Sunday Assembly

Sunday Assembly

New Empire Bingo Club, Edinburgh

Tuesday 22 October 2013, 7pm

Led by: Sanderson Jones & Pippa Evans

Soul Searcher can be a bit tetchy at times. What can I say? There’s a lot to be tetchy about in this world. Until tonight, though, I hadn’t really thought of myself as a no-holds-barred misanthrope, but nothing makes you see the worst in humanity quite like an hour and a half of enforced jollity and really bad music. That and people photographing you without asking permission, which is something I’ve commented on before. You snap me with your camera, I’ll snap right back at you in my blog. Honestly, it would be a courtesy to warn folk on the way in.

I’ve heard some truly awful singing this year at the various churches I’ve attended, but the Sunday Assembly band trumps them all. Deafeningly loud and flat, flat, flat. Ouch! I mean, really, an offence to the eardrums, and no amount of clapping along could disguise it. The songs were 500 miles (I wanna be), Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow, The life of Riley and Walking on sunshine. Exuberant, yes, but in the way that pub karaoke singers are exuberant despite their patent lack of tone and talent. There was a bar but I didn’t buy any alcohol – perhaps the numbing effect would have left me more kindly disposed to the discordant caterwauling. As it was, I felt like the designated driver in a crowd of bar-room philosophers.

And no, Sanderson, I don’t think that a second cello would have succeeded in classing up the act. The absent cellist had gone to his mother’s funeral and had sent a message which was read out by Sanderson Jones, but this was the only genuinely affecting and thought provoking content of the meeting. The rest, as I shall reveal, was … oh dear, where do I begin?

Let’s begin with the other offences to the senses, because the New Empire Bingo Club offends the eye with its pink formica and the nose with its awful stench of hoover bags and stale smoke – doesn’t the smoking ban apply to bingo halls? Someone’s been having the odd crafty fag or twenty in that building. Not a great environment in which to nurture community spirit, but maybe it was the best venue they could get with their limited budget.

They want a bigger budget, of course – £500,000 bigger. Yes, that’s right, they’re crowdsourcing the funds they’ll need to take over the world. Apparently there was also a collection plate going round tonight, but it didn’t come my way, though I’d have bunged them a couple of quid if it had, so they could do with organising that aspect of their fundraising a little better.

Sanderson describes the basic outlook thus: if you had an excellent pair of shoes but there was a stone in one of them, you wouldn’t throw out the shoes, you’d throw out the stone. Richard Holloway’s reaction, apparently, was to tell him, “Well done, you’ve just made your first parable.”

So they’ve thrown out religion and kept all the good bits of church (singing and cake). Their mantra is Live Better, Help Often, Wonder More. What I’m wondering is, do you need to be part of a Sunday Assembly to do that? Do you need to read out Walt Whitman poems and talk about wave-particle duality in terms of dots and wibbly wobbly things and debunk time as a meaningless construct and say “atoms are weird” and ask people if they’ve ever drunk so much absinthe and listened to so much Enya that they feel themselves to be at the centre of the universe? The chap who did this also had the good grace to say, “This talk will be better if you lower your expectations.”

Pippa Evans, who is apparently the 26^th most influential atheist in the UK, talked about how it’s okay to fail as a comedian if you’re about to become leader of a worldwide movement that will awaken non-religious community spirit. I didn’t find myself warming to her.

Sanderson Jones talked about finding things to be grateful for. His technique for celebrating life is to think about death. He dreams of dying peacefully in his sleep, but next to someone he dislikes … who hates surprises. This was the only thing that made me laugh. Clearly I haven’t developed the “attitude for gratitude”.

Will the Sunday Assembly succeed in expanding and enlightening and uplifting and all the other affirming and upbeat things they want to do? Other secular movements have come and gone, and none of them has really had the staying power that churches have. But Sanderson and Pippa are hopeful, and good for them. They managed to get fifty folk to come out on a nasty October night, so it could be the start of something wonderful … for those who like that sort of thing.

Frankly, I’d rather go to church.

