Love is...

‘I always thought I’d be the one who died first,’ a widower said to me last week (he’d been seriously ill several times in the years before his wife died) ‘but now I’m glad I didn’t because I wouldn’t have liked her to have been as sad as I am’.

The pictures are both in St Nicolas’ churchyard. First, at the southern end, where the variety of spring flowers which people have enjoyed since almost the beginning of the year are just beginning to be overtaken by the dandelion and over growth which will look so untidy while we leave the wildflowers to set seed before cutting back at the end of May. Secondly, at the northern end, where a second burial took place last week in the new area for cremated remains which the widower of the first person buried has been mowing repeatedly for us to help establish a lawn.

Redundant apprentices

If an Apprenticeship is your chosen route for post-16 education and you are made redundant, where does that leave your qualifications and preparations for life and work? It isn’t a question which had occurred to me until this week when I attended a Government briefing on its 14-19 reforms at the Grimsby Institute of FE and HE where I’m a Governor.

It was the question I asked the briefers when they told us both that those who are not in work at the end of Apprenticeships do not gain the relevant qualifications and that the Government offered six months support where there is redundancy. One of the tutors chipped in after me to say that she had some students who are in exactly this position this week and she doesn’t have any funding to continue to provide the training element attached to their work. The Government plan is that by 2020 1 in 5 young people will be apprentices, so getting this right really matters.

The briefers promised an e-mail answer from the Government Department ‘within a fortnight’; I’ll try to wait with some hope for this, although when I was the independent Chair of the Local Authority’s 14-19 Strategy Group we wrote to the Government about some apparent contradictions in its policy mentioning an aspect of the Academy programme as one example and the reply gave no evidence of having read our question but instead told us what was good about the Academy programme.

Meanwhile, here is the whole of the magnificent south door at Middle Rasen (a detail of which I posted earlier in the week following our local Jenkins bagging trip on Saturday). Jenkins calls it ‘the most monumental Norman doorway in Lincolnshire, though not as the guide states "in the country"’ (but that isn’t actually quite what the guide book claims - so we couldn’t decide whether he subtlety misquotes the guide or whether its text had been amended to take account of his gentle stricture).

Kingerby on Saturday

Snarford on Saturday

Middle Rasen on Saturday

Rise in independent churches

There was competition between two independent congregations to buy the redundant St Peter’s Catholic Church building on the Willows estate in this parish. The congregation which is buying the building used to worship on a Sunday by renting space in a school a couple of miles away. The congregation which isn’t has worshipped in our redundant Bishop Edward King Church and will continue to worship in a building the Salvation Army does not now use on a Sunday morning, both of which are on the estate. As it happens I know that a third independent congregation, which also continues to meet in a school on Sunday, was a bidder for the redundant Weelsby Road Methodist Church elsewhere in town which was eventually bought by a Moslem group.

I mentioned some of this last night at the Pastoral Committee for the northern slice of the diocese when I learnt there that the redundant church on the Westcliff estate in Scunthorpe at which I used to work is being sold to the Elim Pentecostal Church. The fellow Rural Dean for that area suggested that this may all be part of a pattern of reshaping Christian presence in our area: well established denominations divesting themselves of surplus buildings and independent evangelical groups and others taking some of them up (although this isn’t happening where population is sparse or where buildings have major maintenance liabilities, so many mediaeval churches in tiny villages and some substantial Victorian and twentieth century churches and chapels will continue to stand empty, be demolished, or be converted into secular use).

If so, it is a further variation on an endlessly shifting denominational pattern. I happened to be looking at a guide to the near by town of Barton last week which told a typical story from an earlier period: ‘the rise of the Free Churches meant that, by the mid-nineteenth century, Anglican churchgoers here were vastly outnumbered by Methodists and other Nonconformists’ although that time round a little while later both large Parish Churches ‘were restored and refurnished’.

The magnificent monument is in the redundant church at Buslingthorpe, near Market Rasen, which we visited on Saturday and which is one of several not too far away from each other in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust.

New Life

Having had most of nine and a half of the last fifteen days off, and having lived through Holy Week and Easter Week again during that time, you would have thought that I’d pick things up today refreshed and regrounded. The picture of the new born Coot and his parents (which we spotted on Thursday in a tucked away spot which is right at the centre of the parish) ought to represent all this.

But the cumulative effect of looking again at all the things I put aside as Holy Week was about to begin and all the things which have accumulated in the fortnight since then (no single one of which would have a chance of outweighing the effects of relaxation and reinspiration) do seem just a little too dispiriting and dominating than they should on what ought to be a joyful Second Sunday of Easter with all the potential of a new Term beginning tomorrow.

I wish there were not quite the number of things in both deanery and parish which I promised myself (and, in many cases, other people) ‘I’ll do when space opens up after Easter’, and just one of the new things on my desk is a letter from the church’s architect who has now been to look at the south aisle roof at St Nicolas’ and recommends substantial work there. I’ll make a list, which always proves the most tempting displacement activity when there seems too much to do.

First, to worship. Last night we went to Doubt with Meryl Streep’s award nominated performance as a 1960s nun and school Principal who moves against her parish priest certain but unable to prove that he is grooming an altar boy for abuse, as good a preparation as any for being subtle about today’s scriptures (‘we declare to you what we have looked at and touched’ and ‘unless I see and touch I will not believe’), and indeed then for tackling what is on the list.