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THE SHIP IS SINKING, BUT ONLY SLOWLY.
At the beginning of every year, while the Christmas decorations are still up and the wrapping paper is as yet unburned, there falls to every Clerk in Holy Orders who has charge of a parish the unenviable task of adding up and doing divides by. The statistical analysis of attendance over the year has to be completed for the mandarins who sit hunched over their ledgers in the Diocesan Office. The moment that the last candle has been blown out after the final Sunday service of the old year the midnight oil begins to burn. Books are opened, columns of figures drawn up, the calculator comes to hand, and curses issue from beneath the breath.
This year the computed figures were so depressing that I went for a long walk to mentally compose my letter of resignation. Before there are whoops of joy from some quarters, let me assure you that the route that I took was so spectacularly beautiful and the people that I met on the way so welcoming that I decided that I must go and analyse the doom laden results more closely before taking so drastic a step. Which was a good thing, because taking statistics at their face value is like drinking neat bleach, quite breathtaking but not very good for the system.
True, average attendance at both churches was down on the previous year. This will add grist to the mill of those who take delight in perpetrating the myth that we are in free-fall. The reason for this is perfectly simple. It was all down to birth control. We had thirteen less baptisms in 2001 than we did in the previous year, which, if you remember, was the millennium year, when they were all trying to hit the jackpot.
The biggy is the attendance on a “normal” Sunday. This is the one on which we are assessed for our deanery quota. The larger the numbers, the more we pay. Once again, it was down, but not by much and, taking into account deaths and removals from the parish for one reason or another, it wasn't as bad as it might have been. This doesn't mean that we can be complacent, far from it, but we have a healthy base from which to work and a sign that the light of the Gospel is still flickering in this parish. As Candlemas approaches, perhaps this might be an appropriate moment to fan the flame.
God bless you all, Fr Allan.
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