Prayer and Worship

Cassettes, Communion, and Guardians of the Galaxy: Online Worship isn’t the Answer to Everything

by
Hooked on a feeling, I'm high on believing.

Young people these days are a rum lot! I’ve recently discovered that they’re getting into cassette tapes in a big way. I understood when people got back into vinyl again, that made perfect sense; analogue audio just sounds better than its digital counterpart, and there is something magical about the gentle crackle of a needle amplified by a good set of speakers. For the same reason, as a keen digital photographer, I understand why some of my snap-happy brethren are rediscovering film, even I have no desire to go to the trouble of setting up a darkroom myself.

But tapes? We lived off cassettes in the 1980s; we would make compilations by recording scratchy radio stations, sometimes Radio Luxembourg on Medium Wave, barely audible before sunset and full of fading after it in far-off Belfast. I remember how prone to breaking they were, always getting tangled up on the heads of the tape player, having to be straightened out and wound back on with a pencil, usually damaging the sound quality, even when they didn’t break altogether. Who in their right mind wants to use tapes?

Hooked on a feeling, I'm high on believing.
♪ Hooked on a feeling, I’m high on believing, but just not via Zoom ♫

A clerical colleague, who has the advantage of having teenage children, explained to me that it all started with Guardians of the Galaxy. And I can see why. Rarely has anything been more aptly named than Awesome Mix Vol. 1. My coleague’s son had recently given his girlfriend a mixtape for her birthday – they use that ugly Americanism (ugh!) rather than ‘compilation’, apparently. A question formed in my mind: but surely he could just make her a playlist on Spotify? The answer was so obvious I never even uttered the words. A compilation would always be a physical token of their love – in a sense, a sacrament. An outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.

Maybe the young people aren’t so rum after all.

Read more

Let’s Worship Outside

by

The News Letter later asked me to turn this blog into a newspaper article which you can read here.

Worshipping outside in happier times in South Dorset. Photo © Diocese of Salisbury/Gerry Lynch.

The dreadful news that more than a hundred people were infected with coronavirus at a single, legally permitted, church service in Germany earlier this month should make it transparent that we are unlikely any time soon to be returning to church worship as we hitherto understood it.

In this time of fear and death, I feel deeply deprived of connection with God. I have not received communion in more than two months; I have no idea when I might do so again. I cannot even spend time in a church praying in the presence of the reserved sacrament. I cannot kneel in any of my familiar haunts for prayer, nor can I discover new ones. A computer screen in my parents’ box room has proven a distracting and sensory-deprived locus for prayer. In my case, as a very definite extrovert, prayer is very much an externally contextualised physical process as well as an interior mental and psychological one. Prayer involves the placing of the earthly into the loving care of the heavenly, and is thus intimately bound up with place, physicality, community and body.

Worship via videoconference involves deprivation of the senses. It only involves sight and hearing; never smell, taste, or touch. The aural and visual, already overprivileged in technological societies, are mediated through a screen and a speaker, usually with poor audio and video quality. That is not to dismiss its value – certainly some people seem to have reconnected or newly connected with Christian worship via online means during the pandemic. But it can never involve the smell of incense, the taste of sacramental wine, the heat of a ray of sunshine streaming through a window, a hug, or noticing that a much loved elderly parishioner’s gait has suddenly become laboured.

Are there other ways to worship safely in the era of coronavirus?

Read more

Why This Liberal Catholic Will be Praying #ThyKingdomCome

by

The last thing the disciples are recorded as saying to Christ on Earth: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”

After all they’d been through, they still didn’t get the point. They were looking for an earthly realm founded on their values – which of course were God’s, and therefore would usher in an era of justice and peace – and missed so much about the Crucifixion and Resurrection they’d experienced first-hand. Doubtless too, they missed the subtle point that all earthly kingdoms, political, theological, or otherwise, are prone to corruption and subverting their own principles.

Why should we be surprised? After two thousand years, we are no different.

As a Liberal Catholic, I can understand Angela Tilby’s pain and sense of loss: for we were the future once. Our tribe had once controlled the kingdom – or at least that small part of it that is the Church of England – and, while we had our faults, it was broadly a time of enlightenment and faith, liberation and not a little courage. It is wonderfully captured in a photo from the mid-1980s, I think in Dean’s Yard, of a smiling Desmond Tutu and Robert Runcie. This was the future of the Church – Catholic and reformed, deeply faithful yet open to asking hard questions, confident in its calling while open towards others, sacrificially committed to justice and peace. This was just thirty years ago.

Read more

Sermon Preached at St James’ Church Alderholt on Sunday 3 May 2015 (Easter 5)

by

Readings – John 15:1-8; Acts 8:26-40.

Pruning doesn’t seem like a very pleasant process for whomever is being pruned. It carries connotations of being taken down to size, perhaps of having one’s wings clipped. Christ says in today’s Gospel that abiding in Him, and bearing fruit for the Father, means that at times we’ll have to undergo the process of being cut back. It’s right here in one of the most loved passages of Scripture.

Currently in the Church, it can also be an idea that is pushed to one side, replaced by a forced confidence that “good” vicars and “faithful” parishioners will have “growing” churches that run a whole range of social projects which never go wrong. They not only feed the hungry and clothe the naked, but get them signing up to adult baptism courses as well.

We shove out of the way the idea that we are a vine that sometimes needs pruned, perhaps because it brings into the open a difficult reality: that following Christ is often painful. It is emotionally painful – for trying to love our enemies or forgive those who have wronged us always hurts, and is so difficult that it often ends in the second hurt of failure. Truly following Christ is often financially painful, or painful in the way that it shatters our ego and self-delusion, and it can be physically painful. As we meet here in peace to celebrate the feast, somewhere in the world, someone is being put to death for their faith in Christ.

Read more

Our Experience of Secret Church in Salisbury

by

This is a bit of a brain dump after the Secret Church event I helped organise in Salisbury last night. If you aren’t interested in the background to our church and our advertising programme, just click down to find out what happened during the service.

In September, some advertising material for Open Doors’ Secret Church campaign came across my desk in work. I was instantly taken with the idea: it gave the opportunity to pray in solidarity with and for persecuted Christians; to raise awareness of extreme persecution, particularly of the ‘forgotten Christians’ of North Korea; and it also looked like a fun and exciting worship event. I consequently gave it a bit of publicity on the Diocesan website, weekly e-Bulletin and monthly Grapevine, but also decided to run an event as the first thing sponsored by our new Mission, Education and Outreach Committee at Sarum St Martin.

St Martin’s is not a very large church, with a usual attendance of around 40 at the main Sunday morning service. It is a traditionalist Anglo-Catholic parish (Resolutions A, B & C), now growing again after the departure to the Ordinariate of the previous incumbent with a sizeable minority of the then congregation on Ash Wednesday 2011. It has been in interregnum since.

Advertising and Attendance

Advertising JPG used on Facebook, correctly sized for the platform.
Advertising jpeg used on Facebook, correctly sized for the platform.

I produced a poster based on one of the image files sent out by Open Doors UK, and put it in a number of church and Christian venues in Salisbury City Centre. I also advertised the service on Facebook and Twitter, with images specifically sized for each platform.

Read more