Tell me about your Christian church

[IdaBWells]

I am a convert from atheism to Roman Catholicism, I converted a very long time ago as a young adult and have constantly been active in my faith. I have always been very interested in other Christian denominations and churches and would love to hear about your church, your basic theology, how you worship and the size and style of your congregation. Also just generally anything you would like to share about your church that is important to you. If you would like to share please do, so we can all learn about the different flavours of Christianity as practiced by MNers.

As this is a thread for Christians to share their faith and support each other, it is not the place for any unkindness or to wax philosophical on whether Christianity should even exist. If you feel compelled to criticize Christians and their faith please start your own thread.

Hello Ida!

I'm a leader in a small village C of E church.
We have no money, but we have children so we are rich! An average Sunday has about 30 adults and between 5 and 15 children.
We have both organ hymns and modern worship songs on guitar and keyboard.
In between Sundays we have a prayer meeting, Boys Brigade/Girls Association, baby group, a family club, monthly lunch club for older folk, all held in the church- we took the pews out to make room.

We have a strong lay team, and are expecting a vicar soon after a couple of years without one! Very excited!

Our ethos is about showing the heart of Jesus to our community- we serve the community in anyway we can- on parish council, running events, going in to nursing homes etc.

I will be interested to hear about everyone else's churches!

Great thread! I just posted on the other one but I go to a small village church which is very close knit but open and friendly. We probably have a congregation of 30 or so. The church is very involved in village life and the vicar is popular with everyone, even non-Christians. She is a lady vicar. The main Sunday service is a Morning Worship which is quite informal, there is a more formal Holy Communion once a month and also Book of Common Prayer Communion and Evening Prayer in the early morning/evening. The vicar does communion in a public place in the village twice a week too. Once a month there is a Breakfast Church which is very informal over free bacon butties and coffee!
There is a focus on a personal relationship with God through Jesus and a big focus on the Holy Spirit. Occasionally people speak in tongues. There are several home Bible and prayer groups and a youth club. I love it!

So to get the ball rolling, I currently live in the USA and my parish is very new, about 10 years old. It is a vibrant community and when founded was completely bilingual Spanish/English. The parish community worked very hard to integrate the two communities of language speakers, while also raising money to build a church.The Parish met for Mass on Sundays at a local school.

After all this work very sadly about 4 years in to this plan the new Bishop decided to move our bilingual priest to another part of the state where the need for a Spanish speaking priest was acute. In that area, which is very agricultural, tens of thousands of mostly Mexican farm workers, some permanent and some temporary residents, were living without the sacraments completely and had no one to perform weddings and baptisms. Unfortunately there just are not enough Spanish speaking priests to serve the huge need in the USA.

This decision was completely understandable and I think the right call. Unfortunately without a Spanish speaking priest at our parish Spanish speakers were encouraged by the diocese to attend another parish about 20 minutes away that is served by a congregation of Spanish speaking priests so Spanish speakers could feel at home. The outcome was the division of the parish, with most Spanish speakers leaving. All the very hard work the parishioners had put in to unite everyone felt like it was in vain. We are a new parish as we are in the outskirts of a city that has been exploding in population growth for the past 30 years.

We still have a diverse community with people from around the world (including yours truly!) but the radical ideals our parish was founded on (being completely bilingual) have sadly been abandoned and we have had to forge a new identity. We did get a brand new church built and at the moment the extra space is being expanded especially for new classrooms as many small groups meet during the week and we have lots of teaching for children and adults. I am not sure how many families we have, but I would say conservatively about 300. We have one priest and a staff of about 8 people who work full and part time.

So I guess our community is about being founded on (wonderful) dreams and then having to confront reality and need. We are still a very warm and welcoming community but had to confront quite a trauma in our early years as a community. Another congregation needed our priest more than us and we are relatively prosperous and much smaller in number than the Catholics growing and harvesting crops for us all.

Wow thank you 🙏 for your very quick responses, even while I was tapping out mine! So fascinating, I love to hear everyone’s different experiences. It is so lovely that so many C of E churches are still the heart of village life. One of my best friends attends the C of E church in her village in Norfolk which sounds very similar.

Pickleme and Bathsheba you seem to be having the quintessential English C of E experience, with the rituals and community events that are so typical such as the Harvest Festival. I did get a sprinkling of this having attended infant and primary schools where we did have a blow out Nativity play and learnt the “Our Father” and sang “Lord of the Dance” at assemblies (Although I had no idea this hymn was about Jesus and found it quite frightening that it’s “hard to dance with the devil on your back” I just didn’t know enough about Christianity to know the song is about Christ’s Passion).

