Church Adventure
Jill and I had a fun morning. We have been to the evensong service at the church a few blocks from our house in Trumpington once before, and decided we would go again this morning. Once the baby is born, getting into Cambridge on Sunday morning to the church we have usually been going to will become a big inconvenience since we won’t be able to bike. So we thought getting to know the local church would be a good idea, and we might also get to know more local people. This is the church (not our photo–all the snow we did have is melted now):
So we went, but found a sign on the door saying that the service was being held in Granchester and that the members of Trumpington, Grantchester, and Newnham, three neighboring towns, were all to be there. It is only about 1 mile away, so we had plenty of time to make that service. As we got closer to the church, there was an amusing scene of bunches of old cane-propped men and women emerging out of nooks and crannies of the town and flocking to the church.
The occasion was the formal announcement of a woman’s being ordained/hired to be an assistant to the vicars of all three churches. So they had a joint service and had a sermon on how the church is one body not considered as individual local churches, but as all people who are “in” Christ. So while local traditions are great, churches need to be open to cooperation with other local churches and practices. The service was not sung, as our usual one is, and was generally quite a bit more casual than Little St. Mary’s in Cambridge city center.
The funny thing was that the vicar, Father Andrew, from our usual church, Little St. Mary’s, was there and gave the sermon. The Anglicans seem to have a lot of visiting people and special guest people giving the sermons. Father Andrew probably only gives the Sunday sermons at his church 1 out of every 5-6 Sundays. But with a liturgical service the sermon not the center piece, and usually only 10 minutes. Here is the Grantchester church:
The most fun part was afterwards, when everyone headed a block down the road to one of the town pubs for coffee. We almost didn’t go, but then decided we ought to and were glad we did. They usually have coffee in the church but there were too many people. Apparently the pub has a new owner who had previously asked for a blessing for the pub, and they took this occasion to do it. Here is the pub:
And then had some nice blessings about hospitality and so forth. So we said hi to father Andrew afterwards and he joked that he hoped we “hadn’t abandoned” Little St. Mary’s so we explained our decision and chatted a bit (he returned to Little St. Mary’s to catch the end of their service and our friends there told us he told them he “caught us at another church”). He is the “Dean” of all the churches in the area and so is helping to oversee the collaboration between these three churches. We also talked with the woman who was “ordained” and asked about something mentioned in the sermon called “beating the bounds.” This was (and maybe still is) a ritual done every year where members of a parish would walk around the borders of the parish so everyone would know what they were. She explained how in the “olden days” parishes were responsible both for taxing and for taking care of everyone in their parish who fell on hard times, so knowing who was part of which parish was a big deal. She also said something about disobedient kid’s heads being bonked on the corners of the border, but we didn’t quite catch it. We then talked with the Grantchester vicar who mentioned he studied under Alasdair MacIntyre, a famous philosopher. The vicar had a really weird cadence in his speech that I can’t describe very well–very punctuated or sounding like a slow machine gun.
It was a fun surprise of a morning. We also bought a little book about interesting people buried in the Grantchester cemetary and look forward to reading it.
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