’s sometimes hard to see the connection between what happens in a small parish church and such grand considerations, but every prayer is a weapon in the Lord’s armoury.

And in the end, like every Christian I should be focused on God and not on myself and my own concerns. Of course I have a task entrusted to me, on one level, and have to carry it out to the best of my ability, but are my hopes for my church not about God, and not even about the welfare of souls, but really about my own sense of self-respect – of stopping up the hole in the dyke of my own anxieties and insecurities? Nothing will ever be achieved that way. Only joy works, not fear.

At Malling Abbey every recitation of the Holy Office begins with a little chant from Psalm 34: one of the sisters sings ‘I will bless the Lord at all times’. She sings it on her own behalf, that though this is corporate worship, the worship of the community she belongs to and of the whole Catholic Church, it is, first and foremost, hers, in which she invites others to join. So should my worship be, full of the joy of the Lord’s presence, and if there are others there to join, many or few, all the better.

La Peste

It felt strange at 7am yesterday morning to go down the hill to the post box and then past it for the first time in twelve days. Even in the midst of my isolation I had ventured out to post letters under cover of darkness, slightly on edge in case Sir Chris Whitty or someone were to leap out from a bush and point an accusing finger at me. There was never anyone else around, though, to denounce or to potentially infect. Anyway, on Sunday I left the post box far behind me and went down to the church. At least I remembered where it was. 

There were fewer people at the 10am mass than for ages: in fact, barely half the numbers we had only a month ago when everyone coincidentally turned up at once. Then, and since, I have had a string of reports and emails announcing this or that person has covid or is steering clear of friends and relatives in case they do. One of them is Sylv our Pastoral Assistant, and her being out takes out a range of others as well, not just those she gives lifts to church but also those who were in the home group she took part in last week. So far, though, only one member of the church has had to go to hospital, and he has (praise God) just been released, sorry, discharged. I mention all this just to put my own sickness into the context of a very significant upsurge in cases, and one which is cutting a swathe through the older members of the community. Thankfully, though, none of them are all that ill, generally reporting nothing more serious than a heavy cold and mostly less than that. The great benefit is that really quite large numbers of people will have had covid before Easter and there will be no reason for them not to come. Or not that one, anyway.

Not for the first time, Considering Children

I had the sequence of the changes we'd made to our children's ministry at Swanvale Halt in my mind, but, when I looked back in preparation for a meeting on Monday evening, I'd forgotten how long it had taken. By 2014, though attendance at our Family Service was spiralling up regularly in the direction of 100 a fifth of whom were children, the Junior Church had dwindled to the point where there was often only one forlorn little lad there, so in February that year we suspended it, convinced it wasn't what people wanted any more. Mid-2016 saw us having another go, but offering Junior Church only on the 3rd Sunday each month so that the first-Sunday Family Service wasn't the only time families felt they could safely bring their children. Now, we find ourselves in possession of a Family Service to which no families have come for a long while, and a Junior Church which sometimes gets feasible figures but is hard going: you really need five or six children of similar abilities. When it works, it feels great, and when it doesn't, it's miserable for all concerned.

'Over the twenty years I've been here, we've tried virtually every configuration,' said Erica, 'and can't find a way to crack it.' We're not sure whether our Catholic-end worship puts people off - given the experience of Anglo-Catholic churches with very flourishing children's work, I suspect not, and that the experience of coming into a church full of grey and white heads in which you are virtually the only young family is far more influential on what people do. What people tell me is that they'll choose a church where they feel their children will be catered for, whatever it is, over their own liturgical preferences. The Roman Catholic congregation we share the building with has a well-supported Junior Church which they run every week, led by one member of the congregation but with parent helpers. Marion our curate is convinced that we really have to offer children's provision more often in order to build up support - but can we manage it? Can we drum up enough assistance to get that far? We're also thinking about ways of including children in the liturgy, and beefing up the music so they could be part of the choir (needs money, that). 

My friend Fr Thesis shared pictures on LiberFaciorum of him surrounded by children for the Candlemas mass at his church. He wore a biretta, gold cope and a crossed stole, and his deacon and subdeacon were keeping control of their maniples. There were candles (obviously), incense, aspersed water, and loads of youngsters with their families. He told me:

We definitely benefit from having an excellent parish school, that can’t be denied. However, above and beyond the detail of all the various theories and strategies one can adopt, I think the most important thing is a question of culture. Do kids feel welcomed and included and at home in church? I think that makes the biggest difference and has to underpin whatever projects and plans you adopt. I hope that’s the most significant thing we’ve managed to achieve at all levels of what we do. I rarely if ever hear moaning about children at St Benet’s and try to exemplify that in my own attitude. 

