I’ve been on a course. That’s the trouble. I’ve been on a course about Baptism.

Now the first thing you have to understand about Baptism is that the service that we have now with common worship is terrible. At the 11:30 service, our booklet is 8 pages long. That has the whole communion service in it. Confession, Absolution, Gloria, Reading, Address, Communion, the lot – 8 pages. When you put the Baptism into that, it goes from 8 pages to 16 pages and those other 8 pages are full of words that I have to say, mainly me. There a few questions and answers, but it is mainly stuff that the Priest just has to say. When you consider that the Church is usually full of people that don’t normally come to Church, how do you help people engage, not only with this important symbolic act of the moment of Baptism but with this great chunk of liturgy. “Well what’s liturgy for a start?” some would start asking.

So I went on a course to see if it could help and they started talking about movement and actions and symbol and stuff that I kind of like. The idea of the drama within the liturgy.

At the 11:30 today we have two Baptisms. Not just any old Baptism. We have the Baptism of one family who has been here for about 5 or 6 years and it’s the third of their children to be Baptised at St Nicolas so they are regular members of our 11:30 congregation. The other child is a relative newcomer to the Church but they came to church for the first time about 6 months ago and they have been every week since. It’s one of those occasions when someone just kind of comes in, sits down and its kind of, “I’m at home, it’ feels good”.

So without wishing to make a huge distinction between the Baptism of people that come for Baptism and they come and go, and the Baptism of people who are part of our Church community.

I know I am making a distinction and I was challenged on that earlier in the week and I said that for the birthday of one of the members of our family, a good friend, we buy them a big present and we go round and we spend time with them and we make a fuss of them because they are part of the family. For the birthday of a colleague, you send them a birthday card. Yes? We do make those distinctions and I don’t think it is too outrageous just to draw a slight distinction on this occasion between Baptising members of our Church community.

So in order to get this bit of drama into the Baptism service that really resonated with me on this course, I had to create a bit of space. Here is the space.

What we have done before at Baptism is that we have the Altar here, the Font here and the Lectern here and the people there. When it comes to the moment of getting the parents and Godparents up, they come and have this holy huddle over here and they’re almost pushed away because there is so much stuff around - there is no space for them to be and then we move from here to here. That’s about it. That’s as much movement as we get. Yet there is a really important moment that we haven’t, I haven’t until now, worked with in the liturgy and that is the three questions asked of parents and Godparents.

Do you turn to Christ? Do you repent of your sins? Do you renounce evil. It is THE decision in the service.

What I’m going to do later on, they don’t know this yet, is get them standing in a line here facing me up here. They are going to come from the body into this big space and line up facing me, because this bit is about them and me. It’s the wedding vow bit where I say to the couple “is there any reason why you may not be married?” that question and answer stuff. Do you turn to Christ? I turn to Christ. Do you repent of your sins? I repent of my sins. Do you renounce evil? I renounce evil. Fine. Then let’s do it. Let’s not just say it, let’s do it.

Prop number 1. Lighting a taper from this candle here which, in theory, I know this doesn’t quite work because sometimes the candle goes and we have to relight it, but in theory this flame is sparked on Easter Eve at our service of lighting the new fire and is alight for 362 days except in a leap year when it is alight for 363, and it is extinguished on Maundy Thursday. So this light is the Easter light for us. It is lit on Easter Eve and goes out again when Jesus dies on the next Maundy Thursday. Take in the light. With the people who have decided that they wish to turn to Christ, we will then physically turn and come to the centre where the font will be and we will light the candle, the Easter candle that brought the light into the Church on Easter Eve.

In old Churches the Font is by the west door. It is by the west door because this is the place of entry into to the Christian faith and indeed if you are not Baptised, in days of old, you may not come any further. The font was the furthest point you came into a Church. Then it moved to the west end. There were great big Churches with great big west doors so there was the opportunity to fling wide the west doors, and the font there and this great procession into church past Baptism up to the high altar and wooo up we go.

The only problem with great west doors, is that the east wind comes flying in and this is about where reality and theology kind of mix and all our liturgical, ecclesiasalogical, historical, theological stuff gets mixed up. We don’t use the great west door because of the great east wind so we have a door on the side. But the font is on the west because that is where people should come in, either by the door or by the west end.