Craigrownie Parish Church, Cove

Craigrownie Parish Church, Cove

Sacrament of Holy Communion, Sunday 20 October 2013, 11.30am

Minister: Rev Norma Moore

After the not-so-great service at Paisley Abbey last weekend, I carried on northwards and westwards and ended up in the Rosneath peninsula, where I’ve spent a splendid week sequestered at Cove Park getting more work done than I ever thought possible and occasionally braving the rain and the highland cattle to get my daily fix of internet access. There’s definitely something to be said for a break from the norm.

So this week, it was Craigrownie Parish Church, or Craigrownie “Paries” Church if you believe the intimations notice. What is it with church leaflets and proofreading? Apparently people in the peninsula are fighting the scourge of Japanese knotweed, so this may reduce the time they have available to root out typos. I feel I should offer my services; my rates are very reasonable.

Craigrownie is a proper old-fashioned Church of Scotland village kirk with some nice stained glass and the congregational turnout of “about fifty” that I’ve come to expect this year. Whether this is typical for Craigrownie I couldn’t say, but it was a communion service, so that may have drawn a few more than usual. In any case, the church seemed pretty full, although the first thing read out at the beginning of the service was an edict form the presbytery of Dumbarton (yes, yes, it's been pointed out, see comments below, and Matthew 7:1-3) about the linkage of Craigrownie with the neighbouring parishes of Garelochhead and St Modan’s. Linkage … what does that entail? Alas, I won’t be around to find out.

There were proper old-fashioned hymns too, albeit accompanied by ponderous and uneven organ playing, which was at its worst during psalm 121 (I to the hills will lift mine eyes), when the organist couldn’t choose which of the two versions of French in CH4 he/she was playing, settling for a mix-and-match version somewhere in between. Other numbers from the old-school C of S hit parade included Psalm 24:7-10 (Ye gates lift up your heads to St George’s, Edinburgh), God whose almighty word, Now thank we all our God, and O God of Bethel by whose hand, which might be the first paraphrase I’ve heard all year - I need to check that. The paraphrases seem to have gone out of fashion elsewhere, but we actually got two of them at Craigrownie, because we also sang Now, Lord, according to thy word at the end. All that and a sung Amen; you can’t go much more trad than that.

The readings were 2 Timothy 3:14 - 4:5 and Luke 18:1-8, the persistent widow and the unjust judge, and the theme of the sermon was “Persistence in Prayer”, drawing on the readings and on psalm 121, a plea for safety and a statement of faith in the absolute reliability of God, who is constantly there (or should that be here?) looking out for us. Just as God is constant, said Rev Moore, we should be constant and should live in confidence that God will prevail.

Turning to the gospel reading, she asked us to consider why we should persist in praying to God for justice when it is in the divine nature to grant justice? And she offered three answers: 1) through persistent prayer we remain mindful of God and of the need to put our own spiritual house in order and to keep alive our own commitment to justice; 2) by praying persistently for something that doesn’t seem to be happening, we may realise that the answer is in our own hands and that God’s will is to be done through us; and 3) God doesn’t see persistent prayer as nagging, but loves to hear our prayers and wants us to share everything with him, and we ought to consider the judge/widow scenario in reverse – what if God is the one who is persistently asking us to deliver justice?

All of which makes me think of a yet-to-be-written blog post about Try Praying, which I will get round to soon.

I had parked at the foot of the hill, outside the burgh hall, and walked (no, actually, I climbed, because getting anywhere in this part of the world somehow involves a steep, slippery hill) the 250 yards to the church. The locals knew better and had all driven up to the church itself. On the short but perilous journey back to the car I nearly fell over twice (first time moss, second time leaves), I got thwacked in the face by a tree branch and I managed to get soaked even through my waterproof coat. That’s the wet, wild west coast for you.

But now it’s back to auld claes and porridge, and back to the east and my beloved Edinburgh. All that fresh air is fine in small doses, but the Soul Searcher is a city girl at heart.