And crucially, I think:

Also - kids don’t want rubbish religion. They like the proper thing and don’t want to be talked down to. Religion should be fundamentally different from school and clubs and all the other things they do.

Perhaps we need more liturgy rather than less!

Christmas 2019

As usual, the carol service at Smallham (altar pictured left) concludes my Christmas duties. The little chapel was packed again this year. As for Swanvale Halt church itself, the Crib Service recovered from its noticeable decline in numbers in 2018, and every seat was occupied although it was my turn to lead the children with the wooden crib figures up towards the crib, and for some reason I forgot where 'the south aisle' was. The Midnight was a bit down, as was the 8am on Christmas Day, but the 10am was up. None of this really means that much, on its own!

I am getting quite bored with doing the Christmas Day 8am according to the Prayer Book: all that business of praying repeatedly for the Queen and Humbly Beseeching Thee over and over again is starting to grate a bit. I don't think any tears would be wept if I abandoned it as it was my choice to start it. This year a young couple arrived who I instantly and accurately guessed were Roman Catholics who'd turned up early for their 8.45am mass. They didn't know what was going on.

But that's not as boring as keeping the church locked outside service times this Christmas. The troublesome youngsters have been orbiting around constantly, when they should have been tucked up in bed sucking their thumbs and wondering what Father Christmas was going to bring them, and I didn't feel as though I could risk the security of the Crib; justifiably, I think, as the ecumenical Crib which has stood unmolested in Hornington High Street for twenty years was smashed one night. I loathe locking the church against the world outside, but I hope next year we will be back to normal. 

They Came, They Saw, They Made Suggestions

Barely any families ever come now to our Family Service, the non-eucharistic and slightly less formal service we hold on the first Sunday in the month. Not so long ago this was not the case and a few times back in 2014 we hovered close to a hundred souls in church a fifth of whom were under 16, but times change. I want to do something useful with this slot, and something less formal than a mass but not focused on children, as such. I increasingly feel that 'formal' versus 'informal' is the fundamental dichotomy around which people who don't know that much about church life think, rather than 'high church' and 'low church' or anything like that; and the core of 'formality' is reading things out of books or leaflets, something which people don't do on any other occasion. Moving away from that sort of formality, and providing something for people who find it alienating without forcing them to seek it outside the parish, means installing a screen to project words and images onto.

We thought about doing this during the big refurbishment of the church in 2012, but in the end decided not to go ahead. Last year when Dr & Mrs Abacus came to visit I talked about this with them and the Dr. came up with a back-of-a-fag-packet design for how a screen might be mounted on a beam which could hang down at the side of the chancel arch and then be fixed in position by a pulley-and-rope system. Dr Abacus is an old hand at such practicalities and this sounded both plausible and cheap, but I couldn't find anyone who would advise on it. I arranged a visit by a cheerful young fellow from a company that installs audiovisual systems in churches who told me how much it would be to put in a drop-down screen behind the chancel arch - the trouble being that the arch is quite sharp and you can't fit more than an 8-foot screen across it without it being very intrusively visible when not wanted, nor do the sight lines in the building make it very easy to see. 

Finally today a couple of helpful consultants from the Diocesan Advisory Committee, the body that advises on works in church buildings, came to help me think through the matter. Once they'd managed to find somewhere to park (no easy matter in itself in Swanvale Halt at the moment) it didn't take them long to suggest a very obvious option - placing Dr Abacus's screen against the wall above the choir stalls, so instead of being lifted into place it could be swung out across the chancel arch and fixed. That would allow something much wider if need be. The aisles could have subsidiary, portable screens on trolleys. We could go for one of those amazing glass screens that hangs permanently and invisibly in place, and is projected onto from behind, but those are pricey.

Why couldn't I think of that? Well, that's what other people's brains are for, I suppose.

