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.