We celebrated the feast of the Transfiguration today, in advance of tomorrow. It was good to be back again, with a congregation of two dozen mostly familiar faces. After lunch, I took the train to Aigle where churchwarden Jane met me and drove us up to Villars for the evening Eucharist with fifteen present. This was an occasion for me to remember in prayer Roy Damary, Reader at Holy Trinity Geneva, who died back in June. He was up in Villars bringing Communion from the Reserved Sacrament to a group of Christmas Day worshippers, a couple of weeks before my last visit there in January.
I talked briefly about him coming at great personal effort driving 120+km from Geneva on Christmas Day, stepping in when they had no priest to serve them. An expression of his concern that the church shouldn't fail to maintain its round of worship, and naturally that's what being a lay minister was all about. After the service, nobody made mention of this to me. Then, it occurred to me that there may not have been anyone present on this occasion who was there on Christmas Day, such is the fluidity of attendance among regulars as well as visitors.
Maintaining pastoral relations with mobile people in dispersed congregations of this kind is never easy. There's always a risk that ministry becomes nothing more than than cordial but transient engagement between consumers and producers of religious events. It's already characteristic of funeral and wedding ministry, despite efforts made to ensure the occasion is charged with personal meaning. Does publicity and marketing of church ministry make any difference? I doubt it. Good quality information may encourage people to take church ministry and ministers seriously, but time is needed for lasting relationships to grow, and in an increasingly mobile rootless world, this is far harder to achieve. I don't have any answers. There's more to learn about this new world, to know what the right questions may be.
Maintaining pastoral relations with mobile people in dispersed congregations of this kind is never easy. There's always a risk that ministry becomes nothing more than than cordial but transient engagement between consumers and producers of religious events. It's already characteristic of funeral and wedding ministry, despite efforts made to ensure the occasion is charged with personal meaning. Does publicity and marketing of church ministry make any difference? I doubt it. Good quality information may encourage people to take church ministry and ministers seriously, but time is needed for lasting relationships to grow, and in an increasingly mobile rootless world, this is far harder to achieve. I don't have any answers. There's more to learn about this new world, to know what the right questions may be.
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