Paisley Abbey

Paisley Abbey

Service of Thanksgiving for the Royal National Mòd, 2.30pm, Sunday 13^th October

Led by: Reverend Iain Thomson

Precentors: Mr John Macleod & Rev Kenny Macleod

I was in unfamiliar territory this Sunday, in Paisley, the town that Starbucks forgot. After trailing round several caffeine-free streets and two grim little shopping malls, tongue hanging out like Miley Cyrus (see, Soul Searcher’s not entirely disconnected from popular culture), I realised that Costa and Caffe Nero have also forsaken this unloveliest of Scottish cities, and I didn’t much like the look of Muffin Break.

Isn’t Paisley too far west for the Soul Searcher? Well, there were two reasons for going there: a) it’s sort of en route to where I have to be on Monday, which is further west, and b) it’s Mòd week, which means that the town should have been buzzing with the excitement of what people persist in billing as the biggest Gaelic cultural event of the year.

Er … should have been. You can’t miss BBC ALBA’s OB trucks, lying in wait for the first of the competitions tomorrow, but the city fathers hadn’t exactly hung out the tartan bunting. Nor had the Abbey seen fit to list the service on its website – not under “services” or “events” or “news” or in its October newsletter. Despite this, a fair crowd had gathered. Difficult to count, but I’m estimating 150+ of a congregation, which isn’t bad going, but it didn’t make for the greatest Gaelic church experience I’ve ever had.

And since it scores low for both ecclesiastical and Gaelic reasons, my review is divided into two parts. This bit for my Anglophone readers, about the church stuff, and a rant about language politics further down the page.

The psalms were 136:1-2, 96:1-3, 98:3-4, 40:5, all attractively printed in multicoloured ink and adorned with the Mòd Phàislig (Paisley Mòd, as if you couldn’t work that out) logo, but whoever designed it could have done with spending a little more time proofing it and weeding out the typos. There’s a new god in town, folks, and his name appears to be Lehovah.

Of the two precentors, the older chap with the white hair was croakier and less easy to follow than the younger chap with the tonsure, who had that bright tenor tone that you want in a precentor, but the tunes were familiar in any case. The real problem was that nobody in the congregation seemed to be singing. I was, and my Mòd competitor friend to the left of me was (you always bump into someone you know at the Mòd) and the chap immediately in front of me was, but all around us sat dozens more folk with their mouths firmly shut. It makes one feel very exposed, and more “listened to”, which doesn’t feel great even for a confident singer like me. Frankly, we made a better fist of it at St Columba’s Free back in March when there were only 16 of us.

The reading was Revelation 5 (quite why, I’m not sure, because it was read in English and then never referred to again), and the text for the sermon was Psalm 100. Rev Thomson spoke for twice as long as was necessary, because he provided his own subtitles by translating everything he said into English (see Gaelic rant below), and in an unintentionally ironic counterpart to the muted congregational singing his theme was that we should sing to God from the very depths of our soul, which we can do wholeheartedly only when we enter into the same spirit as inspired the psalmist.

In a nutshell, we should worship God for all the reasons given in the psalm – because he is God, because he made us, because he tends us like his flock, because he is good and merciful, and because the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever (first question in the catechism, for those who had forgotten).

But hearing any of this was a challenge, because the lectern was positioned in the middle of an echo chamber and the reverberations drowned out quite a bit of what was said. Perhaps it’s just as well he said it all twice.

Chunnaic mi rudeigin air duilleag Facebook caraid dhomh a bhon-dè: “tha e math a bhith beò agus gun a bhith aig a’ Mhòd”. The e a’ còrdadh ri cuid agus buidhe dhaibhsan, ach tha leasan fhathast – fhathast! – aig a’ Chomann ri ionnsachadh mu dheidhinn cleachdadh cànain.

Carson a bhiodh e cho doirbh duilleag Ghàidhlig a chur ri chèile? Nan robh iad air “Dàmhair” a chur an àite “October”, an tigeadh crìoch air an t-saoghal? Bhiodh e furasta gu leòr obrachadh a-mach, nach biodh? Nach eil facail againn airson “welcome”, “prayer”, “psalm”, “reading”, “benediction”, etc? Smaoinichibh, a Chomainn! Dè tha ceàrr air an deilbh seo? Coimhidibh … smaoinichibh … seadh, tha a h-uile rud sa Bheurla!

Dè a’ Ghàidhlig air “Doh!”?

