It gave me a chance to speak to Megan, who is 13 and one of the very few young people who orbits around the church community. She was helping out on one of the craft tables, making spangly sequinned angels. Megan has been coming to the church with her family since she was small and naturally is questioning things a bit more as she gets older. She's taken communion a couple of times at Christmas and Easter, despite not being confirmed, so technically we ought to 'admit her to holy communion' which as far as I'm concerned just requires a conversation to make sure the communicant knows what it's about. 'I'm not sure I believe in God,' Megan said. 'I think there was a person called Jesus, but I look at things very logically and I'm not sure how all the rest of it fits'. Jesus is a start, I said.
I've tried to treat the handful of teens and near-teens we have at the church as a group, but the trouble is that they aren't. They go to different schools, they have a variety of different experiences, and there aren't enough of them seeing each other often enough to develop any sense of common identity. Even when they retain any sort of definite faith, the pull of bigger churches where they might find more young people like them is inexorable. It's hard for me to think my way into their situation, because when I was their age I couldn't abide other teenagers and sat in my room reading books.
Megan and I got on to gender stereotyping. She had two templates for her angels, one clearly supposed to be male and one female, with longer hair and a schematic skirt. Most of the children seemed to think angels are girls. The male figure doesn't appear to have any hair at all. 'They take the view that if you're bald you're male,' Megan told me. 'I asked, What if I lost my hair? and they said, You'd be a man.'
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