Bury Parish Church

Bury Rectory

July 2008

Dear friends

As you will probably know, the Deanery is in the process of being reorganized, and at some stage in the future Bury Parish Church and St Paul’s will come together.  At the moment it’s all a bit informal; John, our Rector, being the focus for the unity of the two congregations. 

I was really pleased to be involved with St Paul’s.  It doesn’t have a church building, it was sold off and converted into apartments recently, and that carries with it some disadvantages – weddings and funerals no longer come St Paul’s way, and there are few christenings, since people want a ‘proper’ Church for these things.  Without a Church building St Paul’s profile is bound to be much lower in the area.  And many Church buildings do have a special atmosphere.  In any other building you have to work much harder to create that sense of mystery.

On the other hand, the congregation are relieved of the huge burden of a building to worry about.  So much of our energy can go into simply keeping the building going. And, the misunderstanding can creep in, that Church is about a building, and what goes on in it on a Sunday morning, rather than the people - the people who worship there, and those outside it who God wants to reach with his love.  Instead, the Church meets in St Paul’s Primary School.  And that prospect excited me.  After all, many people are intimidated by a church building.  School can be a daunting prospect for some as well, especially if their own memories of school were not great.  But for many people, coming through the school doors is a frequent experience and nothing like so daunting.  Besides, there is a ready made community that we can work with, care for and help to know God.

So how is it going?  I lead the services three out of four weeks, John comes the fourth week.  Both of us are regularly involved in leading assemblies there.  Last autumn I started up an after–school club, one day a week.  It’s nothing very ambitious, the focus is on having a lot of fun and using some of the Bible stories to sow seeds of faith.  About a dozen children attend, which is as much as I can cope with!  It’s a good way to become known amongst the children and teachers, and the parents as well.  I’m hoping to follow it up with a monthly craft event, maybe on a Sunday afternoon or Friday evening, depending on what’s most popular, to which I can invite children and their parents, with some kind of short act of worship at the end.  It’s not Church as we know it, but I think we’re going to have to think quite carefully about what is going to help the people of the parish make connections between their lives and God.

Last year John and I visited the families of the incoming reception year, and we’re hoping to do the same again over the next few months.  Again, nothing spectacular, but that’s the name of the game – slow and patient care.

We’ve tried a number of different things – car boot sales and a sale of nearly new clothes, and we might try that again, this time concentrating on children’s clothes, since that’s where the interest lay.

The challenges are there: a small congregation, few children and few people to staff the kind of things Church generally does; we’re going to have a real struggle keeping the Sunday School going.  Music relies on a pre-recorded disc, which makes worship harder work.  And there’s so much more John and I could be doing in that parish but we’ve other work to do as well.

But………the congregation are pure gold!  They are committed to God and to a Church in that parish, and they are not held back by traditions long past their sell-by-date.  They know that if the Church is to have a future, it must reach out to the people, and that we have to be prepared to try things.  Mission has to be the core activity of God’s people, not an extra for people who are in to that sort of thing!

I’m hoping, too, that we will be able to start a group meeting regularly for a limited period – say six weeks, maybe twice a year, to support one another and to encourage our faith.

It’s all challenging and a bit daunting, but that’s the situation facing the whole Church in this country.  It’s just more obvious and in your face at St Paul’s.  Either the Church rediscovers what the Church really is and what it’s for or it dies.

Gordon

Bury Rectory

26th June 2008

 Dear friends,

This has been a busy and a dusty week at the Parish Church.  At long last, work has started in earnest on the west end of the building.  On Monday, the unsightly wooden porch from inside the south door was taken away, revealing the splendid pair of huge doors Crowther designed as the main entrance to his Church. But that was only the beginning: today, the upper, glazed section of the tower screen has been removed (the lower part will be removed during the next couple of weeks to provide draught-excluding doors in the tower entrance). There is still much to be done, but the narthex is already much lighter and more spacious, and you can begin to see how well it will look when the work is completed.

I have to confess to you that I shall be relieved when all the work, for which the Appeal raised such a magnificent sum, has been completed; fabric matters have absorbed an awful lot of my energy over the past two years, even with all the commitment and expertise of our excellent Fabric Committee. I can think of a dozen things that I would rather be doing, and indeed a dozen more important things for a parish priest to be busy with.

And yet there is no escaping the importance of buildings. Sometimes, you hear clergy and Church leaders bemoaning the fuss that Christians make about their churches, and it certainly is possible almost to idolise bricks and mortar.  But if there are to be organised Christian congregations, they will need places in which to gather for worship, and there would be obvious dangers in meeting in people’s houses rather than in a place that belonged to everybody. On the 8^th June I was honoured to be asked to preach at the first anniversary of Bury U.R.C. in their new building on Parsons Lane, and on the 22^nd to be present at the consecration of the new All Saints Church. Buildings remain a necessity, even in the enlightened Twenty-first Century.

They also say a good deal about the people who use them, just as you can tell a lot about a family by visiting its home.  Ever since I first set foot in Bury Parish Church – It is ten years ago, almost to the day – I have had two strong convictions: first, that it is so fine a building that it ought to be kept open and available to Bury’s people on seven days a week rather than just one; and second, that the entrance, and the space you arrive in when you walk through it, were not worthy of the rest of the building.  I am delighted that we shall soon have a building with a light and spacious welcoming area that invites people to cross the threshold.

But of course, stones and timber and glass are the easy things to change. Welcoming and inviting buildings need welcoming people inside them. I think that we may (just) be better than we used to be at welcoming newcomers into Bury Parish Church, but there is a long way to go, and we all need to play our parts. When did you last have a conversation on a Sunday morning with somebody you didn’t know?