O seadh, agus ar caraid ùr “Lehobhah”? Nach eil cuimhne agaibh air “Na biodh diathan sam bith eile agad am làthair-sa”?

Thuirt mi gu h-àrd gun d’ rinn am ministear fo-thiotalan dha fhèin, agus ’s e a rinn, cho nàdarra nach robh e fiù ’s a’ tarraing anail eadar an dàrna cànan agus an cànan eile … “Cionnas a tha sinn a’ dol a thoirt dha cliù, how are we to give him praise?”

Is e a’ cheist a th’ agam, carson? Cò dha? Is e seo am Mòd, agus bhiodh dùil agad gum biodh Gàidhlig ann, agus a bharrachd air sin, gum biodh tearmann air choireigin aig a’ chànan far nach biodh Beurla a’ tighinn a-steach air a’ chùis.

Trì facail sa chànan eile … does … not … compute!

Agus trì sa Ghàidhlig: o mo chreach! No OMC, mar a bhios a’ chlann ag ràdh. Soul Searcher’s scratched her head about lots of things this year, but this one … this one has finally left me lost for words, in either language. 

St Paul’s and St George’s Church

St Paul’s and St George’s Church

Worship Service, Sunday 06 October 2013, 11am

Led by: Richard Cornfield, Associate Rector

Preacher: Vanessa Conant, Associate Rector

After a few small churches where any visitor is conspicuous, I thought I’d go for a big one where I could hide at the back. “Ps and Gs” should be a good place to hide, because there might have been about 200 folk there (beyond a certain number it gets difficult to count, so that’s ballpark), but the people sitting in front of and to the side of me made a point of saying hello, which was nice of them. As I’ve said before, there’s a balance somewhere between being lovebombed and being completely ignored.

Other Episcopal churches I’ve been to so far, Old St Paul’s, St Columba’s by the Castle and St Mary’s Cathedral, have all been pretty trad with their Anglican liturgy. Not so Ps and Gs, which had no liturgy (maybe their early communion service does, but I was still dragging myself out of bed at that point). In fact, so non-liturgical was it that barely anyone said, “Thanks be to God,” in response to the reader’s “This is the word of the Lord.”

It was a service of contrasts, bests and worsts. There’s a band (aaarrgh! thought the Soul Searcher, this is a bad sign) but the guitars/fiddle/bodhran combination gave it a folksier feel—which worked particularly well for My Heart is Filled with Thankfulness (Getty/Townend) but less so for Praise my Soul the King of Heaven—the backing singers had some nice harmonies, and the sound engineers hadn’t gone overboard with amps and base, which is more than can be said for some of the dire worship bands I’ve encountered this year. On the other hand, there were two songs that were so drab, and so deep – a point that deserves a paragraph of its own – that I just gave up and stopped trying to sing at those points.

Okay, about pitch. I’m a mezzo and I can sing from the G below middle C up to the B-flat below high C. That’s just over two octaves, but I wouldn’t want to spend much time singing at the extremes of that range. Keep me between middle C and the F/G an octave and a half higher and I’ll be quite happy, and even that is a big range that most songs for untrained singers, such as people in church congregations, wouldn’t span. As singers know, and as arrangers of songs ought to know, what makes a song comfortable to sing is not so much how high or low the highest and lowest notes are as where the tessitura lies, i.e. the typical pitch range, and once you’re grubbing about at the bottom of what’s comfortable for you it can feel, and sound, like growling. Last week’s music was generally too low, and over the year I’ve noticed that the trendier the music the lower it’s pitched. I think it must have something to do with the worship band style of singing, but it doesn’t make it easy to participate. Goodness knows how a soprano or tenor would fare.

But now that my little rant about gravelly singing is over, let’s go back to the sermon, and hats off to Vanessa Conant, who is right up there in the running for best preacher of the year. Matter of fact, personal and heartfelt, she drew on the story of Jesus preaching from the boats and filling Simon Peter’s nets with fish (Luke 5:1-11) and talked about how frightening it can feel to be called to follow Christ. Let’s bring our fears into the light, she said—the fear of the unknown, of the ridiculous, of looking like an idiot—and acknowledge that our first reaction is to decline the responsibility and ask Jesus to choose someone else.

