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Bitter and Twisted of Cayton
Hardly had the copy of last month’s magazine appeared on the streets than a senior member of the house of bishops proved me to be totally misguided by cancelling his planned holiday in Salzburg and going camping in his cathedral instead. This will, no doubt, please the disgruntled correspondent who read this column on our web site and described the writer as “bitter and twisted of Cayton”. Moi? Bitter? Twisted? Smiling boy, laugh a minute, the life and soul of the party?
The problem is with the perception. No one who knew me would ever describe me as such, apart from my wife and the majority of our congregation. What alerted me to what other people think of we Christians was when an irate churchgoer told me that the presenters of a daytime television programme had queried the necessity of repairing church buildings because “nobody goes to church any more”. Do they not?
One of the many reasons why I could not take a holiday in August was the people who, allegedly, don’t go to church any more but, in fact, do. Last year it was the weddings. This year it is the baptisms. Here, we had nine in an eight week period. This is on top of the twenty-two who have been baptized already. At the moment, they are booking up for October. In September alone we have four couples being married. This is a failing church? Maybe at nine o’clock on a damp and cold morning we have a paucity of people in the pews but once the pavements have warmed up we are packing them in.
Why cancel a break just to accommodate people who make use of the facilities of the church for their own purposes? The fourteenth of this month may give a clue to the answer. Holy Cross Day! If we preach the faith of Christ crucified we have a solemn duty to plug the message at every opportunity. There are many outside the church who have a yearning to be on the inside. Showing them the warm side of Christianity challenges their perception that we are a cold, cynical, bitter and twisted lot of miseries. We show them otherwise. Apart from the ones who I eject for having the temerity to take flash photographs, they all go away happy. That is how it should be.
May God bless you all, Fr. Allan
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