I’m sure you may know the joke about St Peter showing someone around the Kingdom of Heaven when they see a large brick wall and hear singing and worship coming from the other side. The person asks St Peter what is on the other side of the wall. “Oh, that’s the Anglicans/Baptists/Methodists/Catholics*, they think they’re the only ones here.”
* – delete as appropriate
In any Church denomination, surrounded by people who may have had a similar background and experience of worship, it’s very easy to assume that everyone thinks the same way that you do. Of course, the reality of any denomination is that it’s not as boringly monochrome as that and part of the delight of Church community is always about learning to live and love and serve with those that you wouldn’t necessarily have chosen to be with!
At the Annual Meetings at St Gabriel’s and St Mary’s this year, I was able to relate how St Gabriel’s has grown from an average of 14 adults and 5 children in the 1st Quarter of 2013 to a situation now where we regularly see about 40 adults and 15 in an average month.
When Christian folk move to Kings Hill, often they come to their new home with a background that’s not Anglican (I know! Shocking!) and so St Gabriel’s now is a mixture of people with Anglican, Methodist, Baptist, Catholic and free church backgrounds.
Pat Dickin and I as the leaders have been slowly growing in the realisation that our worship on Kings Hill needs to be more ‘ecumenical’. The Church of England’s Common Worship has started to feel like a slightly uncomfortable, ill-fitting suit. We need to be a place where all those groups can find a worshipping home and no-one feels like we’re building the proverbial Anglican brick wall around heaven.
After all, I very much doubt Heaven will be very Anglican. All the tribes and all the tongues will be there worshipping God. It’s going to be noisy and not very British!
The AGM gave us a chance to explore that briefly. We opened up the conversation and told people what we had been thinking and there was a bit of ‘Aha!’ moment for many of those present. For many, they had been thinking thoughts along these lines even if they didn’t realise it. ‘Why do we stand up and sit down all the time?’ ‘Why do we celebrate the Eucharist so often?’ ‘Why do we use wafers and not bread?’
Such questions all bubble up from a person’s background before they arrived with us at St Gabriel’s. The tricky bit now is to find a way forward that involves and includes as many as possible. And so, as we discussed at the Annual Meeting, we will be experimenting with our worship in the coming days to find a way forward that fits the church and fits the community of Kings Hill in which we we worship. We also need to find sensible forums in which we can talk about the worship as we experience it: what we liked, what we didn’t like, what worked, what will reach a wider community on Kings Hill.
We need not kid ourselves. You can’t please all the people all the time. Indeed, St Gabriel’s is very definitely an Anglican church congregation aiming for the day when we are a ‘parish church’ for the whole community of Kings Hill. We will always need to find ways to express a sense of Anglican identity in worship.
But if we are to experiment, the key to it all will be an open-handedness and generosity of spirit amongst the congregation. I very much like a quote attributed to a Roman Catholic priest, Fr Vincent Donovan, that fits this need very well:
“Do not try to call them back to where they were and do not call them to where you are as beautiful a place as that may seem to you. You must have the courage to go with them to a place that neither you nor they have been before.”
David Green