My most successful blog post of all time is just about to get its annual boost. Always gets readers in the week running up to pancake day.
Yes – it is the Provost’s Famous Pancake Recipe.
Full instructions here: http://thurible.net/20040224/pancake_receipt/
I fight this every stinkin’ time I’m in church. The average age of our Vestry is 47, the eldest is 69 and the youngest is 28 (*waves*).
However, all I hear about is how we are a ‘grey’ church in fear of dying.
I think it’s too much trust in statistics and not enough in the power of the Holy Spirit. And I will beat that through their heads if it KILLS ME.
Conversations about mission that assume the Church is dying are bad enough, but at least the subject is being talked about. It’s worse when the mere idea of having a conversation about mission causes consternation and retreat behind the brocaded curtains.
If such a conversation is to get going at all, however, we need to be prepared to rethink radically our ecclesiology. It may not be strictly inevitable that decline will continue, but we need to be realistic about the prospects (such as they are) for future provision of ordained ministers and stipends to sustain them. All churches are facing a decline in these areas.
P.S. – I’m not leaving the Holy Spirit out of the reckoning, simply saying that sober and realistic thinking is one of the less trumpeted gifts of the Spirit.
I was feeling much the same Kelvin, I was starting to believe all the doom and gloom merchants and wasn’t looking forward to another 3 days of it. I didn’t really think it was the case but when the dripping tap just keeps on going eventually you start to wonder. LYCIG gave me the kick up the backside I was needing to stop listening to the negative and concentrate on the positive and there is lots of that about. If we keep talking about decline we will talk ourselves into it, we need to stop it now!
Mary Sue,
Perhaps some parts of our church are glad to be grey.
But seriously, while I applaud the resistance to ‘sociological determinism’ (i.e. decline is inevitable), I think we can also think creatively about our demographics before we chuck out the baby, or the bathwater. It’s time to recycle the grey water.
Some recent thoughts I had are here:
http://www.dunc.info/?p=94
(I don’t know how to do that clever trackback thing…)
Isn’t it time now for the BBC to scrap Home Truths on a Saturday morning on Radio 4? If even John Peel, of blessed memory, could not make this phone-in drivel worth listening to, how is any lesser broadcaster to do it? Oh no! Has Home Truths turned me into Disgruntled of Bridge of Allan?
General Synod – the Opera!
A pebble came home with me yesterday. I spent part of the morning watching waves throwing up stones onto concrete sea defences. The power of the waves turning water to foam and the roar of the shingle in the undertow were mesmerising.A single pebble now sits on my desk. Khaki in colour, it is divided in two…
I was walking through Tescos in Alloa this week when I encountered two women who had just met for the first time since new year. One hollered to the other: ?A good Christmas then?? and the reply came, ?Aye!? They got a bit closer. ?A Good New Year then?? The reply was the same, ?Aye!?…
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