I was asked to take a Sunday service recently in a fine church building in a strategic position serving a deprived area. I remember it from the days it had a full-time Vicar and an active congregation.
Basic worship provision and occasional wider ministry now comes from afar and there were just sixteen of us there that Sunday. Each time I go I have a depressed feeling that I might just be helping provide a sort of end-of-life care before its possible closure in the not too distant future.
But I heard three stories while I was there.
As notices were being given out, I learnt that the church’s Authorised Lay Minster had taken Communion into a particular Care Home as she does every month, and had gone upstairs to a room to pray with a former church member who then died the following morning.
Shaking hands at the door at the end of the service, I was introduced to one person there I hadn’t seen before. He was Ukrainian and was introduced by a member of the congregation who said she’d been helping him learn English for two years, and he had now asked to come along with her that morning.
Over after service refreshments in a side aisle, people were exchanging stories about where they had been the day before. One outlined what he said was his fixed routine for every Saturday. Between shopping first thing and going to the pub at lunchtime he had made his weekly visit to a relative living with dementia who no longer recognised him.
Taking Communion to the dying, and providing long term support to an eager refugee and to an unresponsive dementia sufferer. That felt as if there was something fundamentally fruitful going on.
The picture is a detail from the tenth or eleventh century Tournai marble font in Thornton Curtis Parish Church. There are very few in the country of which one is in Lincoln Cathedral. The picture was taken yesterday when a group of Cathedral tour guides went over to see it.
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