VICAR'S LETTER
17
Sundon Road
Streatley
September, 2007
Dear
All
In the most recent version of the Church of England Prayer Book - the Book of Common Worship - each psalm ends with a prayer. The prayer that ends Psalm 126 includes these words:
"Help us to sow good
seed in times of adversity
and to live to rejoice in your good harvest..."
It is a prayer that speaks to our condition. It is a hard time to sow seed.
Just how hard a time it is can be seen in the struggle we have to maintain our children's work. We offer, as the leaflets to be distributed with the Messenger this month will amply show, a comprehensive service. It begins with the Baptism Visitors calling on families not only to organise the Baptism itself but to explain to them, with the aid of the Baptism DVD, what baptism is all about. Then comes the Baptism itself. After Baptism there is Baptism follow-up - cards every anniversary for the first three years - and the Buggy Groups. Buggy Group leads to Story Club which helps bridge the gap between the end of Buggy Group and the start of Sunday School. Sunday School, with its accompanying Holiday Clubs, then leads forward to the Sunday Clubs and so to Confirmation. It is a comprehensive programme offering fun activities and quality materials (remember the stained-glass window), and yet take-up remained obstinately low.
So what's wrong? Why does take-up, especially beyond Buggy Group, remain relatively low? Our enquiries have elicited four main reasons. The first is social mobility. Quite simply a significant percentage of the children we baptise have left the area by the time they reach Sunday School age. The second is the pressure that some families find themselves under. For quite a few, father is away all week working. For many more, both parents are at work all week struggling to meet the demands of a crippling mortgage. For both these groups Sunday provides a precious and unique opportunity to be together as a family. The third explanation lies in the host of counter-attractions that have become available following the demise of the traditional British Sunday especially the current all-consuming pre-occupation with football. All these features have been with us for some time, but recently another and more worrying one has begun to emerge. Some parents - and we are referring here to parents who have had their children baptised - are beginning to speak of a reluctance to send their children to Sunday School for fear they will be 'got at' and 'indoctrinated," and confused by teaching that will conflict with the teaching they get at school.
Responding to some of these reasons is beyond our powers. We cannot prevent people moving. We cannot deliver people from the lunacy of the housing market. Others, however, we can do something about. We can try to combat the counter-attractions by marketing our product more effectively. This we are beginning to do with our new leaflets, by running taster sessions, by reaching out into the local schools, and by laying plans for the more effective use of the display space available to us at the Parish Centre. We can combat the anxiety about indoctrination by making much clearer the basis on which we operate our children's work. Our standpoint is that truth is to be found by bringing together the discoveries of science, the insights of religion, and the perceptions of, for example, poets and artists, philosophers, and musicians, and not by insisting that any one group has the monopoly. Our basic approach is to offer to children the insights of religion and, in particular, the example of Jesus in the hope that it will inspire them to become better people who will leave the world a better place for them having been here. The independence of the child to accept or reject what is offered is preserved. It is not our job to rob them of that free will which God himself has been at such pains to preserve.
It is a hard time to be sowing and one cannot be sufficiently grateful for the work of all those who give such whole-hearted commitment to the task be it in Baptism visiting and follow-up, Buggy Groups, Story Club, Sunday School, and Sunday Club. With them we go forward in the hope that "we may live to rejoice in God's good harvest."
All best wishes,
Roger