Another sacrifice to the spike. This should have appeared in the April 2012 parish mag, but didn't.
Quite apart from the bling proudly displayed as choristers clink and clank their way back to their stalls after prizegiving, the annual RSCM festival service at Blackburn Cathedral has many other things to commend it, not least the fact that you don’t have to fork out a small fortune to be allowed in.
On a holiday last year we wanted to see the new font in Salisbury Cathedral, and in Annie marched, confident and unchallenged. I hesitated, and was lost. “Get in the queue, Sir,” a voice barked from the Box Office, meaning “Hand over your six quid or hop it.” I hopped it, I’m afraid, and waited without while Annie hobnobbed with vergers within, and it was while I was waiting and seething not a little that another brilliant idea landed - attendance cards! It is quite simple, and it works like this.
Every time you attend a service in your local parish church a sidesperson stamps your card. The idea is that you produce that card at the box office of any cathedral in the land, and if you’ve got enough points you’ll be whisked past the lady flogging tickets to sightseers asking what time the bar opens and straight into the VIP lounge for a small sherry with the Bishop, followed by a guided tour by the Dean himself. It won’t affect cathedral takings all that much, judging by the decline in regular church attendance. And choir persons are particularly privileged, ho-ho, being under a three-line-whip on every Sunday in the year – we can practically fill our cards in Holy Week alone.
I was ticked off last month by the Editor-in-Chief for being longwinded (as if!) so this month’s column is correspondingly short. But I couldn’t let this snippet pass without a mention.
A new Methodist hymnal, Singing the Faith, was published earlier this year, and was reviewed in Church Times by Dr J R Watson, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Durham.
The review is a masterpiece of the art of damning with faint praise, or so I read it. Dr Watson enumerates one or two good points, notes pointedly that the number of hymns by the Wesleys has been virtually halved, and concludes thus:
“It is to be hoped...that the music, and the best of the contemporary texts, will help to make this book successful with a new generation of Methodists, who will never know how much they have lost.”
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