Room for More?

The young couple wanted their baby son baptised as part of the main service. Great, people so very rarely ask for that. They also wondered whether it could be 14th March. Fine, I said, not realising when I agreed that it was Mothering Sunday and so not the usual Sunday morning eucharist but a Family Service, and not a common-or-garden Family Service, but a super-charged Family Service with all sorts of stuff going on. Hmm. Oh well, I decided, let's go mad. What can happen? Do the lot!

So, yesterday morning we had over three hundred souls in the church. It can't hold many more, and I suspect that level is illegal anyway. Various assemblages of Brownies, Guides, Cubs, Beavers and Rainbows paraded their standards which were inserted into a strange iron holder affectionately known as the 'Rocket Launcher'. I apologised to the congregation about the amount of paperwork they had to deal with (service sheet, baptism service card, notices, hymnbook, and flyer for the Spring Fair) and pointed out that I had more. The children from the infants' school came to sing, we dunked small child who behaved very well apart from a wriggling reluctance to be anointed, blessed and distributed posies for mums, and somehow prayed. The organist played a storm and finished with Vidor's Toccata. 'You seem capable of making something out of chaos' said one of the regular congregation to me. Whatever it was it can't have been 'order'. We usually think Maundy Thursday or the Paschal Vigil is the most complex liturgical event of the year, but now I'm not entirely sure.