But for us in this Church the obvious place for the font is right in the middle. We have even got the lighting for it. This is the heart of our community. The Church points inwards from every side to this point so we shall come and we shall take the baby and the young child and we shall, well we won’t plunge them into the waters because the parents get a bit iffy about that, but I would love to have this great bucket of water and take the child and go brrrrrr and whoosh! Into the waters of death and out again because that is what Baptism is, a dying to the old way of life, the turning that the parents and Godparents do – do you turn to Christ? I turn to Christ. Well let’s go down into the death of the way we have been and out into new life. But parents get iffy about that so we sprinkle them with water. It’s a pretty naff symbol but that’s what we do, at the moment.

So, we need the space, we need the space for this dramatic moment to bring the parents and Godparents to the place of Baptism and afterwards to process back from the font showing off these new members of our new Church family. To give us space to proudly say “welcome to your brother, welcome to your sister”. So I thought I might try it and see what happens. It’s an experiment to see whether the 11:30 Baptism like this gives something which all those words take away.

I woke up in the middle of the night thinking “oh crumbs, the 8 o’clockers are going to be miles away. They all sit at the back”. So it was like this for 8:00 and I thought “the altar is a long way away”. So, we pulled the Altar here and we created a small place for us to gather and I have to say the 8 o’clockers thought it was wonderful, the idea of a much smaller gathering.

I set this out for the 11:30 for the Baptism. We did it on Thursday and since then 3 people have said “this looks fantastic; this looks really good.” Pete Stone, the schools worker said “it would really make our life easier on a Tuesday. Trying to create a practical space for the schools work would just mean pushing those chairs there and it’s done. Pulling it back in afterwards, it would make it much quicker”. That’s the practical reason.

So having got to this point, because of the Baptism at 11:30, I’m left thinking maybe we should think a bit more long term about this.

The questions would be:

In what way is this a better layout than chairs facing the front?

In what ways does this layout hinder our worship and our fellowship together?

If this is kind of about working but isn’t quite working because there is something fundamentally missing or wrong, what is it? What would we need to do to get to have to lose in order to make this layout work?

We often approach questions of change with a “Why should we do this like this?” attitude. Then the other question is: Why shouldn’t we? There may be some very good reasons why we shouldn’t have this as a layout. Getting out to the loo is more difficult if your sitting in the back row, that sort of thing, sitting with children, it’s all serious, latecomers – if everyone sits like that, people that come in late are going to find it quite difficult to have to traipse right across here. So if we do go down this road, we will have to think about filling up over here first so that we leave those spaces for people that come in a bit late. There are very real issues about how we would make this work. But those are the questions and I would be very interested in your thoughts, your comments, your reactions and reflections. Either now or later.

COMMENTS:

It’s much easier to clean

There is no where for small children to play at the back.

Would it be better to create more space at back by taking out row at the back

You can see each other – some people don’t like looking at each other but I have to do it so I don’t see why you shouldn’t!

Because you can see other people, it is difficult to concentrate on the actual service and worship, but the positive is rather than worshiping side by side, we are worshiping together.

Would you then bring the Altar down? We have a hexagonal table that was made for use in the evenings. We could try that.

You look very isolated. If the table was in the middle, that would fill the gap.

I think it looks right in this building being hexagonal. It was built for chairs around the Church.

Easier for the transition for the 11:30

Clearly some people sitting here with negative thoughts because of the positive thoughts coming out, but please don’t just talk to me, talk to Karen, talk to Richard, talk to any member of the PCC.

This all started with a thing about the 11:30 Baptisms. If it works at the 11:30 then you might see the chairs like this again for the next Baptism. If this is popular you might see this again next week.

Why put it back after today? Leave it like this for a couple of weeks to get the feel of it. OK but we will try it with the other altar next week and bring the chairs forward a bit to make space at the back and not have such an empty space.

I think we will carry this on over coffee and thank you for your comments. It’s been fascinating, not what I had anticipated or set out to do. I had set out to look at the Baptism.