Future Prospect

I sat opposite our newer churchwarden, Grant, talking about a church property whose management has worried me for a long while. Grant very much sees his year as churchwarden – his first, I hope! – as concentrating on the church’s finances and properties and making sure we make the best of what we have as we emerge from the pandemic. He, and others who have talked about this to me, are right, and I am aware that there is a series of questions I’ve pushed to one side over the course of years that relate not just to this but to other organisations we are linked with, and which we either give money to or receive it from. They have niggled, but I have devoted my energy and mental bandwidth to other things. Now those questions must be brought out again and tackled.

Nothing comes to life except first it dies, the Apostle Paul reminds us, and over the last fifteen months like so many other churches (and organisations generally), while it has not died, Swanvale Halt church has been ground down close to it. In March and April 2020 we existed in no more substantial form than me saying the mass on my own in a bedroom and an invisible web of prayer across the parish. Now we face the task of rebuilding, reconstructing activities and relationships which have dwindled or been impossible. Decisions between priorities are forced on us by our remaining resources both financial and human: my plan for resuming worship supposes having a crucifer as well as a server, and eventually a full serving team, but we now have only three people who can act as crucifer at all. What’s best and more encouraging: for more people to remain in the congregation, or for them to see more souls participating in the liturgy? We will need a determined concentration on what does the mission of the church most good rather than what we are used to doing, and some things are already falling by the wayside as the people who used to run them decide that they no longer can. For us, as for so much else in society, the pandemic has accelerated developments which were already underway.

Yet there is a great deal to be encouraged by. Our curate may have left, but it looks as though over the course of a few months the church will have acquired two retired priests, a lay reader, and an occasional preacher, as well as a variety of souls whose experiences and abilities promise to be very useful. We will have a revamped and explicitly evangelistic non-eucharistic service to add to the mix, and I will be a better pastor to the organisers within the church and the souls on the edge. So I tell myself: and one has to cultivate hope!