Today is pretty manic... just grabbing a few minutes between events to read emails and such like. Got my work proposal off by midnight Myanmar Time (Google tells me it's the right number of hours ahead of the UK...) and made it to the Bright Hour 70th birthday service.
There was a nostalgia section to the service - recalling the early days, but not really saying very much at all. Apparently a man used to go in early to light the boiler to heat the church and then light the fire in the upstairs schoolroom. Sometime later someone known as the 'copper lady' would go into the washhouse and light the copper in readiness for making tea. The chapel crockery was, so far as anyone could remember white with a coloured rim around the top, water was pumped from a communal pump shared with adjacent cottages and milk was fetched from the farm in a can. Tea was bread and butter with homemade jam.
What was sad was the lack of anyone who seemed to know anything about what they did or who they were. There were recollections of rallies with soloists and the ubiquitous (in this area) 'roll call' of churches and groups present but nothing that spoke of people or purpose.
As the women who began this meeting would have been contemporaries of my grandmother (who, had she lived, would have been 100 this year) I found myself able to imagine some of what they would have experienced, but am no wiser about what they actually did. Did they sew and knit? Did they pray? Did they swap recipes? Did they work for charity? I don't know, I'm not sure anyone else did either.
Psalm 71 was well received, along with my imagined old man playing his equally old harp and singing his praises to God. The oldest person present was 99, but as an incomer had never been part of the Bright Hour. I think I was the youngest, though there were a couple of others about my age, which made a pleasant change.
I don't generally like speaking to women's meetings, but this one always feels a little more alive than most. They had a few men present, not just as chauffeurs but as welcomed participants. Maybe there is life in the old thing yet.
After the service we had tea and scones, with the jam so thin you could pour it over the scones, and tea poured from an enormous, ancient pot. The copper lady may be long gone, but her legacy lives on!
Will there be another generation of Christians who socialise together or meet for fellowship? Will they, like the Bright Hour grow old together and find themselves slowly dying off? Does this even matter? Should each generation find its own level and do it its own way? Is there anything new under the sun - will "Cell Groups" one day sound as quaint as "Bright Hour?" Will someone tell of how people used to drive to someone's house, order take aways and sit on IKEA furniture in the way the Copper Lady was spoken of today?
If, by some miracle, our 'Thing in a Pub' ever makes it to 70 years, what stories will be told of its early days? What stories will anyone tell of us after we are gone? And what about the neverending story of which we are a part...?
"Even when I am old and grey, do not forsake me, O God, till I declare your power to the next generation, your might to all who are to come." Psalm 71:18 NIVi