I do have many happy memories involving my very rudimentary understanding however!

Is it difficult to keep a church and building going with such a small congregation? I am actually amazed that a congregation of 50 gets their own vicar! Envious really as our priests are often spread very thin and parishes have a large pastoral support staff, who are doing an amazing job.

We don't get our own vicar... Vicar's tend to have several churches they look after.

It is tricky- the congregation pays for the upkeep of the church and all activities, while the national church covers the cost of a vicar and their accommodation. With such a small congregation it's a tight ship!

What I am currently rebelling against is the obstacles put in the way of ordination. Had someone Spanish speaking in your community gone forward for ordination, problem would be solved!

We are very short both of ordained people and of money to pay them!

We have the money to pay for them but not enough vocations, even though there has been an uptick in ordinations the need still outstrips supply.

I'm the vicar of a medium sized C of E church on the edge of a city. We are very local with most of congregation walking to church rather than driving in for a particular style of worship. We have a choir and on major festivals we have an organist but we can't afford one each week so use CDs most weeks.

We would see ourselves as middle of the road. I wear robes for services and we have a communion service every week. We are between two very large churches but the people who come to us like small and reflective and being able to know everyone by name.

Sounds lovely mostly drinks tea. When did you develop a vocation? Was it something you always considered and did you grow up Christian or did it develop in a different way? Also does the congregation follow the vicar’s theology or vice versa, or are a vicar and congregation carefully matched for theology?

I hope you don’t mind the questions I find it really fascinating!

Again our vicar is a team vicar of several parishes in the benefice and does the rounds of the churches but we are lucky she lives here and to have some really great lay ministers.

Great thread OP! Wow at 300 families! Our Episcopal church is wildly different. We have a large church with a congregation of about 20 (people, not families) at our main Sunday service. This is sung and has holy communion every week. The earlier service is a quieter said affair, also with holy communion. There are even fewer people who attend that (no children sadly). There used to be Wednesday and Sunday evensong services but after a huge falling-out between half of the congregation and the then rector (and the other half of the congregation) a lot of people left and these services stopped. As did the choir sadly. There is one couple with children but they only come about half the time and even then only one parent and one child attends at a time. There are 3 (wonderful) members of the clergy who work on a rota with other churches; we almost always have one of them present. We usually have an organist but sometimes use a cd. I don't know why, but this almost always ends up with us singing out of time which is quite funny. I suppose our style is very old style and not attractive to young people. Our hymns are very traditional (but lovely imo), our liturgy is very structured and traditional too. In comparison to Church of Scotland and Church of England churches I've been to it probably seems a bit stuffy apart from the sermons, which our clergy always fill with light, love, warmth and passion. There are no two ways about it. Our congregation is old and getting smaller 😔 This worries me for our future but I remember a sermon where our Rector reinforced the importance of faith in small things. We are trying to get out into the community more, to be the acorn from which the tree will grow. Please pray for us!

trevor if you are Episcopal are you in North America? Or are some still in the UK?

Ours is a larg(ish) evangelical COfE church. We have about 400 people over 3 services each week. We have 5 clergy plus a reader, so don’t have any trouble with services.

Our big value at the moment is in serving our local community and taking the love of Christ out to them.

OP, the individual church chooses the vicar through a long process involving parish reps, the patron, area dean and bishop. The produce a document called a “parish profile” which describes the church and provides a person spec.

Ida, matching the vicar to the church starts the same way as any recruitment process- a job advert!

We put together a pack describing who we are and who we are looking for (parish profile), and advertise in the church times and online.

The applicants (should we get any!) are shortlisted between the diocese and the parish reps- the diocese tends to weed out candidates which are no starters before we see them.

Then we interview. There is prayer for discernment wrapped around the process, and also lots of red tape- patrons, bishops, archdeacons... but that is roughly how it works.

Trevor, my Church which is tiny but thriving and full of kids, was on the brink of closing 20 years ago. Things can change!

We go to a smallish baptist church in a suburb of our city. We live in the city centre but the reality in our city is that the city churches are not growing and the numbers of kids and young people are dwindling as many families live in the suburbs. 10 years ago these people would have come into the city for church but now there are a lot of church plants in these towns and villages themselves which is wonderful for the suburbs but not so much for the city.

The church we go to is only a 15min drive away though so it doesn’t feel too far.

