This week I will mostly be…

Something happened at BCLC that hasn't happened before this week. I have always treated Worship, and consequently BCLC, as something of a head exercise. I know that most other people seem to approach this sort of thing with their heart but that has never really worked for me. So on Sunday when someone actually broke down and cried with the emotion of what our session stirred in them it shocked me a little. That person then sent me and Anne a text message thanking us for the session and apologising for their emotional outburst. Neither of which they needed to do.

BCLC is really getting to the people that come to it. Someone from Big Church joined us the other day and seemed to be enterting into all the activities. When she later commented to someone as to how she felt it went she complained that she didn't feel there were enough opportunities to offer anything. I do find this a little staggering as if there is one thing that is guaranteed with BCLC is that you can offer something and it will be received.

Some of us will take it to heart as well as to the head and for those, perhaps, life will never be the same again.

And still they ask, is it worship?

Missed Opportunities

No this isn’t some sad missive about my mid-life crisis (which, incidentally was when I was 30 so I am hoping it was an early-life crisis) it is in reference to what went on at church this weekend.

We didn’t do BCLC, it was the church anniversary so we had an ‘all inclusive worship’ together with the methodists. This is also an occasion to invite the rainbows, brownies and guides in – probably the only time a lot of them will set foot inside a church. So as you can imagine the place was packed to the rafters. We got out extra chairs and we laid on extra breakfast muffins.

Our part-time minister opened promisingly by telling us how exciting the bible is and how exciting this whole worshipping God malarky can be. Then he, somewhat ironically, proceeded to lead the most ordinary services I have seen for some time. Obviously, as you will have read on these pages, I have long since decided that this type of traditional hymn-sandwich style of worship is not to my tastes so my view isn’t totally objective on this. I would speculate though that, for those who haven’t been brought up to suffer days like these, it will be a long time before they darken the church doorstep again. That is unless some of the guides go off the rails and start sharing a bottle of Martini Bianco with our regular teenage drinkers on a Friday or Saturday night. Had someone produced a bottle of said beverage on Sunday I would have probably partaken myself. And this is from a man who the last time he sampled that particular Italian delight threw up terribly and vowed there would be no ‘time’, ‘place’ or ‘where’ he would touch the stuff again.

I digress a little. Whilst the traditionalists probably enjoyed themselves others were muttering as to how it was a missed opportunity with all those children and newcomers joining us. A view I initially shared but then on reflection I have to ask, a missed opportunity to do what exactly?

What we had on Sunday was a pretty fair representation of what goes on in most churches on most weekends. You could argue that to do anything else on a day when we have visitors would be a bit dishonest and deceptive and would give them a false impression of typical church worship. Had we actually laid on something different, something that was genuinely exciting then some people might have come back another week expecting the same. At least this way there will be no false expectations if they do.

What I find more surprising is that a whole lot of people who were complaining about this missed opportunity and just how unexciting the whole thing was, regularly return for more of the same and steadfastly refuse to give BCLC (a genuinely exciting and stimulating activity virtually every week) a try.

They say we get the politicians we deserve and I think the same is true of worship. As long as the regulars keep coming back for the usual turgid, mediocre drivel they are subjected to then that is precisely what they will get. They certainly shouldn’t rely on a few brownies, who frankly don’t know any different, to change it for them.

Things shaping up and shaping down

I had a really good idea on my way into work this morning.

You know that we are planning on moving in with the methodists up the road, what you don’t know (because we don’t) is what we are going to do with the buildings we currently occupy.

When we took the decision to move it was ostensibly for 2 reasons:
1. The buildings are beyond economical repair.
2. The congregation is too old and too small to embark on a major redevelopment of the site.

Those reasons still stand but it has troubled me a little that if we just sell the site on to a developer (and lets face it who else is going to buy it) then it will be a waste of what is a prime site. Also the number of usable buildings for the churches in the area goes down by 1 more (after the Anglicans have left theirs a few weeks ago).

The baptist secretary rang me the other night because he had got wind that we were moving and that they would be instrested in buying the whole thing. I don’t want to talk numbers but they had quite a lot to spend. Of course they will be buying a set of buildings that need a lot of money spending on them to make them properly usable or they spend some money knocking them down and starting again. The amount they have to spend would preclude that I believe. This is where my idea comes in….

We move to the meths temporarily and we jointly develop the site at the bottom of the road with the baptists. It is brilliantly simple, we invest the land, they invest the money and we all get to share a purpose built set of buildings that can be used by the whole community.

Just got to convince everyone that the idea is as good as I think it is.

Easter

Bit previous with this one but it is more a heads up than anything else. We are planning to do some street theatre on Good Friday. When I say ‘we’ I refer to Weekenders which I do include as part of BCLC. The plan is to depict a ‘crucifixion’ with a bunch of clowns on the one hand trying to drum up excitement for the spectacle, whilst other people try to stop the death of an innocent person. The debate at the moment is whether we actually depict Jesus as the victim or whether we use a more modern representation. Of course whichever we choose we risk upsetting someone. If we go for a modern day political prisoner scenario then people will think that we are politicizing Christ and if we go for a more literal interpretation then, apart from the logistics of actually crucifying someone in the street, we may offend someone’s sensibilities.

The pressures of being such a cutting-edge-avant-garde-drama-group, perhaps we should just stick to panto….

…. oh no you shouldn’t…..

…. oh yes we should etc. etc.

