Back to index of vicar's letters - Back to the main index
All is Safely Gathered In
Most people assume that, as we came to this parish from one in Middlesbrough, we are a pair of townies. Nothing could be further from the truth. The church, being the kind of organisation which has little or no grasp of the concept of horses for courses, thinks nothing of putting people who have spent a large amount of their life communing with nature into the middle of an urban conurbation, whilst consigning those who wouldn't know a bullock from a heifer until one hit them into some parish out in the sticks.
Prior to ordination I had lived for half of my life in a former mining community so isolated that the women went unmolested but the sheep looked apprehensively over their shoulders. We both have our roots in rural communities. By that I do not mean the kind of place with thatched cottages and a convenient slip-road onto the adjacent motorway but the real country, miles away from anything, including mains drainage, where the snow plough took until June to arrive.
Harvest Thanksgivings are, therefore, things which are dear to our hearts. Out in the wilds, the churches would be packed three times a year; Easter, Christmass and Harvest. I would be quite exhausted, conducting four harvest services in the churches, followed by at least another four harvest auctions for church funds in the public houses. Closing time, where the nearest policeman was miles away and relying on his bike, was honoured more in the breach than in the observance and the larger the consumption of ale the higher was the bidding.
Sadly, they were a little wide of the mark in their celebrations. Harvest Thanksgiving has a quasi-rural feel about it, we even had one in town, where the nearest field was over the river in the next diocese, but what we need to pray to God for is the harvest of souls. Somebody asked me, recently, if I became despondent about having nobody in church. As it so happened, on that day, we had nearly a hundred and fifty through our doors and we are only one of three mainstream denominations in this place. In bringing the Gospel to the people we might not be in the Premiership but we are now pretty near top of the league in the Conference. At harvest time that is something to thank God for.
May God bless you all, Fr Allan
Back to index of vicar's letters - Back to the main index