The abundance of God’s presence can be scary too; it breaks our nets and causes our boats to sink with the weight of it, and of course we want to opt for a safe way out. Being called brings a sense not of certainty or strength but of inadequacy and brokenness, but God calls us not for our strength or competence but for the totality of ourselves, and we don’t have to become someone we’re not to be a disciple.

She was really very good, and didn’t seem to have any speaking notes either. All their sermons are online, so have a listen.

Unfortunately, the chap who led the prayers was the mayor of Dullsville, a real let down after that sermon, but then Vanessa was a hard act to follow. 

Niddrie Community Church

Niddrie Community Church 

Morning service, Sunday 29^th September 2013, 11am

Led by: Andy Constable, assistant pastor

Preacher: Mez McConnell, senior pastor

Knitting on the Sabbath might have been frowned upon at one time, but we’re so much more relaxed about that sort of thing now, aren’t we? Actually bringing your knitting to church, though, still seems to be overstepping the mark somewhat, but it’s not the first time there’s been a tricoteuse in the back row; the other one was at Charlotte Chapel. Well, they say that the devil makes work for idle hands.

What I’d have liked in my hands was a bible, but I didn’t see them at the door as I came in, and then I didn’t want to walk all the way back in front of everyone to get one when it came time for the readings (bits of John 15 and John 16 – they’ve been studying John’s gospel all year). But not to worry; I had my work cut out taking notes on Mez McConnell’s sermon, one in a series on the holy spirit, taking us into the same territory covered some months ago at Holyrood Abbey Church, even down to the Edinburgh Castle floodlights analogy to illustrate how the holy spirit illuminates Jesus the better to let us see his splendour. They must teach them all that in evangelical pastor school.

Unlike the Holyrood Abbey preacher, though, Mez doesn’t fight shy of theology, even though the trinity is a concept that’s been baffling his head for fifteen years. Yours and mine both, Mez. He even had a PowerPoint diagram showing that the Father is God, the son is God and the Holy Spirit is God, but that the Father is not the Son or the Spirit, the Son is not the Father or the Spirit, and that there are not three gods, only one.

McConnell is an energetic and engaging speaker, well rehearsed and self-deprecating to a fault – “I can’t guarantee much because I’m just a little dude”, “I can barely string a sentence together”. Oh no, laddie, you’re good and you know it, although I think you might have given J.I. Packer credit for the quotation you read out rather than attributing it to “some old dude”.

Hey, dude alert! As orthodox as the preaching was, the dress code was certainly laid back. Hoodies and combat pants (Mez), assorted trainers (most men), blue hair (the knitting woman), and possibly the best hippy skirt/shawl/sandals combination yet spotted this year. I felt distinctly overdressed and I hadn’t really made a special effort.

For those readers unfamiliar with Edinburgh, it’s worth pointing out that Niddrie is not a smart or fashionable area. If you’ve seen Trainspotting, you’ll know what it used to look like before the housing regeneration schemes got going – acres of boarded up and abandoned flats where only the brave or foolhardy would venture. It looks a lot different now, but it’s still economically deprived and not short of problems. Niddrie Community Church is part of 20 Schemes, a cross-denominational initiative to plant new churches in poor areas, and of the East of Scotland Gospel Partnership, all but one of whose partner churches I’ve already visited this year.

Niddrie Community Church is the sort of place where people spot a new face and immediately come to speak to you (leaning in just a little too close, perhaps, and being just a tad too inquisitive), but that’s better than being completely ignored, which has happened elsewhere. I was approached by the leader of the women’s ministry. Sorry, did we just rewind by about 150 years? The women’s ministry! No, no, the Soul Searcher does not do gender segregation, but apparently NCC does. All the elders and deacons are men, and whatever the women get up to is separate. Sharpen your knitting needles, sisters. You need to go in there and assert yourselves. But seriously, boys – and, more importantly, girls – do you really think this is how a church should be in the 21^st century?

