To think the baby Jesus wasn't laid in a chuffing 'feeding trough'?

[TheOriginalSteamingNit]

Ok, am atheist and perhaps not entitled to comment. But I support, like and attend my dds' carol service every year, and every year I wonder why in the blazes the church has changed the words to stuff.
Can't people understand 'thine is the kingdom', and 'trespasses' any more?
Why must Mary be 'pregnant' not 'with child'?
Aren't all those Christmas verses and readings and carols sort of losing something through accessible bland language?

This isn't the school: it's the bloody minster! Why have they done this? Why??

I know!
Should be all in Latin, hidden behind plumes of incense on a high alter, and mumbled incoherently.

I've actually been to Bethlehem, and the manger- from the French, to eat, btw, is a stone with a depression in it. Not the blardy wooden crib like structure on all the cards.

And Santa is actually Nicolas who's feast day is the 6th December.

And the only reason why Christmas is celebrated this time of year is to supplant the saturnalia of mid winter sun return..

But who's counting?

But why change it just for the sake of it, I guess I'm asking. The 'kids today' didn't massively get into the sheep analogies the vicar did, or find 'forgive us our sins' more comprehensible than trespasses, or 'today' rather than 'this day'... (which I do think has a different connotation, actually). It just seems like an attempt to be 'relatable' (fucking awful word) out of low expectation, and to choose the word that seems easiest but without any attention to nuance, atmosphere, rhythm or mood.

I think it started because church attendance was falling and modernising the language was seen to be a way of making the services and the bible relevant. I was still going to church when they started changing things. It did not go down well to say the least.

I think it's that language matters, and we shouldn't just 'translate' into modern language without thinking about it.
Listen! The angels who have got a message are singing!
Oh come here, all you faithful people.
Away in a feeding trough
Sleep well, sleep well, you small baby.
Once in royal David's city, there was a skanky cowshed.

It doesn't work in song, any more than it works in speech.

It's doubtful according to 'the wrong messiah'!

What's wrong with it being relatable? It would have been relatable at the time of Kings James, there would have been nothing olde-worlde about it, to its readers or hearers? Of course I don't believe a word of it but these arguments just illustrate how faith is a persons own construct built on personal history etc.

Personally I am more in favour of getting the message across than "poetry and gravitas". I don't see much point in teaching little kids prayers they don't understand.

Just going slightly off tangent...

There was a brilliant letter in the local paper the other day from some professionally offended person complaining that there was no star or cross on top of the Christmas tree in the town centre and how disgraceful it was that the Christian symbol was missing.

I don't remember the bit in the nativity where someone dragged in and decorated a tree? What the fuck has a tree covered in lights and glitter got to do with the Christian story? Nothing. It has a lot to do with the pagan tradition of decorating your house for the winter solstice though. Well, and Prince Albert.

Well 'relatable' is a fairly dubious word and idea anyway.. You can't really just state that something is 'relatable' without saying to whom, and when, and why.

But, whatever your beliefs, 'thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever' has a rhythm and a poetry that 'the kingdom and the power and the glory are all yours now and forever' does not, because of the repetition echoing and emphasising the meaning. The translation seems to me to have been come up with by someone who doesn't really care about language, only simplicity.

Yes, YABU. If you want older language that hasn't yet evolved into the 20th, let alone 21st Century, then attend a traditional service of lessons and carols. If you want something to be accessible to small children, then accept the language might not be as highbrow as some you remember.
We have all sorts of different services so that everyone can have their turn at it being what they like.

jolly atheist me and atheist OH both products of Scottish state schools have regular arguments about the trespassers/trespasses debtors/ debts. He claims it's debts/debtors but at my school it was definitely trespassers/ trespasses.

I don't like the phrase 'dumbing down' bit that's exactly what it is. There's nothing wrong with making people think about the language they use. Take the line in Once in Royal David's City. "With the poor and mean and lowly". It's an opportunity to learn that the word 'mean' can change.
You're right, it's like the first word popped into somebody's head and they thought "ok that'll do" without considering the meaning of the whole phrase.

Well, they're secondary aged children, not small.

But the thing is, why were we in the 80s thought capable of understanding thee and thine, and now we aren't? What's behind it?

YES, something!

Why is it that an atheist hits and a pagan are arguing for tradition forms of worship??

Oh ffs, an Atheist and a Pagan!

I'm arguing for language, I guess, but I'm interested to know whether Christians like this, or why they might think it is a good idea.

I love the King James version of the Bible. It's pure Jacobean poetry, and as a literature student who specialised in the late 16th / early 17th century at one point, I feel its beauty.

However, I like it more when my nice traditional story is jolted a bit. The nativity isn't pretty. It's rough and ready and desperate, about a teenage homeless mother giving birth in the direst of circumstances, but it still being a cause for hope and peace. So feeding trough, 'teenage peasant girl Mary' (as I heard it explained once by a South African preacher from the townships) being visited by angel, and no skirting around the horror of Herod's decree are all fine with me.

backforgood I think a carol service in York minster is probably about as traditional as it gets, and I'm not sure where I'd go for a more traditional service!

I imagine that in the 80s no one gave a monkeys whether we understood it or not. It was all about repetition and rote learning.
"Our father Richard in Heaven" anyone. And we can all remember similar mis hearings.
And loads of old hymns are tremendously clunky and scan badly.
(But I'm a bit of a philistine and like a lot of the new ones anyway.)

"There is a green hill far away without a city wall"
I see this has been changed to outside a city wall.

I do remember a primary school teacher's difficulty in explaining 'very god, begotten, not created' to us, and similar agonies in how you make it scan.

But I also remember what she explained 'very god' meant, to this day.

Caitlin, on MN surely that should be 'outwith the city wall'

The thing is, when this started I was still going to church. My boyfriend at the time came with us and is now a vicar himself. The vicar of our church was a good friend of my family and came round to drink whiskey to chat with my parents quite a bit. He was a progressive type but hated the new version of the Lords Prayer, he decided to give it a chance and see what the congregation thought.
It went down like a ton of bricks. Everybody hated it and we had a fairly large congregation with a huge age difference. My Bf took against it the first time he heard it and as far as I know sticks to the traditional version in his own church. Every service I've been to which contains the Lords Prayer has the preface "in the traditional way" before we start to say it. The nativity plays always use mangers. Maybe I just live in a very traditional area but the modernisation really doesn't seem to have taken off that well, and I'm going back 20 years here!

Well to answer your point about language, the King James bible was revolutionary because for the first time religion was in accessible language - the people could speak it without recourse to priests. Same as when the Catholic church moved out of Latin.

In Scotland the Calvinist movement was all about stark simplicity both in the form of worship and the church and the way you brought yourself to god - faith is about simplicity, not puffing yourself up, working hard and glorifying god through your labour.

So I imagine simplifying language is around the same themes - strong and simple words mean more. Clarity of language brings us closer to god. It's not dumbing down, it's removing barriers between you and your god.