Sunday, June 22, 2008

An interesting morning

Imagine if you will the typical 9.30 congregation at Church in the Valley...Say 50 lovely people of all ages....some learning-impaired adults...not very many children...but all glad to be together and to be God's family here.
We do enthusiasm. We do loving welcome. We don't, on the whole, do "decently and in order" - specially with last minute dot com as the vicar, but it mostly seems to work and God turns up.
Add to the mix this morning a trainee Guide Dog for the Blind (oh how I wish I'd known he was coming - he could have saved my sermon just by being himself. Equally, how I wish I had had the courage to dump my notes and talk about him anyway. Another time, Radley, OK?) and 2 families who were bringing their toddlers to Baptism, accompanied by the usual clutch of supporters of all ages, some clearly comfortable in church, others less so.
Subtract, because somebody had, all the organist's music from her personal shelves near the organ and all the toys from the children's corner but add, in questionable compensation, a range of sonic booms, loud squawks and whistles from the sound system, whose foibles we are still trying to get to grips with, though it arrived in the valley before I did.
Remember the readings we were gifted with this morning....none of which offers us anything like a good PR job for the Christian life....and then guess what adjective the father of one of our small candidates used to describe the proceedings.
............................................................................................................................................
Ladies and gentlemen, in Church in the Valley we offer......MELLOW worship.
To borrow a phrase from my US friends "who knew?" !

3 comments:

Auntie Knickers said...

Well, if you got through all that without freaking out, clamping lips shut, frowning, etc. I'd say you are pretty mellow, and good for you all!

Half Cab John said...

All I can say is that it was a great morning.
I am sure Radley will forgive you for not basing your sermon around him; it might have gone to his head anyway. Wait until Nimmo gets going! He's going to be with us for a long duration.
How do you get the time to run a family, two churches, etc and blog to boot?

DogBlogger said...

Wow! Yeah, who knew?

I really enjoyed reading your setting of the scene, though!