Christmas 2018

There were two new bits of kit to welcome into Swanvale Halt church this Christmastide. The first was the new votive light holder installed beside the statue of the Virgin and Child on the last Sunday of Advent, when the BVM's role in preparing the way for the Messiah is especially recalled. When I got it from eBay it looked like this:

I knew it was what I wanted because it was exactly the same as the one we have beside the icon of St Nicholas, but when it arrived I found it was unimaginably filthy with grease and gunk. I spent a morning trying to clean it with every substance I thought might have an effect, from washing-up liquid to vinegar. A sort of brassy material was revealed: I agreed with the kind donor who was actually paying for it that we should have it re-silvered, a process which has taken longer than you might expect. Now it is beautiful, and looks like it's been purchased new. You can't see it that clearly in this photo, but Our Lady and Our Lord seem to approve of it.

The other new item was the replacement for our old wooden crib scene. With the unavailability of donkeys on Christmas Eve getting no easier and the 'nativity tableau' we did for several years not being very involving, we decided last year to assemble a crib scene with painted wooden figures. They were placed on the altar but we agreed they looked a bit lost and what they needed was a stable to frame them. John who regularly knocks up such items did his magic again and produced something which looked so splendid I thought it was high time to dispense with the old version which was well past its best.

Curiously the Crib Service was the only one of the Christmas services at which attendance was down - if you believe the figures from last year, which I am not sure I entirely do. The biggest surprise was the Prayer Book communion service at 8am on Christmas Day, which not only drew more souls than any service of its kind since I arrived in Swanvale Halt, but I'm fairly sure more than any 8am service in that time. Admittedly, that's only a grand total of 21, but still. Two of them were under 8, and that's not even counting Ruby the dog. 

Frustration in High Places

Our Archdeacon is still quite fresh in the job. I went to his house a couple of days ago to have a conversation about how things were going in Swanvale Halt. I am aware that having gone through a gentle decline for a couple of years (themselves succeeding several years of gentle growth) numbers at church have been dropping quite steeply for about 18 months as a whole cohort of faithful souls die or become too infirm to attend, and aren't replaced by new ones coming in at the bottom end. I know this isn't anything to do with me directly, though I need to keep alive to the possibility that someone else might do the church better. My firm grasp on the Parson's Freehold, last priest in the diocese to be appointed thus, means I can't be dislodged unless I agree to be, but I don't like to contemplate the possibility that the bishop's staff team might be sitting around the table on a Monday morning and saying 'Oh, if only he would go!'

The Archdeacon assured me that this was far from the case. 'This pattern is happening almost everywhere,' he said, explaining that there are only ten churches across the diocese that are growing in numbers at all. Ironically these tend not to be the big evangelical ones, either, as those are generally losing support to smaller independent churches. One of the most prominent culprits in this respect is Emmaus Road in the centre of Guildford, which I know has been causing consternation among some of my colleagues as they have watched significant proportions of their younger families disappear in their direction. The parish church of Swanvale Halt hasn't (although I know some families in the parish who are part of Emmaus Road - some come to our Messy Church and even, last year, to our children's Passion Service on Good Friday), but then families who want that kind of worship were very unlikely to have come to us in the first place. One incumbent, went on the Archdeacon, has asked these departing families why they've left: 'they don't make any demands on us,' was the answer, no pressure to join rotas for this and that. They come, they listen to the speakers and wave their hands in the air, and go home. I wondered whether this was really true, as people are certainly encouraged to join the church's home groups which in good Maoist manner they call Collectives; but we were due to host one of the Swanvale Halt collectives one Saturday morning a few weeks ago, and the convenors rather shamefacedly cancelled it as it became clear nobody else was coming. 

'It does raise the question of what they think "church" is about', said the Archdeacon. 'And I can't help thinking, Why have you set up a church in a town which already has more churches of more kinds and styles than almost anywhere else? Why not put one on the Wellesley Estate in Aldershot? That would actually be helpful.'

Rites of Passage and Other Mission Opportunities

Couples have to be determined to get married at Swanvale Halt church. This is not because we have a parish policy of making them somersault through a hoop backwards whistling 'The Star Spangled Banner' to qualify, but because it takes a hard-nosed bride to choose a church where the first sight she and her new husband will see as they emerge after their marriage service will be the supermarket across the street. If they have the option of a church set in a field or a nice cobbled street, they tend to go for that (also we have no car park). That's why we only have two weddings this year, one of which has already happened.

