Rolleston is a town which has grown from nothing to almost city size over the last few years, populated largely by refugees from the wreckage of Christchurch. There are a a number of retirees, but most of the inhabitants are young families renting or buying one from the plethora of new houses. The infrastructure of the place tells its own story. There is a large shopping mall, still in the process of construction and a bare paddock, where a proper little town centre is promised. There are playgrounds everywhere and four new primary schools, each with a roll of over 700 children, and an impressive new high school has just finished its first year. There are rugby, soccer and hockey fields, tennis and netball courts and a pretty decent library. The astonishing aquatic centre was opened in 2013. There is one small, 60s era church building, The Church of the Resurrection, dating from the days when Rolleston was a tiny farm service hamlet. It was the first church I ever preached in, and now it houses a small congregation of mostly elderly Presbyterians, Methodists, and Anglicans.
We have our own familial Christmas pattern: church in the morning, an antipasto lunch, the opening of presents and then dinner in the evening. Most of this was easily and happily arranged, and all that was needed was to choose a church. Last year, the family went to the Church of the Resurrection and it hadn't been a great experience, so they looked for somewhere else. Bridget and Scott would not let their children within a bulls roar of anywhere having even the faintest whiff of homophobia about it, and are not prepared to take on the task of explaining to a very bright four year old why it is that when the guy at the front says the world was made in 6 days, or that a great flood once covered the earth, you shouldn't really believe that, but you should believe lots of the other things he says. In the end, the choice was made in the way most things are for Millennials and Gen X-ers: online. The nearby Anglican parish has a static web page that hadn't been updated in a while, and was hard to find unless you knew that Rolleston was part of the Lincoln parish, and anyway, had no mention of Christmas service times. The Pentecostals wrote themselves out of the script for reasons already mentioned, which left only one contender: Hope Presbyterian whose up to the minute Facebook page and website promised a short, family oriented service at 9 am.
So it was, that for the first time in 45 years I didn't attend an Anglican service on Christmas Day. Hope meets in one of the school halls, which was suitably decorated for the occasion. We arrived to find a reasonably competent band limbering up on stage, and a bloke in his early 40s, in the regulation ecclesiastical uniform of a 21st Century Pastor: skinny jeans, t-shirt and a Madonna head set. By 9 am there were about 100 people present, and the service began with a jazzy version of O Come All You Faithful. There was a talk for the couple of dozen children present, following which the kids were given a very well produced activity booklet, of about 20 pages or so, containing enough things to do for the service and for a considerable time afterwards. I noticed the coloured pencils and felt tip pens were all new, and not the usual grab bag of dried up pens and blunt pencils that has lived in a parish cupboard since 1993. I noted with approval that no one embarrassed the kids by dragging them up to the front for show and tell, or to light stuff or extinguish it; they were placed at the side of the hall in a nicely prepared play area, in full view of their parents and with lots of space. A good sound system covered their noise, allowing them to move about the place with minimum distraction to the rest of us. We sang a couple of other carols and a worship song that was, by the standards of modern church music, mercifully and unusually singable. The sermon was not too bad: personable, engaging, delivered with a good dollop of self depreciating humour, though from the vantage point of three days, I can't quite remember what it was about. There was no Eucharist, which I regret. There was no passing of the peace or cup of tea afterwards which I don't. The whole thing took less than 45 minutes. Sweet. We would probably return.
About 15,000 people live in Rolleston. My guess would be that maybe 750 or about 5% of them attended church at Christmas. Or to put that another way, about 14,250 or about 95% of them didn't. Which is something I will talk about next time.
Comments
Unfortunately, it doesn't surprise me - I really wish your critique of Anglican online presence and the ability of Anglicans to offer quality worship within a contemporary timeframe surprised me,
but, after a decade of offering free advice on how to be online in a simple way, and many decades of energy expended in how to run services well, I can only conclude: often, Anglicans just don't want to do those things.
Some have, of course, followed the suggestions - with spectacular results.
I have to declare some responsibility: as a priest, then in my 30s, I was on Standing Committee, part of diocesan strategic planning - in those days Rolleston had a "small congregation of mostly elderly Presbyterians, Methodists, and Anglicans". Rolleston was growing, but all my suggestions were voted down. I was a lone voice against those who were determined to keep things the same for the small congregation of mostly elderly Presbyterians, Methodists, and Anglicans.
Blessings.
I doubt if any of my 3 kids have read a newspaper in years, but that doesn’t mean they are uninformed. In fact they read the news avidly, and generally 24-48 hours before it appears in the Press or on TV One. So a newspaper ad for Christmas service isn’t going to do them much good. They don’t associate with the people who attend Anglican churches - wrong generation, wrong interests, wrong stage of the life cycle. So they aren’t going to learn about the services by word of mouth. So, if a church isn’t online, it doesn’t exist. It’s that simple.
But there’s a bigger issue I am trying to get sorted and it wont fit easily into a blog post. We Christians compete for the 5% who are willing, against all the odds, to go to church. Some of us compete better than others, often for reasons of style or marketing or the ability to make a comfortable “relevant” environment. The ones of us who dont compete then try and emulate, usually very badly, those stylistic or marketing or environmental factors. But we all turn a blind eye to a glaring fact: That 5% was 6% only a couple of years ago, and 7% before that, and within my lifetime was 12% and within my parents lifetime was 25%.
And very very few of us preach a message which makes sense. We may be well aware that The cosmology in our scripture is millennia old, and should be read metaphorically, but our key doctrines: creation, fall, redemption - continue to presuppose a universe that is simply not true. There was no primevally perfect creation from which we fell, but our key doctrines suppose there was. So our message can’t be heard, shouldn’t be heard by a generation who accept the truth of evolution as easily as their grandparents accepted the truth of gravity, and who are rapidly assimilating the insights of Einstein, Bohr and Schroedinger.
I think we can’t proclaim a credible message to this generation because we haven’t figured out ourselves what Jesus means in an evolving and quantum universe. Until we do, we’ll just have to sit around squabbling over the 5%. Then the 4%. Then the 3%...
Newspapers: I didn't check, but when I have in the past, only a very small percentage of parishes advertise in the newspaper. Twice a year our Press publishes a lift-out on weddings. They were begging for articles about weddings/marriage/relationships from vicars/parish priests. I put that word out & encouraged clergy to put something in. You can guess the number of responses: nil.
Notice boards. Letter-box drops. All that 19th century technology is not even regularly used well. When congregations shrink & we close churches, I am regularly the only one who speaks up. The common response is "not many people live there". When I walk around these areas, the infill housing has to be seen to be believed. 4-6 dwellings where there used to be 1 is now normal.
Evolution: of the couple of dozen bishops in our church, are you the only one who has publicly stated acceptance of evolution? You are right - we haven't put energy into making sense of faith living in a 21st-century worldview. In your blog post, you allude to where we have put our energy: who may love whom. And, of course, accepting Jesus & the Bible are wrong about evolution might lead to accepting it might be wrong about...
Blessings
Bosco
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