"Are you allowed to wear that?" the man asked me mock-conspiratorially in a broadish east Belfast accent, indicating the tiny silver cross on my lapel. "I'm a believer", he assured me solemnly. Now the silly part of me (and I realise I am quite silly, really) wanted to reply "I couldn't leave her if I tried" completing the chorus of the 1966 Monkees hit. But I didn't, because sillness was not, well... indicated. You see I was hanging around in the very busy men's toilet on the second floor of John Lewis, Oxford Street. I was waiting for my elderly father who was in the disabled cubicle and might need my help; I had been there for a good while and was beginning to feel a tad self-conscious. To be honest, in such a context, I really didn't want to be engaged in conversation. So I smiled and listened politely.
He and his wife had come to the West End to do a spot of Christmas shopping and were staying with their son who worked in London. He told me that the son had had difficulty in finding a suitable place of worship within reasonable distance of his home in east London. He had wanted to go to - he mentioned the name of a well-known fundamentalist conventicle in central London - but it was too far away for him to travel to on Sunday. He had settled for a moderately distant Baptist community, having tried his local parish church and discovered that he was one of only nine people in the congregation. Nine people! Why, in their home church back in Belfast, they could expect over 1000 worshippers on any Sunday; there were evening prayer walks, bible-reading groups - he reeled off a long list of church-related activities and services. He did not so much rant as boast. His sub-text: how pathetic is a church with only nine people; and how difficult it must be to be a Christian in godless London!
As he spoke, I thought about what he and I had in common. We were both middle-aged men. We shared a nationality and a language. We were both Christians. Depending on how you use the word, we were both Protestants. Yet I felt that I was listening to someone from another planet. This was not just because of his vast congregation (most churches in London that I know, including mine, have less than 1000 but rather more than nine people in them, despite the impression given by Rev) or even because his Christian culture and language was not my own. It was because his pride somehow resided in an expression of religious power and strength - and perhaps, given the complex context of Northern Ireland - dominance.
I have a favourite quote the identity of whose author, I am ashamed to say, I have forgotten. It is this: "The Church is called to be a sign of God's love in the world; not a sign of success or power". This for me is so profoundly true, as to be almost scriptural in its status. My work as a Christian is not to set myself, or my way of operating, above those of other Christians. My work is to communicate God's love through Jesus Christ in my way of living, which I do alongside others, and in the context of my calling as a priest which the Church has approved and mediated. If I do this to the best of my ability, sincerely, authentically and conscientiously, then there is a good chance others will want to live in that way. That is how most churches grow. But if they do not, that does not invalidate me, my ministry or my church. A church does need a critical mass of regular and committed worshippers to survive in the long term, and tiny congregations cannot expect to be subsidised by neighbouring parishes indefinitely if they have simply given in to their own decline. But churches which are weak and poor may nonetheless be expressions of God's love - particularly perhaps to those who are themselves weak and poor.
If the conversation had not been taking place in a public toilet, I might have asked the man why his son did not stay at his local church. Was it because, in so small a number, he felt dispirited and unengaged? Was it because the worship style was not familiar and/or not to his taste? Was it because the teaching lacked authenticity or conviction? Was it because he had no sense of the presence of God? Was there no love? - since all these things are possible, sometimes simultaneously. Or was it because he had stumbled upon an expression of the Christian faith which seemed weak, and he was repelled by weakness? Because that would be an odd disposition for a follower of Christ.
Photo: John Lewis store, Oxford Street, London W1 showing Barbara Hepworth's sculpture: Winged Figure. Courtesy of flickriver.com