In my last year at Lamford I did no fewer than twenty-five weddings, because I was looking after Goremead as well for eight months and we had a good few there. Fifteen at Lamford was probably average. So I was most surprised to hear from Il Rettore the other day that the parish's wedding tally for 2018 is four. This is quite a decline in nine years. Il Rettore wonders whether the fees are putting couples off, as the choir and bells do cost a certain amount as is only fair, but it can't be just that. You can refuse the frills if you want. At Swanvale Halt I offer couples the chance of a choir turning out for a very modest fee, but in nine years the offer has, I think, only been taken up once.

The Church of England has had a number of initiatives over the years - the Wedding Project, the Christening Project, and - yes - even the Funeral Project - to promote best practice in providing these rites of passage. We are supposed to be friendly and welcoming and understand better what it is that people unfamiliar with church may expect and want out of the experience, so that it's as user-friendly and accessible for them as it can be. This is of course good for all sorts of reasons. It hasn't, however, stemmed the catastrophic decline in the numbers of weddings, christenings and funerals most churches conduct. 

I've had plenty of positive feedback from our dealings with the couples who come to us to be married, to baptise their children, or to conduct the funerals of their loved ones. I don't think I've ever had any negative feedback although there have been a couple of rare occasions when I deserved it. It's nice to be appreciated. But I'm not sure it makes any difference, at least not in the short term; I'd doubt whether a single person has ended up attending church as a result of coming to one of the services I've conducted, however good their experience was. 

There is a gulf between how people feel as a result of their lives taking them inside a church building, and incorporating those feelings into altered behaviour. I remember Dr Bones reporting a conversation she'd had with the cleaners at the university department she worked at many years ago. 'If my vicar was like Weepingcross, I'd go to church', one said, and gratifyingly for me the others agreed. 'Have you been to your church?' asked the Dr. No, they hadn't. 'So how do you know your vicar isn't like him?' 'Well, they wouldn't be.' People can discount their own immediate experience in the face of what they think is the universal case, and recast it as an exception. 

Of course each priest doing their best to make people welcome and comfortable in their church - which is virtually all of us - is doing a good thing, eroding gradually whatever negative ideas and stereotypes people may have about Christians and how they behave, but you see what a weight they have to shift. It isn't just the actual attitudes and prejudices people have, but also the kind of experiential exceptionalism which locks those attitudes in.

Easter 2018

This closeup picture of the Maundy Thursday Altar of Repose makes the candles look crazier than in fact they were. The flowers, as usual raided from the Rectory garden, don't amount to the spectacular displays you might see in some churches, but it was done with devotion (and some weariness). Most of the services were roughly parallel in numbers to last year, though the main 10am service today slumped by about a third from its seventeen-year peak of last year. You can't read too much into that as it's usually due to where in the week, and in the case of Easter where in the year, the big days fall. The 8am Prayer Book service was a thing of chaos. I forgot the order of events, which differs quite significantly from the modern service, and then wondered why Rick the verger hadn't brought up the offerings. I went to investigate and found there weren't any, which threw me even more.

I'm not sure I achieved much spiritually over this Lent and Easter: it remains to be seen, perhaps, in reflecting on the various things that have happened including my op. But today I finally waved goodbye to Julie's car, which has sat under a hedge at the side of my drive for well over two years. A friend of hers wanted it and took it away. I am very, very glad at this. 

Into the Desert

Last year our Ash Wednesday observances were exceptionally well attended: I wasn't anticipating a repeat performance this, given the wind and rain battering the walls of the church, and we didn't get one. The only not-quite-familiar face was a young man who works at a public school locally: 'You're the only church with a lunchtime mass on Ash Wednesday for, what, fifty miles!' he explained, exaggerating in a gratifying way.

My personal priorities for Lent are two, and both arose from the mini-conference about parish mission we held a couple of weeks ago. I want to be a more restful presence (having met a priest who I found wasn't) and will make an effort to cultivate stillness and stop fidgeting, especially when praying. I will also try to be more prayerful going about the parish, intentionally calling people and events to mind as I pass houses and locations. That's aside from simply getting through the whole thing without an unconscionable breakdown in temper, an aim in which I am sometimes successful.

