This afternoon I planned to go into the CBS office to work on some budgetary for forthcoming meetings, but first I had to do a funeral preparation visit in Cyncoed. The time constraints of achieving this meant using the car to take me where few buses go, then leaving it on the St Mary's Vicarage forecourt, and walking into the town centre from there. The plan worked fine and I stayed in the office from four until seven.
Getting home however, took three quarters of an hour from the time I got back to the car, instead of the usual ten minutes. The roads around the edge of the centre were congested due to an international football match, which brought hundreds of kilted supporters from Scotland to play Wales. I wonder how much good these events really are for the local economy?
The funeral I'll be officiating at next Wednesday in St David's Ely (standing in for Fr. Jesse Smith) is of a black Pentecostal pastor Bassey Esien, formerly of the Restoration Church, who died in his mid-eighties, a post war immigrant from Nigeria, who was converted and called to ministry here in Britain. His daughter is organising the service in the place where she got married, to have somewhere big enough to accommodate mourners from communities her father served.
It'll be the first time for me to preside at a 'black church' funeral since I was Rector of St Paul's Bristol in the eighties. My job will be both to pray and hold together the various contributions from family friends, church pastors and singers. I'm looking forward to it, especially as this is a local church group about which I have no information - unless they are known by a name which is already in the Cardiff database of churches which I researched and created six years ago.
I'm amazed at the way experiences from my very varied past still continue to be of value, given how much the world has changed during my adult life.
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