What is in Kelvin's Head?

St Eucalyptus and St Anaglypta revisited

15/03/2017
I was thinking just this morning that it was about time we paid another visit to our conversation about St Eucalyptus on the Rocks and St Anaglypta by the Skerry. It is some seven years since these two congregations came into being in the glorious imagination of my mind. Seven years is a long time on the internet and I was just musing that it might be worth revisiting the conundrum of their priest, which was how he could provide a Godly Eucharist in these two churches which are situated on adjacent islands which are well supplied with bandwidth but which have no Sunday ferry service.

Then just after thinking that it was worth returning to this question, I came upon, by mere happenchance, an example of someone in the Church of Scotland using the internet to conduct a Communion service.

Let me remind you firstly of the original fantasy conundrum and then I’ll point you something that is actually real and then I’ll ask some questions.

This was how I originally posed the St Eucalyptus/St Anaglypta conundrum:

Now, suppose we have two congregations which are linked in fellowship and love but who live on adjacent islands. Their priest, Father Indulgent wants everyone to have communion each Sunday and they are devout and holy and desirous of weekly communion. However, the person who runs the ferry link between the two blessed islands belongs to the Free Church of God of the Sabbath (continuing) and consequently will not operate any boat on a Sunday, for fear of eternal damnation.

What would we think, if Father set up a system (either closed circuit TV or via the internet) whereby he could stand at the altar in St Anaglypta-of-the-Rocks on one island but be seen and heard in St Eucalyptus-by-the-Skerry on the other island and then proceeded to have one communion service? Could he be deemed to consecrate the elements in both churches whilst remaining in one of them?

We will presume that the devout communities in each, respond with a loud Amen at the end of the Eucharistic prayer.

The thing that I noticed that is actually happening is a Church of Scotland minister near Dumfries who is putting online a 7 minute communion service, asking people to prepare bread and wine in their homes in order to take part in a weekly Eucharist. I’ve not forgotten Fr Madpriest’s longstanding commitment to providing a service like this online. I think that the offering from Dumfries is the first time that I’ve come across this kind of thing on a parish website.

When I first posed the case of St Eucalyptus and St Anaglypta online, I was generally sympathetic to experimentation and could fairly easily conceive of the Holy Spirit in her wisdom joining in with the use of technology in order to provide the holy mysteries to the people. It seemed at the time (seven whole years ago) that most feeling amongst those who were commenting on my post were dead against the idea.

I wonder now whether that still holds true.

We now use the internet to connect one person unto another much more routinely than once we did. Clearly some people in some denominations have reached a point where it just seems completely normal to engage in a Eucharistic activity online. I suspect our answers to the questions can tell us much about what we think of community, church and God.

The Church of Scotland congregation that I mentioned above is real and there communion service can be heard here: http://www.dumfriesnorthwest.org.uk/index.php/online-communion-service-16-march-2017/

The rubric on their website is this:

The intention is that you will participate and not spectate or listen in. You are taking communion in precisely the same way as you would at a church service but in your own home. The church is merely expanding way beyond the walls of one building.

I applaud this attempt to reach out to people – I think it is interesting. It does make me ask a lot of questions, which we’ll come to in a minute.

St Eucalyptus and St Anaglypta are fictional but not purely hypothetical. I have to make decisions alongside others about situations which could benefit from this kind of thing all the time. At a time when I see so-called megachurches in the USA rolling out different “campuses” for Sunday worship with everyone connected to hear a preacher preaching from one central place remotely, I can’t help but wonder whether there’s a model here that might be useful in Scotland. Suppose we have St Mary’s, Auchentoshan and St Mary’s, Auchtershuggle – two churches with a glorious heritage of Episcopal worship who are on their uppers. They are 5 miles apart. Would they be better linked to one another in some way (and what way?) or would they be better linked to a larger church at some distance digitally – St Miriam’s Cathedral, Auchterboggan for example which might be some 40 miles distant? To whom should one give the diocesan largesse in order to maintain ministry across a wide area where people are distributed thinly but with commendable devotion?

Now, here’s a few questions.
1. Should our dioceses in the Scottish Episcopal Church be encouraging some churches to experiment in this area?
2. Is a communion service more a communion service at a distance if it is shared live and in real time rather than recorded?
3. Does the Church of England’s recent declaration that “the sacraments of Baptism and the Holy Communion are rightly administered” in the Church of Scotland cover this way of sharing communion in Dumfries. If someone hears it in Carlisle and participates with bread and wine, does the Church of England regard that person as having received communion?
4. Seven years on, do we think that St Eucalyptus and St Anaglypta should receive a diocesan mission grant to install a screen and closed circuit TV equipment to allow the two congregations to receive communion together with Fr Induglent on one island?
5. If you were writing a mission development plan for St Miriams or St Mary’s, Auchentoshan or St Mary’s Auchtershuggle, what would your top three goals for any of them be?
6. Which sacramental acts do you think might be appropriately imparted via some kind of digital link?
St Eucalyptus & St Anaglypta

7 responses to “Whither the Kirk?”

