A Parish day of Christian initiation

Bishop June came to preside and confirm at this morning's United Parish Eucharist at St Catherine's. There were nine candidates altogether from our Benefice and from the Parish of Cathays, several of whom I knew who came in support of candidates, still fully active there, twenty years on from when the parish was created  at the break up of the Benefice of Central Cardiff. Once the Sunday school children and teachers arrived at the offertory, the church was just over half full, about 150 adults and children.There were seven clergy present, notably five women and two men, plus our male ordinand. It's typical of the times we're living in. Decades ago Confirmation would have been a standing room only occasion in Parish life. These days, standing room only events seem confined to large funerals of folk who die tragic deaths.

I began to get a bit fidgety towards the end of the service, as I was conscious of my time deadline fast approaching to walk to St Luke's an conduct the infant baptism I prepared for last month. It had been arranged however that church warden Beryl would there to open up and get everything ready. As it happened, she was also at the service, and gave me a lift, so we were both there by ten past twelve with time to spare.

We had an unusual congregation, as both husband and wife each had several siblings married with young children. There were three dozen adults in church and amazingly, fifteen under-fives, including several babes in arms. The kids seemed happy to potter around and enjoy the space, or sit with their parents and watch, all remarkably well behaved, and maybe used to being in church, for a change. I thoroughly enjoyed this celebration. I told the congregation about the Parish Confirmation earlier, and encouraged those who hadn't had their kids baptized to consider it. 

Unusually, most of the service leaflets, which usually get collected in afterwards, weren't discarded but taken away. Beryl wasn't bothered about this, as she thought some of them were looking a bit dog-eared. A few times, I nearly came adrift, as the printed text I was reading from was rather small and not clearly enough laid out in a decent font to make for easy reading while standing up.

After everyone left and things were tidied up, I walked home under overcast skies in the drizzle. Glad it's like this today. It would have made yesterday's lovely fete a sadder an less profitable occasion. A record sum of over £3,500 was made, thanks to hard graft and good Parish teamwork 

Midweek mysteries and digital tasks

At the midweek Eucharist this morning we were four adults and one five year old girl, brought by her mother, and clearly used to being brought to worship. We celebrated Bartholemew the Apostle a day early, with a 1662 BCP service. It's been a while since I last used the old liturgy on a midweek in St Andrew's Los Boliches four years ago, the difference here was an eastward celebration at the Lady Chapel altar. 

Reading the service using a small modern handy booklet without direct lighting was difficult, so I used one of several classic ornate Victorian altar books possessed by the church instead, with much larger, clear print. Even so, I stumbled over page turning at the Offertory, as my eyes weren't quite attuned to the page layout, so I nearly launched into the Consecration rather than the Prayer for the Church Militant. Out of practice, that's for sure. At the end, the child confidently walked into the sacristy and returned with the brass snuffer on a pole to extinguish the altar candles. It was a delightful surprise.

Clare then walked into Montreux gare to meet her friend and former colleague Colette, who came to us from Basel to stay the night. It was marvellous to converse in French, and then later switch to English or a mixture. Colette is fluent in French, German and English after years of working as a teacher internationally. She got me to install WhatsApp on her new smartphone, with German language user interface. Thankfully, Android functions the same way regardless of language settings, so it wasn't a puzzle, except for the odd error message. Curiously, while I was doing this, the house Swisscom wi-fi router lost internet connection. Not even re-booting could restore it. This caused confusion at first, after all, you don't expect fibre broadband to go down like that. 

While internet was inaccessible, but still wirelessly attached to the router, I got a Chromebook browser prompt to access the Swisscom router and troubleshoot the problem. I can remember this happening when we had troubles with the BT network router connection in the CBS office. It was a slower process then, a lot more arcane and fiddly, not user friendly. The shadow of that bad memory warned me not to bother delving into these router settings, potentially in one of several languages. The problem seemed not to be the hardware, but something happening on the external network, so it seemed better to do nothing except wait. An hour later, all was back to normal.

I discovered in the course of the day that no service booklets or sheets were available for me to use next Sunday afternoon for the Christening in Villars. There are few infant baptisms here with an averagely older congregation, and normally when they happen, it's in St John's at a Eucharist, this is now Anglican recommended and desirable best practice, but doesn't cover all pastoral eventualities. So, I had to look for a copy of the required baptism booklet on line, whose contents I could draw from to use for this occasion. 

The Common Worship Baptism rite contains a plethora of options for infant and adult baptisms, and rubrics for all eventualities. I found a PDF to convert to an editable file in Word 2016 on the church computer, then adapted select texts to a recto verso A4 double columned service sheet, of the kind you may still find in the liturgy corner of a specialist church bookshop. The job was made difficult by the fact that the Word conversion preserves all formatting, whether you need it or not. It took me ages to get texts satisfactorily laid out in a readable format. If I hadn't learned how to do this fifteen years ago, the job would have defeated me. 

Just before bed, I emailed the service sheet PDF to  Jane the Church Warden, who'll get copies made at a print-shop. Apparently the church photocopier is on its last legs. Once upon a time, every church had its copier, bought or rented with a service contract. The modern digital print-shop is cheaper, far more versatile in what it offers, and there are far more of them, so there's far less incentive to pay to maintain older equipment. All in all, it was satisfying evening's chore.