Lammas Day thoughts

Lammas Day, first of August - I wonder how many people of today seeing that title on an old fashioned calendar would know that it refers to the ancient custom of baking and offering to the church for use at Mass on this day bread made from the first-fruits of the new summer grain harvest? Loaf-mass=Lammas. Is popular culture today as disconnected from the tradition of Eucharistic community life as it is from agriculture?

Looking over the Cowbridge Benefice Sunday bulletin last night I learned that David Boult the non-stipendiary priest in the Benefice has now been licensed to full time ministry there as Assistant Curate. That'll make a difference. For many months Rector Derek Belcher has been the only full-time cleric in a rural agricultural area of eleven churches, eight of them with weekly services. There's a vacancy for a Team Vicar proving difficult to fill. Thankfully there are a number of retired clerics living in the Vale. Without their help every week, plus local teams of lay people, pastoral life in the area's village parishes would be impossible to sustain. It's cause for concern as numbers of retired clergy shrink, reflecting a decline in numbers of vocations dating back to my ordination time. 

In those days, the Church in Wales promoted liturgical revision and acceptance of Sunday Eucharist and Holy Communion as the norm for worship. This sent Matins and Evensong, services not needing a cleric, into terminal decline. Short-fall priestly vocations has been proportionately greater than that of church attenders. Demand for the Eucharist is now high and clerical numbers to provide it are fewer than ever, as in the Roman Catholic church. Cardiff Deanery has half the clerics it had a decade ago, though few churches have yet had to close, or give up their Sunday Eucharist altogether. At what point does the present pattern of localised church become unsustainable?

Sixteenth century liturgical reform aimed to increase regularity in receiving Communion but it failed. Regular church-going remained less than popular and Communion infrequent.  People were content to attend Matins or Evensong, and in the absence of communicants, Eucharist was not celebrated. Even the four obligatory main feasts a year were poorly attended. Centuries since have seen times of stagnation and revival. Recent church decline follows missionary resurgence in the nineteenth century as the population moved from the countryside into the cities. However worrying the present situation is for mainstream traditional faith communities, nobody can really predict what the future holds, especially in times of such rapid change. 

There are plenty of experiments in mission and worship going on today, quite apart from those enforced by pressure for change. There has been much rethinking of the way Christianity and the Gospel is translated and communicated for the era of modern science, technology and globalisation. But we have yet to see how the spiritual hunger and creative imagination can be captured for such a radically new era, an time in which accounts of Lammas tradition can be accessed on-line in seconds, but rarely if ever encountered in reality.