Music-wise, it was that can’t-put-my-finger-on-it genre that I’ve encountered a couple of times now. A bit Sally Army, a bit Gospel Hall – only one song I’d heard before, I stand amazed in the presence (How Marvellous! How Wonderful!) – all with a rolling electronic keyboard accompaniment and generally pitched too low but otherwise very singable, and with 70-plus folk singing along the sound fairly filled the sports hall.

About an hour in, I spotted the video camera. They really ought to warn folk that they’re liable to be recorded and tell them where to sit if they don’t want to be on camera. I didn’t expect to be filmed, but on the other hand I don’t think they expected to be blogged about. Let’s call it a quid pro quo.

So that was Niddrie Community Church – bustling, young and “producing children at an alarming rate” – and it’s nice to know that there’s something dynamic happening in the area, even if they all need a lesson in gender politics.

Old Schoolhouse Christian Fellowship

Old Schoolhouse Christian Fellowship

Sunday Morning Service, Sunday 22 September 2013, 11am

Led by: didn’t learn his name

Speaker: Charles Tulloch

Shades of Bellevue Chapel at this morning’s church, which offered not so much a service as a fundraising speech and some holiday snaps, but with better music than at Bellevue … and birthday cake.

The Old Schoolhouse seats sixty and was almost full, but many people were visitors.

After being asked three times if I was from St Columba’s, I had to ask, “Which St Columba’s?”. It seems that the Old Schoolhouse congregation is dwindling, the young folk having upped sticks and decamped to Central: Jesus at the Heart (for those who like that sort of thing, as a famous Morningside lady once said), and that St Columba’s Free Church is coming in to plant a new church and revive the OSH’s fortunes. This makes sense for the Free Church vis-à-vis its geographical coverage of Edinburgh, and I’m sure it can’t be easy for an independent Brethren group to keep going without wider denominational support. At least, I hope I’m right to categorise the OSH as Brethren in my list of churches, based on the history page of its website.

The minister/pastor, whose name I didn’t learn, had been on holiday to Austria. He likes mountains – “all the best scenery is where glaciers have been carving things out” – and can’t understand why anyone would ever go to Holland, because it’s totally flat and there’s nothing to do there. He showed slides of the peaks he’d climbed, on the descent from which he had sung the hymns chosen for this morning: To God be the glory, great things he hath done; Praise the Saviour, ye who know him; Jesus is Lord, creation’s voice proclaims it; and Lord, thy word abideth. And despite the computer having thrown “a hissy fit” before the service began, the technical stuff all went smoothly.

The reading was Luke 8:4-15 (NIV), the parable of the sower, which was the set-up for guest speaker Charles Tulloch’s talk about the work of the Gideons International, described as an organisation of “Christian professional businessmen and their wives”. No businesswomen or their husbands, then? No single women? No blue-collar workers? Or maybe the Soul Searcher’s asking a few daft lassie questions there.

The Gideons give out 80 million “scriptures” (by which I assume he means both whole bibles and New Testaments) a year in 195 countries, only 10 of which raise enough money to pay for the books they distribute, so in the UK 49% of money raised goes towards purchasing books for overseas distribution. That’s a lot of books by anyone’s standards.

Not every school will allow the Gideons to distribute bibles to their pupils, but in a month when the Scottish press has carried stories about the religious indoctrination of children and the dissemination of creationist literature in state schools, the minister/pastor rejoiced in the fact that a bible distribution session in a local school (unnamed) had allowed him to turn a lesson on euthanasia into a discussion of Christ’s return and the promise of eternal life. Because for those who believe in Jesus, everything is going to be all right.

Well, I’ve no objection to such discussions in the context of a comparative religion class, and at least he’s not a young-earth creationist, or he wouldn’t have credited the glaciers for the Austrian landscape. But does it mean that the kids never got their euthanasia debate?

There was coffee, and cake, and chat. Everyone was very nice and friendly, but it left me asking myself, “Yes … but?” It’s unlikely to tempt me back in its current form, although maybe the St Columba’s deal will give the Old Schoolhouse a new lease of life. 

