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I have finally got a completed draft of my essay and it is only 100 words over the limit. I am way too glad about this!! I am fairly confident I can get rid of 100 words with a bit of sentence restructuring. Whether it's a good enough essay remains to be seen but I am happy with my last section which effectively says it is!!! So, with the editting and tidying up done I can hit the deadline, hurrah!
Now I need to buy more double ended candles and midnight oil ready for next year.
"We don't know any of these hymns" ... please choose some we do know.
In the dim and distant past when I played piano (and sometimes even organ sans pedals) for small churches with no other musicians I was often given the hymns literally five minutes before the service. Whether I or we knew them did not matter, my task was to get through them the best I could. Latterly, I had a minister who'd arrive having chosen nothing and say 'I think we'll have open worship today' - i.e. the congregation call out songs and you play them. I would not wish to return to those days, I think it is common courtesy to let churhces and musicians know at least a few days in advance what the hymns/songs will be. I am not anti 'open worship' but it is nice to know more than five minutes ahead that it's coming!
For all that, there was an acceptance that if you invited a speaker he or she was free to choose their own hymns and our task was to sing them (I got quite adept at changing tunes). There was no way we'd have told the visitor to choose another set of hymns - that would have been utterly rude. I think it still is.
Manners aside, the need to sing things we know speaks to me of making church comfortable for us - a place where we know what to expect and can have a nice time. Not knowing any of the hymns puts us in the place of the person entering church for the first time or who does not speak our language - we find oursleves excluded, uncomfortbale, not knowing what to do. I think it is good for us to experience this once in a while as it keeps us alert to the foreigness of church.
Baptists are good at criticising more liturgical traditions for their 'vain repetitions' of set prayers, and can even be wary of the Lord's Prayer and 'The Grace' becoming little more than formulas. Yet in some churches a repertoire of half a dozen songs each sung 37.5 times is not questioned - can these too become vain repetitions? I think they can.
What I have learned from this latest experience of hymn choosing is that the good people of Dibley are to be applauded for their willingness to sing whatever I throw at them. My pianists both know that they are free to alter tunes, and the couple of times a year that members choose all the hymns gives them the chance to get their own back! We fairly regularly learn hymns/songs that are new to all of us and even sing in French, Latin, Spanish and Xhosa on occasion. We might be seen as stuck in the dark ages, but in no way are we hymn ignorant!
A week tomorrow I will preach at D+6, whose 'senior pastor' is on sabbatical. It is apparently a church where 'hymn wars' are quite common and a truce operates most of the time so long as the choosing of hymns/songs is shared between the parties. However, during this period it has been agreed that visiting preachers will select all the hymns/songs. I dutifully sent off my order of service, with a mix of hymns and songs, old and new, naff and meaningful, and even some alternatives - then they rang me up and said 'we don't know any of these' - i.e. please choose another set.
This raises some questions for me - and I'll post on them later - but I am surprised that they don't know any of the following: -
So, nice kind readers, please don't comment on their naffness (I know which are really bad) because they do all, in some way, connect to the theme of the service. I know I probably have a wider repertoire of hymns/songs than many people because of my diverse church experience, but I kind of hope that most people regularly in churches would know at least some of them.
Now I need a set of songs that relate to my theme, 'God made me to be me,' and are known to these good people. Maybe I should dig out 'If I were a butterfly...' Hmmm.
Having had almost a week off from essay writing my head is a little clearer and last night I managed to reduce my incomplete draft (three sections still to go!) to below the total word limit by pruning out almost a thousand words - that's not all that helpful because I'll undoubtedly write another 3000 plus before I'm done.
As I prune away, try to sharpen up sentences without them getting too terse and ponder whether this or that paragraph is really essential, I find myself wondering about the whole word limit thing.
Back in my undergrad days when we had a +/- 10% allowance on word limit, people fell in to two camps. There were some who, with a 3k limit would say, right that means 2700 and others who would say that means 3300. No guesses which camp I was in! Even then it struck me that what could be said in 2700 words was an awful lot less than in 3300. By the time it got to 6000 word level 3 essays, the difference was huge. I guess there some people who, without a word limit, would write precious little and others who would never stop writing, and it's probably as difficult whichever one you are. My mother tells the tale of an English exam which had the question 'would you rather be Titania or Puck?' to which one candidate simply wrote 'neither' and passed. How times have changed.
I do understand why we need word limits, even if I dislike them passionately (had you noticed?!) and I know that with my tendency verbosity and non-essential detail they are a good thing, but I do wonder about the fact that I often spend as much time pruning as writing - especially when it gets to the point where I am only about 10 words over! With no leeway on this piece (though I don't think I have to declare the word count) I predict a week of nightmarish editting prior to submission.
I wonder what the Bible might have been like with a word limit on each book?!
Ah yes, SAF, the good old LKH acronym for 'speaking about faith' which was 'apologetics' in lay-speak.
Tonight, in the absence of any other speaker being booked, it is me who becomes the tame face of Church for COMPASS and my theme is 'faith and the workplace.' Not mega thrilling but the only non-Church thing I can offer since I don't play in a band, paint pictures, play football for England or anything else 'sexy.'
So, I think I have three strands to work with...
The first two are kind of ethical things, I guess.
In the first one I want to open up the reality of complexity of selecting an employer/field in which to work. Is there such a thing as 'truly ethical employment?' (no! not in my view). How does a person of faith make a choice? Can people of faith come to different conclusions? (yes!)
In the second I want to pick up the fact that you are paid to work - teach/clean/program/dispense/build/whatever not proselytise; you should be the best teacher/cleaner/etc you can be. I want to stress that actions speak louder than words and that attitudes matter - the values we adopt at work should not differ from those we have in church (you'd be amazed how many of my deacons tell me they behave with different values at work. Or perhaps you wouldn't, maybe I'm naive). By stories of former colleagues, I want to suggest we should avoid legalism (the one I knew who timed his staff's lunch breaks to the minute!) and laziness (the one who was saved so what he did now didn't matter!). Instead by being human, hardworking (but not workaholics) and humourous (a Roman Catholic colleague I really admired for this) we can be good witnesses.
Lastly I want to stress that we can bring into church things from the work place - good practices, new skills and ideas, openness to change and so on. The sacred/secular divide is not helpful we should see the whole of life a just that, a whole.
In 20 mintues this will be a tall order but I'll give it a try. Then I'll let you know how it goes...