I have had a week’s holiday and I’m only just returning to work, trying to get back into the groove. The “O God, it’s the Vicar” enquirer’s course caught me by surprise… I had popped it in the diary but hadn’t really had a chance to prepare. With the help of a few parishioners we got advert out into the community and hoped for the best. No one had come to Cowshill, two people had come to Eastgate, I wondered what interest there would be in Stanhope…
Four people turned up.
This was quite wonderful. These four people came in two pairs. People with difficult questions about God wanted the opportunity to ask the Vicar in an informal setting and they brought friends. After a silly exercise to help our minds become creative and curious, I invited them to get their questions down and we’d see how far through them we could get. I’ve noticed that people’s questions fall into three broad categories:
- God questions
- Questions that are more about what the church believes, and differences in denomination’s beliefs… but questions are not worded like this.
- Questions that could be described as “problems with the way Christians behave”.
The questions themselves were different to the ones in Eastgate, tonight’s questions were generally:
- Why can’t people bring pets to church?
- Faith, is this too big to understand?
- Why should we come to church? (and separately) What drives us to come to church?
- What is faith?
- Is God too busy to answer my prayer?
- What is the difference between God and Jesus?
- Was God a Jew?
- Why are less people going to church – compared to years ago?
- What is church?
- Why do we have different religions (we narrowed this down to denominations), “Why are there different religions within Christianity?”
As we worked our way through these questions, it became obvious to me that there was a lot more going on in these four peoples lives than simple curiosity about church. There is a pain hidden away, often pain related to the way our parents have treated us, or the way we have treated others – including our children. There is intense grief over deaths that happened during the pandemic, when people couldn’t be with loved ones as they died. The questions listed above became opening for each of them to speak of their sadness or even to shed a tear in grief for past behaviours. We spoke about the way bad behaviour poisons relationships over several generations and the way we see our children repeat our mistakes.
It was a powerfully moving experience to be invited into the lives of these four people, and we explored Christian faith in a way that was related to their real lived experience. I couldn’t have written a course to do this.
In the sense of rural mission, there was nothing about this course that is limited to a rural mission context, but there is the surprise that if you create space for people, sometimes they take you up on the offer.