It has been an interesting and busy day in my cluster, and especially in my little corner of it.
Our 'holiday thankgiving' invitation service went well, with 8 visitors out of the 28 people present. My 95-year-old brought her 90 year old neighbour, my lunch club coordinator brought her grandchildren, a deacon brought her mum, and someone managed to persuade one of our erstwhile members to come along. It was good fun, and we enjoyed worship and fellowship. Best of all, the deacon said she thought we should do it again soon - perhaps next February.
Then it was off to D+2 where there was a Baptismal service. As we will be borrowing their building for ours, I wanted to check out the logistics. It was a rather loud, informal service with lots of people present who rarely enter a church. The Baptismal candidates included two "daily dependent drinkers" and another with a fairly colourful past. It was a great privilege to share in something so utterly unlike Dibley yet only a couple of miles away.
I wonder how B2CS worked out nationally (we weren't registered so won't appear in any official statistics). Certainly in our little corner of the world lots of people came into churches, found a welcome, acceptance, fellowship (and food!) which just may help them contemplate the possibility of exploring faith a little further.
One thing, though, before we do our Baptism, we'll heat up some water using our urn, as there is no heater in D+2's baptistery!
Comments
In line with the Baptist Insurance Company advice, do remember to take the urn out of the baptistery before anyone enters the water!
Our B2CS defied statistical analysis. We had 10 visitors/returnees/fringe members, many of whom hadn't been aware it was B2CS and two of whom have just started looking for a new church after their old one closed down, so I'm not sure they counted! A good number of usual attendees weren't there (there again that's usual, if you see what I mean), but we still ran out of service sheets. Always a morale booster.
The really interesting thing is that the two folk who definitely came in response to an invite, were brought by a couple who often seem to give greater priority to the local stroke club than to church services. More grist to the mill for the argument that too many of us faithful attenders have forgotten how to make friends outside church. And a dig in the ribs for those of us - me included - who tend to differentiate between the more and less spiritually minded in our congregations.
In the end the only item from the B2CS pack we used (apart from the invitations) were the balloons, which went down very well (unfortunate choice of phrase, sorry) and then went home for various grandchildren and possibly even as a bit of a souvenir. Nobody played balloon tennis during the sermon, but my abiding memory of the parable of the prodigal son will now be our very imposing and usually undemonstrative Church Treasurer reading the bit about the grumpy elder brother with a Bible in one hand and a balloon in the other!
Oh yes and while everyone in church (not just the visitors) carried on being a Very Important Person for the day, our two children with help from an adult teacher and an invited teenage helper made some Very Important Biscuits (which were also very nice).
Every day could be back to church Sunday, but I'm glad we made an occasion of it this Sunday.
Hee hee, maybe we could just climb into the urn instead?!
Sounds like you had a good day. For us it was mostly those who'd see themselves as less 'holy' who brought anyone and we, too, had several regulars away.
I have to assume the traffic flows were different yesterday if people were in church rather than supermarkets!
I fear your suggestion may be inappropriate. The scriptures are clear you can't urn your way to salvation...
Groan.
But at least I can still recall how to calculate how long it will take a 3kW portable baptistery heater to warm up the water... so long as I know what the starting temperature is and can assume perfect convection in about 10 cubic metres of water!
Suggest you just think of a number and double it!