Liberton Kirk

Liberton Kirk

Morning Worship (early), Sunday 15^th September 2013, 9.30am

Preacher: John Young

I have no idea which parish I live in, and I might have reached the end of my Soul Search mission without the thought ever crossing my mind were it not for a very splendid cat. The feline in question has graciously allowed me to live in her house for the past week while her regular butler and housekeeper are on holiday, and what should land on the doormat while I was tending to her every whim but a copy of the Liberton Kirk magazine.

It got me thinking … where I live, over in EH7, I’ve never once in seven years received a leaflet or a newsletter or any other communication from a church in my own (albeit less salubrious) district, although the Presbytery of Edinburgh’s church locator reveals ten churches within a one-mile radius of my flat. Which of these is “my” parish church, though? I’ve no idea. That’s the Church of Scotland, of course. The Catholic directory is “under construction” and full of dead links, and I’m assuming that smaller denominations don’t attempt full coverage.

So who would I call if I wanted to find out which parish I’m domiciled in? The people at 121 George Street couldn’t answer a simple query I had about the General Assembly (which day and what time of day was a particular debate taking place, and this was me asking one week before the Assembly itself – no schedule online, you see), so I expect they’d be equally useless on this one. I could go to the library, I suppose, but who uses a library these days? You really expect a website to be able to serve you up this kind of data, don’t you? I might just have to try all ten local churches and see which one of them claims to cover my street.

But all of this is by the by, because this week it was Liberton Kirk, which, unlike some of its sister churches, has really got its act together. Not only does it produce its 44-page magazine and deliver it to every household in the parish, but it boasts a full programme of activities from badminton and Brownies to Scrabble and Scottish country dancing, on top of its three services on a Sunday and mid-week bible study and praise meetings.

A chap called David, who is a member at Liberton, was kind enough to comment on my blog earlier in the year. I looked for you this morning, David, but I didn’t see you, or I failed to recognise you if you were there. Sorry! But thanks for the recommendation, because I enjoyed the service.

The later service (11am) is for the trendy guitar people, to which Soul Searcher says a resounding, “No thanks!”, but the early service (9.30am) is for people who like proper hymns and no nonsense, and there were about 60 of us. In fact, the minister almost apologised for an unfamiliar hymn, Loving creator, and rightly so, because it really didn’t stand up alongside the others (all from CH4): Immortal, invisible; Jesus, lover of my soul; and You are before me, Lord (psalm 139).

John Young’s theme was “Just 10 – Prosper with a clear conscience”, one in a series of sermons looking at the ten commandments, based on sermons given by one J. John, who seems to be well known to everyone in the world except me. This week, “What is stealing, and is it possible to get by without it?”, which I initially misread on the website as “… is it possible to get away with it?”. Everyone’s at it – the Fiat garage, the respectable Morningside restaurant, the online music downloader – and the sermon notes make it particularly easy to summarise this one because there are eight questions and two places to fill in the blanks. So, here goes:

Three ways not to prosper in life: dishonesty, defrauding and defaulting. Three right ways to prosper: work, saving and prayer. So, yes, I’ll admit to being old-fashioned. No, I have no stolen library books, unpaid taxes or dodgy dealings, so I do pretty well in the “honesty test”, though I can’t claim never to have written a shopping list on an office post-it. But an interesting answer to the final question, “What has God been saying to you today, and how are you planning to respond?”, is contingent on his saying something, otherwise the answer will be, “Nothing”, and, “To what?”.

The reading, incidentally, was Luke 19:1-10, the story of Zacchaeus (NIV). Maybe that’s me sitting up there in the tree trying to see without being seen, but Jesus didn’t call to me this morning.

So that’s all, really. It’s old-school Church of Scotland. The building is kind of back to front, in the sense that the doors are at the pulpit end, so latecomers will be conspicuous, and the scent of the flowers was pretty strong, but not unpleasant.

And on a completely pedantic note, which will be appreciated only by my fellow grammar freaks, I was delighted to note the use of the vocative comma (sadly, more honoured in the breach than the observance) on the embroidered banner that read, “Here I am, Lord”, although it occurred to me that the omission of the comma would be okay if God ever takes up appliqué: “Here I am Lord” … and that in turn got me wondering if the latter version should be, “Here, I am Lord”. And now I’m wondering if there’s a Pedants for Jesus group out there somewhere.