Enquiring Minds

Any church event requires cake, and our enquirers' course is no exception. We thought we ought to have one. Our biggest problem was finding a title for it that included neither of the faintly objectionable words 'enquirer' or 'course', while simultaneously managing to convey the information those words embody. We didn't want to produce something about giving people facts and information, which is what Alpha and Emmaus do, but which thinks about experience -  what it's like to be a Christian doing Christian things. We thought that was a good idea.

We also faced the issue of when to hold the sessions. It turned out that me, the curate and the lay reader could either do a Tuesday evening or a Sunday afternoon, while each of our potentially interested people could only do one or the other. However one was going to bring a friend, which tipped it in favour of Tuesday. She didn't.

So we have an enquirers' group with one enquirer. She's also attending an Alpha-type course at a big evangelical church not far away. However she maintains that the other people on her table are helpers from the church and one homeless man who comes because he gets a free meal somewhere warm, which is a useful purpose, certainly.

We just have cake. I walked down the hill to the steeple house with a cake tin in one hand and a bag of freshly laundered altarcloths in the other. This just sums up the Church of England, I thought.