VICAR'S LETTER

17 Sundon Road     
Streatley      

June, 2005      

Dear All

As a church we are currently trying to maintain a balance between continuity and change. Recently, when reading Peter Ackroyd's novel, English Music, I came across a passage that seemed to picture exactly what we are trying to do.

The picture comes at the very beginning of the book. The central character, Timothy Harcombe, now an old man, returns to the East London street in which he grew up:

“Of course the surface of things had changed: seventy years before the City Road was a blackened thoroughfare of small shops and factories. I remember how the old hall itself had stood beside the Bee-Hive Boot Works and a shop which sold fancy goods like calico and trimming: now there was a car-rental showroom and a Superdrug chain-store, although I believe that I could make out the shape of the forgotten buildings. On the other side of the hall there had been a dairy, and the family who owned it kept a cow in the backyard; they also sold soap and candles which, it was rumoured, were melted down from its predecessor. On the same spot, when I went back, there was a Spar supermarket. Yet something remained the same. How can I put it? The situation of the buildings, the disposition of everything was familiar to me.”

In this picture there is both change and continuity. There is change. The shops have changed to meet the needs of changing times. The Bee-Hive Boot Works has given way to a car-rental showroom. The shop selling calico has given way to a Superdrug store. But at the same time there is continuity. Look behind the shop fronts and the outline of the old building and possibly much of its original decoration remains perfectly clear.

It is this balance of continuity and change that we are seeking to strike in, for example, the Seasonal Communions or, for that matter, the Family Service with Holy Communion. On the one hand there is change to meet the changing needs of the times. The services have to address the needs of those less well-versed in the ways of the church and of the teachings of the faith than earlier generations were. They are the products of a more secular age. At the same time, however, there is continuity. Behind the bright shop window, the shape of the old building and much of its decoration remain intact. The Seasonal Communion, and indeed the Family Service with Holy Communion, preserve the same essential structure as that of the 9.30, and, in the case of the Seasonal Communion, continue to draw on the prayers and forms of words that long-familiarity have made precious.

Whenever changes are made, there will inevitably be, and for the best possible motives, siren voices either calling us back to the old and tested ways or urging us forward to greater radicalism. Given, however, the over-riding need to preserve the unity of the church as a whole, the gradual way seems best, changing, like the shops, to meet the changing needs but not so radically as to obliterate the buildings within which they stand.

All best wishes

Roger

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