What is in Kelvin's Head?

Chant Matters – Compline at St Mark’s Cathedral, Seattle

25/09/2012

I’ve been to some interesting services in the last few weeks. None more so than going to Compline at St Mark’s Cathedral in Seattle recently.

Now, Compline at St Mark’s is pretty famous. For over fifty years, a men’s choir have been singing Compline (which is a service of late night prayer) on a Sunday evening. It happens just about every week and is a very beautiful thing indeed. Imagine the King’s Singers with about 30 members and you are not wide of the mark. The service is broadcast on local radio in Seattle and has been since 1962 and is now available on the internet.

The trouble is, gorgeous though the music is, and it is very gorgeous indeed, hearing it is no substitute for being there. For Compline at St Mark’s is one of the great spiritual experiences that this world offers not simply because of the music. You can, if you are minded, experience lovely choral music in lots of places. My own congregation offers Choral Evensong on a Sunday eveningÂ and very wonderful it is too. There are lots of places which do the same. You can even find Compline in various degrees of gorgeousness in all kinds of other places. No, what makes it special at St Mark’s is the crowd.

You see at St Mark’s, they get hundreds turning up. The service takes place at 9.30 pm and lasts half an hour. Most of the crowd are in place quite a while before the action begins. And those hundreds are young. The majority looked to me to be less than 25 and I’d guess that there were 500 there on Sunday evening, maybe more.

Think about that. Five hundred people on a Sunday evening, mostly young. I know there are churches in the UK who can get those numbers but generally they are few and far between and generally speaking they are not offering Compline.

They don’t just sit either. They sprawl. They lie down. Some bring blankets. They inhabit the sanctuary and lie flat on their backs. They loll.

The only movement in the service comes at the Creed when everyone leaps up and stands as they are able facing liturgical East. As they rise it looks like a scene from a Stanley Spencer picture. The dead rise. They stand for the creed.

Then they loll once more.

I found myself thinking that I had never seen anything like it until I remembered that I had. It was all rather like that wonderful Weather Project that was in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern a couple of years ago where they put mirrors on the ceiling and hung a large sun in the air. People laid on the floor there and gazed up to the mirrored heavens. Now though there were no mirrors, the Cathedral of St Mark, Seattle is rather reminiscent of the Turbine Hall at Tate M. Except that the cavernous Turbine Hall has a good deal more charm.

St Mark’s looked to me to be as ugly as sin though it was considerably improved by scores of lolling, youthful bodies.

That’s part of the puzzle about this Compline. Who are those young people and why do they come? No-one seemed to really know. They did not strike me as being people who generally attach themselves to any other form of organised religion.

That service breaks almost (and that almost is important, as we shall see) rule in the How to Attract Young People Big Book of Church Growth.

The building is as close to hideous as makes no odds.
The choir sing from behind a pillar and can’t be seen.
You don’t get a service sheet on the way in. You don’t in fact get anything.
The service is uncompromisingly old fashioned.
The service is based around Plainsong Chant.
There are no guitars. Not one.
It is unaccompanied by anything.
You don’t get to do anything.
You don’t sing.
You don’t speak.
You don’t engage.
You don’t form community.

And still they come. Hundreds of them. Every week they come.

Of course, there is one rule that they don’t break – there is a sense of mystery and awe and wonder about the whole thing. And there is beauty.

If I am coming to any conclusions about what churches need to develop in order to attract people, emphasising mystery, awe, wonder and above all beauty would be right up there high on the list.

I’m still processing what I saw when I went to St Mark’s. I’ve also a lot to think about from other places that I’ve been, about which there will no doubt be more later.

For now though, imagine 500 mostly young people sprawled out in church; in your church if you like, many lying around the altar.

Who told them they could do that in St Mark’s?

Who tells them they can’t everywhere else?

chant, Compline, plainsong, Seattle, St Mark’s Cathedral

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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