Christmas Passed

In 2016 the late-Advent and Christmas period seemed entirely manageable, but this year the timing has brought a certain sense of strain, at least to me. Christmas Eve falling on a Sunday has meant that I was preaching five times over a twenty-four-hour period and, I’m afraid, all my sermons did cluster rather around the doctrine of the Incarnation, with a variety of different emphases. This came after the usual repertoire of nativity plays, carol concerts and other events which extends the Christmas season to the whole of the month of December, and backwards.

One of the tasks which occupies the last days of Advent is taking communion to people who aren’t going to be able to be in church over Christmas itself. This is no problem provided you know about them, and can build visits into the schedule. This year we only located one of Marion’s regulars on the Saturday before Christmas: she’d been trying to phone the lady in question but only that day did we discover she’d moved to a care home outside the parish a couple of weeks previously. I ended up arranging to see another indisposed couple on Christmas Eve after they failed to show for the morning service – had Christmas Eve been any other day than a Sunday, it would have made things easier. The liturgical concertina-ing was very strange as the day started out the Fourth Sunday of Advent and then magically transmuted into Christmas Eve partway through; all the usual preparations of moving furniture, changing altar linens, bringing in flowers and reordering had to be done after the morning Mass was over.

The one liturgical event I didn’t have to worry about was the Crib Service, as Marion the curate looked after it. Some of our usual actors and narrators for the tableau-style nativity we’ve done for the last few years weren’t available, so she thought it would be good to change to the more widespread model of having groups of children bringing up figures to assemble the crib scene at appropriate points in the story. I had visions of our china figures smashing to smithereens on the floor as the fingers of nervous infants turned to butter, so the congregation members responsible for the wooden figures of Mary and Joseph that already tour the parish during Advent in the homes of Messy Church families constructed all the other characters too. We used to do this at Lamford – a plastic crib set was used at the Crib Service and the ‘proper’ china ones were put in place afterwards. What we also did at Lamford was to have two younger choristers robed up and leading the groups of children with a pair of acolyte’s candles, so we imported that custom as well, and two of our more reliable youngsters did those honours. It all worked very well, even if some local people still wistfully remark what a shame it is we don’t have real donkeys taking part. If they could find them for me, I’d happily have the wretched creatures there.

Numbers at the Cribbage were significantly up; perhaps because it was a Sunday evening. The Midnight and 10am on Christmas Day were about level, and the 8am Prayer Book Mass down, but numbers for that are so low anyway it means very little, I suspect. The Midnight passed off without incident for virtually the first time, and certainly no repetition of the thurible mishap of last year.

We normally have a midweek Mass on Tuesday, but it being Boxing Day the worship committee had decided against it. It’s my usual day off tomorrow, and whereas once upon a time I would have said, well, I’ve already had a day off this week so I will work, I now take all the time off I can, not out of any particular sense of deserving it but simply from considerations of self-preservation. Boxing Day was my first full day without any church business since November. I will probably go to Marks and Spencer and look for trousers.

The thing I learned about myself was that I don’t think I could ever be a monk. Rick our faithful verger now attends Morning Prayer virtually every day, but in recent weeks he’s started turning up at Evening Prayer as well from time to time. We’ve also been joined in the morning lately by Ken, who is one of the churchwardens of a nearby evangelical parish church. Then he began to arrive in the evening too. As the last week before Christmas drew on they were both there, all the time. I came into church on Saturday 23^rd intending to do some photocopying before saying the holy Office and found them both seated in the Lady Chapel ready to pray. ‘Have you been waiting long?’ I asked, fearful that they’d been hanging round for ages, but they assured me they’d only just got there. ‘Only I don’t usually say Evening Prayer at any set time on Saturdays, just when I can get here,’ I went on. ‘It’s very faithful of you to come to the Office in the evening, Ken’, I offered. ‘It’s an oasis of calm amid all the madness’, he smiled. The trouble is that it turns the Evening Office, from my point of view, into yet another liturgical performance in which I lead other people in their prayer, albeit a very low-key one. When you come in to church and your heart sinks at the prospect of joining your fellow-Christians in worship, even if ever so slightly before you catch it up, to the extent that you have to combat the inner thought ‘oh not these buggers again', then your faith has worn quite threadbare underfoot, I fear. That's not what monks are supposed to think about their brethren.

On Christmas Eve when I came into the church after taking communion to Mr & Mrs Stirling, nobody else was there. I said Evening Prayer, in the dark, on my own for the first time in ages. As the liturgical season always changes in the evening, it was the first Office of Christmastide and it was lovely.