Church Bollocks
Despite being a pretty agnostic kind of guy, I’ve been brought up going to church and have continued to do so (mostly) over the years. Since coming to Sale, we’ve been hopping along to the local Anglican franchise, partly just to meet some people and partly for some kind of spiritual experience.
Churches in the west are suffering pretty badly in this day and age. It’s the baby boomers: they went to Sunday school and weren’t having a bar of it. Their parents shoved religion down their necks and they spat it out the first chance they got. My generation grew up viewing Christians as a bunch of naive kill-joys who mean well but are ultimately safely ignored. More recently we’ve come to see Christians as part of the larger destructive force in the world called “religion”: the root of all trouble and strife whether it be suicide bombers or homophobic anti abortion lobbyists.
Anglicans tend to fall into the “quirky but harmless” end of the religious spectrum: Congregations of ageing pew warmers or in the more progressive parishes, younger slightly hippie neo-pantheists or fervent evangelicals armed with acoustic guitars and chorus books. Scattered about are the social misfits: a few with mental illnesses, a few with intellectual disabilities and the working poor.
Today we changed the channel and headed up the road to the happy-clappies where you’ve got young hotties praising the Lord with soft-rock and ecstatic hand-waving followed by a guy holding a Bible who talks about how different Christians are because they have God. Everybody then gets in their four wheel drives and heads to their manicured middle class homes where they eat gourmet salad and watch reruns of 7th Heaven ... or something.
So where do we fit in? That’s what I’ve been asking myself for the last ten years. Sometimes we seem to get it right and make great friends who we connect with and who become a kind of extended family but it never seems to last. Other times, well, maybe church is not meant for critical thinkers. If only I had a heart.
You forgot to share the update that the anglicans at our local church recently resolved a `problem’ with what to do with the children by phoning the families with children under five uninviting them to the Sunday service farewelling the Dean! Go to love it. “And He Took Them In His Arms and Blessed Them” Hahaha
Yeah I wrote this before we discovered that little bit of PR genius