Mad Sunday

... which is not an official observance within the Church of England calendar, but Swanvale Halt seemed nevertheless to be observing it last week when two big milestones happened inadvertently on the same day. Our 10am Family Service became for the occasion a Family Communion in which we tried out a model of eucharist involving the children at every stage. There were about a couple of dozen children there - thankfully as it would have been even more difficult to do had there only been a handful - and they began by joining in with the procession up from the font where the penitential rite was said, took part in the Gospel procession armed with battery-powered candles which I didn't realise when I ordered them were all turned on magically by me with a remote control, adding another little bit of excitement, sat around me on the chancel step for the sermon, and then did all the business of getting the altar ready for communion. The real star here was Geoff, our head server, who marshalled the children and gave them all their jobs in such a way that it all moved pretty smoothly. There were a couple of hiatuses and awkward bits but for an experiment it worked remarkably well and, with the odd exception (which I may deal with on a separate occasion as it's interesting in its own right), was very well received. This is a bit off-the-wall for us, but similar sorts of service happen not very far away. I borrowed most of the ideas from All Hallows Twickenham, and discovered a couple of weeks ago that St James's Somerton whose former incumbent I know has been trying out something along the same lines.

Then in the evening we had the opposite end of the liturgical scale. The church is celebrating the 40th anniversary of its agreement to share the building with the local Roman Catholic parish, and we decided to mark the event with a service.  I suggested Evensong & Benediction could be something we could both join in without arousing issues of conscience, and so I led Evensong, Fr Malcolm the Roman Catholic priest offered Benediction, our (female) curate did one of the readings and my predecessor-but-four, who started the arrangement in 1974 and is now in the Ordinariate, came to preach. At one or two points I wondered where he was going with it but he veered away from anything too controversial and was remarkably gracious. The RCs found a magnificent Gothic monstrance at the back of a cupboard in their church in Hornington ('most of our people have never seen this', said their assisting server), we had over 150 people there and a massive party afterwards. 

Originally the 40th anniversary service was supposed to be on November 23rd, the closest Sunday to the time when regular masses started at the church, but it turned out that was Fr Malcolm's 20th anniversary as parish priest. We couldn't do November 30th as we have our Service of Light that evening, and so ended up having it on the same day as the Family Communion. One of our churchwardens described the day as 'like being put into a paper bag, shaken very vigorously around and then gently tipped out'.