Pausing Place

25/08/2010

I missed last night’s programme, but I thought your comments were interesting.

In a sense, perhaps it’s unsurprising if the SEC is inwardly more positive about itself than the CofS. My take is that in the recent past, at least, the SEC started from a lower common denominator, not being the “local” church in the same way as the Kirk, and so it doesn’t have to contend with others saying of it “look how the mighty have fallen” in quite the same way.

As to the health of the Kirk (and the SEC for that matter), I think we need to reflect on our self-perception and to consider carefully the points and places in which a dying church (congregation or denomination) should be allowed to die gracefully, and the ways in which we might see new life emerge from the rubble.

As a young(ish!), relatively new Christian I have seen examples of (both urban and rural) SEC and Kirk congregations where there are few signs of new growth, little to draw in younger (under 50 year olds, to pick a random-ish number) new folk, and much to sustain negative preconceptions of church as boring, irrelevant and so forth.

We as a faith community need to get much better at stepping up to the mark in our creativity and engagement with our society. The sad truth is that most young adults do not know and have not heard about Jesus Christ, and unless we engage with them in ways culturally relevant to them, and which do not presuppose previous knowledge (too often taken for granted) they never will.

It troubles me, but I do think it’s true to say that in the SEC and in the Kirk we have a church sustained by the traditions and cultural reference points taught to a previous generation. Culture has shifted radically, with the result that the same will not be able to be said in 20 years time.

Our challenge is clear. Whether the Kirk and the SEC can step up to the mark to address what it means to live out the Great Commission in the 21st century is less so.

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Cal

25/08/2010

I didn’t really understand who this programme was aimed at, or even what its aim was.

Yes, numbers have fallen, but perhaps the small number of people who remain are there because they actually want to be, not because it’s the done thing on a Sunday morning.

And personally, I rather like the idea of a church “sustained by traditions”. Clearly the church has to be relevant to modern society, but in abandoning the traditions of worship then you lose the centre of why the church exists in the first place.

There was something very Presbyterian about the programme with its “we’re doomed” mentality. I find the SEC generally more positive in outlook.

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John

25/08/2010

The only book the presenter seemed to have used in his research was ‘The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000’ By Callum G Brown – indeed Callum Brown was one of the speakers. The thesis of this well argued sociological study is that “quite suddenly in 1963 something very profound ruptured the character of the nation and its people sending organised Christianity on a downward spiral to the margins of social significanceâ€. That something he identifies as new media, new gender roles and a moral revolution which has dramatically ended peopleâ€™s conception that they lived Christian lives.â€ It could be said to have happened as â€œsex beganâ€ between the end of the Chatterly ban and the Beatles first LP as the poet Philip Larkin so famously put it.”
To balance this statistical decline the programme flagged up some of the “church without walls ” iniatives in a lame sort of way. All in all a most unsatisfactory programme that only told half the story.

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Kenny

25/08/2010

Good crit Kelvin. My reflection at the end of the programme was, “Lord, we visited this stuff over 30 years ago, and have come out of it stronger and better Church in the SEC.” Hopefully, we stopped longing for ‘the good old days’ a long time ago!

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MartinRitchie

26/08/2010

I thinking “Pausing Place” makes a good point about needing to creatively engage with society. From my own experience of working with a CofS congregation, this creative engagement is a weak spot for many.

As a counterpoint to the programme, interesting to note in the latest “Life and Work” a very positive article about a growing CofS congregation in Stornoway – and I mean really growing! So not all doom and gloom, and I’m sure there are many more examples of bright spots, just as there are in the SEC!

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Graham Vahey

28/08/2010

If the C of S disappeared completely we would be at a loss. During the dark and bleak years of Thatcher’s reign she refused to visit Scotland for 5 years. When she did she expressed shock that we had Royal Regalia and ordered it to be removed immediately for safe-keeping to England. Her ‘Sermon on the Mound’ is now historical for its condescension to the Scots. She was none too pleased to be handed two reports on poverty in Scotland by the powerful Church and Nation Committee. Indeed, it was to this Committee that the population turned to for a moral lead during Thatcherism. When James VI (‘Jamie the Saxt’) became James I in England, the population turned to senior Scottish earls for a moral lead. Unfortunately, the Piskie Church does not give a moral lead in Scotland, apart from the work of the Scottish Constitutional Convention in the recent past. The RC Church does pronounce on moral issues. Could it not be conceivable that all the major Churches could unite in a Committee to pronounce for Scotland on moral issues as the Church & Nation Committee once did?

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Aldous N. Gaiters

01/09/2010

Speaking as a Nonjuror myself I am sure the SEC has a right to a moral voice in Scotland. Taking the US daughter church of the SEC as a model you could see where the fissures would appear. There is room for a modern liberal Christian voice, but even I an old Liberal myself, would have to fear that such a voice might appeal to only a select few.

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