What is in Kelvin's Head?

Culture Catch Up

01/03/2013

I’ve been on annual leave for the last week. It was my (rather late) post-Christmas break. Just after Christmas, I didn’t want to be away from either home or St Mary’s, probably due to having just come back from my three-month sabbatical. Hence, I put off taking time off until now.

This year I threw myself into a culture catch-up with a wee trip to London.

Here are the scores on the doors:

Takin’ Over the Asylum at the Citz in Glasgow – solid reworking of a good TV series for the stage Rating:

La Traviata at the Coliseum – all done with curtains. The curtains open to reveal a set of curtains, which in turn are pushed apart to reveal a set of curtains, which in turn…. All in all a rather good postmodern interpretation. Then end worked well. You need a good seat for this one. Some of the action happened amongst the audience. Rating:

Cocktail Sticks – a new piece by Alan Bennett about his parents. Made me laugh. Made me cry. Rating:

This House – an enormous new play by James Graham about the politics of the 1970s and 1980s. In other words, a play about the politics that I first remember. Rating:

Merrily We Roll Along – The Play. This was a mistake. Booked it at the last-minute thinking I was booking Merrily We Roll Along the Musical. The play is incomprehensible, particularly so in a rehearsed reading. This was a rehearsed reading. Lasted until half time. Rating:

People – another new play by Alan Bennett. This one had the wonderful Frances de la Tour being an imperious old aristocrat. It also had an actress, a bishop and enough trouser-dropping to prove that farce has not died just because Brian Rix is no longer in charge. It is not Alan Bennett’s greatest work but greater than so many other people’s greatest work nonetheless. Rating:

Ice Age Art – the Arrival of the Modern Mind at the British Museum. This one is selling out every day – you need a timed ticket to get in. Fascinating, beguiling show of bits and bobs from Europe made by people we know so little else about. Enigmatic “venus” figurines and a ghostly puppet were my favourites. Rating:

Light Show at the Hayward Gallery. From prehistoric art to the art that depends on the technology of today. (I think we can be pretty sure that none of this will be around in 27000 years). An interesting show. Would perhaps have felt spiritual and holy if one had had the chance to go around it alone. As it was, there were too many other people. (Which was the theme of one of the Bennett plays above, oddly). Rating:

Oh, and I met one or two people I know and one or two I know now.

There we go – not a bad week all told. Four and a half plays and two big art shows. Oh, and I also worshipped last Sunday in a small congregation in the West End (just 19 of us gathered right where London’s heart beats strongest) and at Westminster Abbey on Tuesday evening for a gorgeous Evensong with dozens in the cast and hundreds in the congregation.

God was present in both these services.

And in the rest, I’d say.

Quite a lot of dashing about, not least as I was only in London for three nights.

And that’s what I did on my holidays. Rating:

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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