“Things you’d never hear in church”. Contestants to the performance area, please…

• Bless you, Vicar. You’re the one with the training. You decide.
• I think as a PCC we just don’t pray enough.
• No, our generation has had its own way for long enough. It’s time for you young people to show us how it’s done.
• He’s a hard working man with his heart in the right place. He needs our support.
• I’m sure we can find another £500 a year to pay for that project.
• Let’s do something spontaneous, generous and anonymous for the vicar’s family.
• I love the way children behave in church.
• Thank you for pointing out my children’s inconsiderate behaviour. I’ll have a quiet word with them.
• The diocese think we’ve paid too much quota this month.
• Are you sure you’ve taken all your annual leave this year, Rector?
• Surely we could give more to support the work of the diocese?
• No, no, we don’t need you to be at this meeting, Vicar. We can manage without you.
• Do we really need to set up another committee to decide that?
• I know she never came to church, so I suppose she wasn’t really a Christian.
• We don’t want to use this christening as just an excuse for a party. We want the service to be the important bit.
• I’d really love to learn some new hymns.
• I’m going to go home and really think about what you said in your sermon, Vicar.
• I realise now that my Sunday School faith isn’t enough.

And, finally…

• Yes. Let’s give that a go.

The programme for the day began and ended with two long services. In the morning the service was followed by half an hour’s meditation, an exercise that was not interrupted by the circumstances of the removal, though packing cases and youth hostel bunks were the only furniture. The services did not take place in church but round the ordinary dinner-table. They invariably began with a Psalm and a hymn specially chosen for the day. There followed a lesson from the Old Testament, a set verse from a hymn (sung daily for several weeks), a New Testament lesson, a period of extempore prayer and the recital of the Lord’s Prayer. Each service concluded with another set verse from a hymn. Readings from the Psalms and the Scripture took the form of a lectio continua, for preference without any omissions. In structure this very much resembled Anglican evensong. Bonhoeffer believed that this sequence of readings and prayers was the most natural and suitable form of service for theologians.1

Quite.

1. From Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: theologian, Christian, contemporary. ed. Edwin Robertson, tran. Eric Mosbacher (London: Collins, 1970).

The changing rooms of Durham Choir School at the end of a school term is a bit like the Church of England : full of Thirty-Nine articles, which nobody very much wants.

Attributed to John Grove, in a talk by Canon Martin Warner, Rochester Cathedral, 16 September 2002

…the police and the local Crown attorney became convinced that they had prevented a tragedy of CNN proportions…

(… a tragedy of CNN proportions … Can a tragedy get any bigger?)

…the great value of wearing a SMILE badge is that it leaves your face free to scowl.

Malcolm Bradbury, ‘Havernization’ , The New York Times, 29 September, 1977

Do this, do that, love your friends and like your neighbours, be just, be extravagantly generous, be honest, be tolerant, have courage, have compassion, use your wits and your imagination, understand the world you live in and be on terms with it, don’t dramatise and dream of escape. Anyhow, that seems to me to be the pattern, so far as we can make it out here.
So come in again with your eyes open, when you feel you can.

Dorothy Sayers, quoted in Anglicansonline.org 1 September 2002

“If it’s slower than me, stupider than me, and tastes better than me, then I’m eating it.”

Anthony Bourdain, guest chef on Steve Wright in the Afternoon, Radio 2, 24 January 2002

Disputation between Jacob de Keersgieter and Mgr. Friar Cornelis, a Franciscan monk; in the presence of Mhr. Jan van Damme, Recorder, and Mhr. Michiel Houwaert, Clerk of the Criminal Court, on the 9th of May, AD 1569, quoted in Thieleman J. van Braght The Martyrs’ Mirror (1660)

Others take a more robust attitude: “The new Archbishop of Canterbury has carefully cultivated an unkempt and dishevelled appearance, which is frightening to behold, and in defiance of the law of Leviticus.”

Simon Hoggart in ‘Despite the castration, it’s been a good year’ The Guardian, Saturday January 3, 2004