So if anyone has any suggestions then they will be most welcome. My instinct is to politicize. Jesus was killed by the Romans because he was seen as something of a terrorist, someone who upset the authorities of the day both Roman and Jewish. Is there a modern day parallel? I’m not convinced, we are taliking MLK getting killed by the US government at the behest of the black leaders for getting above himself.

Gets a bit complicated, I think we will stick with Jesus but emphasise why he is being killed.

I will, of course, document procedings for your delictation.

Confusion

That's me, not you reader. And the reason for my confusion? Well its probably all in my head. I started out this blog to tell people of our experiences in setting up BCLC and then I started doing the local leaders training and that is throwing up so many thoughts that I am not sure which I am blogging about at any one point.

I will stick to something that happened in the LLC for today and then post a BCLC post later (it's a good one btw so do come back to read).

Well we were on a day looking at Pastoral care just over a week ago. Brilliant day run by a brilliant man, Jim Hollyman. If any of you have come across Jim on your travels you will know what I mean. His take on Pastoral care and the experiences he shared with us really made me think about the whole thing afresh.

It was more a side issue that I wanted to discuss today though. We were looking at someone's theory on the stages and ages of faith and I was saying something about how poeple of a certain age have become stuck in a certain stage and no matter what life throws at them they feel that their faith has never been, and will never be, altered by it. I pointed out that this was so different to my experiences and, I suspect, others of my generation for whom their faith is contantly challenged, thought about and reviewed or revised. We then discussed the usual poles in the church being liberals versus fundamentalists and therein comes most of the tension. It occured to me that what we have in the URC is the situation where we have a group that are dedicated (fundamental) to the reformed tradition (liberal) , in effect 'fundamentalist liberals'. They are certain that whatever happens church isn't going to encroach on their real lives. I know this is a over generalisation but how else can you explain how families with parents with the faith I describe manage to bring up children in such a way that they never darken the churches doorways for the rest of their lives? Could it be that the children see something hollow and not worth their time in the practices of their parents and want nothing more to do with it?

One of the main aims I have for BCLC is to take church from it's special 'golden hour' on a Sunday and try to make it more a part of people's everyday lives. This doesn't mean just giving old people somewhere for a cup of tea or divorced parents a place to see their kids (as important as these services obviously are) it's about giving people the chance to explore how a belief in God and faith in the teachings of Jesus can really impact their lives to the good.

When I was a teenager I used to go to Jim's house with my friends on a Sunday evening and we talked about all sorts of 'issues'. This made a massive impression on me and it is something I have missed in the intervening years. So now with BCLC we are giving poeple the chance to do the same.

So Jim, thanks, I owe a lot of this to you.

Liturgy – friend or foe

I would be very interested to know where people stand on liturgies, I know it depends on the liturgy itself whether you stand, sit or kneel (ha ha ha), only we have just put one together for BCLC.

It’s been a few months now since we started and there is a definite feeling that we need some structure to what we do. This is a bit hard for me becuase I am one for doing what is right for the occassion and as such a written down order of play is a bit limiting and debilitating. However I had to concede that for people to get the most out of what we do they don’t need to be worrying about what comes next.

So this is what we came up with…

We open with a time of sharing thoughts, events, concerns, possibilites for the week that has passed and the week that is coming. This is a transitional time from the breakfast we have all just shared into a different kind of sharing.

The next thing is a ‘formal’ start. This can be anything the ‘leader’ chooses, a prayer, a song, a poem, a reading, a meditation, some drama… you get the picture.

We then introduce the theme and the way we will be exploring the theme through some activity that enables people to relate at any level.

Following that the younger children will do something appropriate to their age and the rest of us will have some discussion on the theme.

Finally we all come together for a ‘formal’ ending of the session.

Off the top of my head we could say:

Share
Begin
Discover
Develop
Depart

We have only done it once but I reckon it’s flexible enough to work with and structured enough to give us a snse that we aren’t just sitting around chatting after breakfast (not that there is anything wrong in that but we’ll save that for another time and another place).

We have also put together a programme for the next 10 months or so and instigated regular planning meetings. Of course this is typical of me, as anyone who knows me will testify, a real stickler for organisation….

More about BCLC worship sessions

This entry sort of follows on from one earlier in the year when I mentioned that BCLC were looking at worship and what it meant to us. I did say I would get back to you with how discussions went but then I missed a week and was away etc. The conclusion to that month was that we ended up planning some worship in the last week, the through our own eyes response week. I have to say that this was an excellent session, the twin highlights of which were Tom and Dan’s finger puppet show of Jesus telling the rich man how it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle etc. and Katy, Katy and Charis re-wording Hey Big Spender to refelct the story.

To continue this theme we looked at Communion last month. We started by looking at the way food is treated by other religions and how they hold certain foodstuffs and meals sacred and where they do them. We then proceeded to really examine closely our attitudes to our sacred meal, communion, what it meant to us and the various factors that enhanced or detracted from our experiences taking it. This was brilliant, we shared so much that helped each of us develop a deeper understanding of what we did, what it meant and how we might get more from it.

Based largely on the success of the previous month we decided that we would create our own communion service last Sunday. The youngest children made some bread whilst the rest of us planned what we would do and how we would do it. Everyone was able to put something into the service and I hope that everyone was able to take something away with them. I know I did, and it wasn’t just stiff legs from sitting cross legged on the floor for 20 minutes.

Like I said before this emerging church malarkey is a young persons game.