DH grew up baptist and I grew up in a brethren background. Neither of us aligns perfectly with the baptist way of doing things, but if I’m honest there isn’t a great deal of choice in our city.

The church is smallish with a membership of about 100 and regular weekly attendance of about 100 which includes kids. The worship is what would be called “contemporary” - lots of hillsongs and bethel with the odd hymn. The pastor is a youngish guy in his mid 30s and he preaches well. It’s still rather too conservative for DH and I to be totally comfortable and although it would appear very contemporary to those used to high church, it is still ritualistic in its own way - the service structure doesn’t deviate, the style of worship is the same every week, communion once a month (DH and I really miss sharing communion weekly), same style of preaching etc etc. Sunday school for the kids is also very traditional - using worksheets from SU and not deviating from the way they’ve done things for 30 years.

BUT - they are friendly welcoming people who truly love God and want to make a difference in their local community.

DH and I have decided not to become official members for a number of reasons - some to do with the church and some to do with us, but we go along every week and get involved as much as we can. The DC are also involved and have some friends there.

the congregation pays for the upkeep of the church and all activities, while the national church covers the cost of a vicar and their accommodation.

The new parish share system means that all churches have to pay clergy costs. The smaller churches in our deanery are up in arms about this, as they also have to pay all other ministry costs and upkeep of their buildings.

The wealthier churches are actually getting a discount.

Our deanery and diocese are not doing it like that! The overall bill has been shared according to deprivation and ministry, so hard up areas pay less. My deanery are paying less than before (though still more than we have). My church is trying to increase its share every year to support churches who are struggling.

This is the very short version of a longer story. I was brought up Christian in that I was sent to Sunday School. Neither of my parents went to church and the Sunday school met separately from the church service so it was disconnected from a congregation. In my teens I became an angry atheist. At university I reconnected with Christianity much to my surprise. I was a very reluctant convert. Looking back I suspect the call to the priesthood was always there but as women couldn't be ordained at that time I didn't recognise it and I went off into a corporate career. When women could be ordained in the C of E I started exploring what it might mean. I did a fair amount of running away but finally said to my vicar that I might be. Vicar material and 6 years later. I was ordained.

In theory vicars in the C of E are trained to work in any style of church. In practice you tend to work in the part of the Church were you are most comfortable. My parish would describe themselves as liberal catholic and choral. I'm not as liberal as some of them but more choral so it sort of works. I could cover a high church service if needed as I do know how to swing a thurible and where to bow. I could cover an evangelical, evangelical/charismatic service if I had to but I would have to think harder as it is not my tradition.

In the C of E jobs are advertised in the Church Times and it is up to the priest when they move on. I've been here 3 years and will think about moving in 2 years. I probably won't but it is a good break point with other stuff that is going on to ask the HS if I should stay or go.

The way that churches in the C of E pay for their vicars varies by Diocese. In this Diocese the cost of paying for clergy and Diocese support services goes out as a figure to the deanery (cluster of churches in an area) and we negotiate what we can afford. Bigger churches pay more than smaller ones. In my previous Diocese there was a very complicated calculation which involved a stab at working out how wealthy the the parish (not the congregation) might be multiplied somehow by how large your congregation is. In another church I think it depended on your electoral roll. No system is perfect. Here we pay around 65-70% of our income in parish share. The rest keeps the lights on and pays the gardener and other ministry essentials.

Talking of Parish Profiles, does anyone else here just love reading them?

I’ve just read all the ones in my diocese, and I keep thinking, “that’s a good idea”, “we should try that”. Very encouraging.

The way that churches in the C of E pay for their vicars varies by Diocese. In this Diocese the cost of paying for clergy and Diocese support services goes out as a figure to the deanery (cluster of churches in an area) and we negotiate what we can afford

In my diocese, parish share is made up of a ministry contribution and a shared contribution.

We all pay the same ministry contribution per benefice - basically the cost of a vicar, including pension and housing. The shared cost is an algorithm based on affluence (related to % of Band D council tax properties) and 3-year rolling average of October attendances.

What parishes get back from the diocese is for ministries and mission. It does not particularly help with, for example, costs associated with maintaining historic buildings.

Small Beautiful Victorian RC cathedral by a famous architect. Good music and good liturgy. Up until last year it was a wonderful parish to belong to. Thriving and happy. Unfortunately the very popular PP was moved and a new priest put it. It's not such a happy place. I have no issue with the previous press being moved, just that he was replaced by the wrong man for the job.

Average mass attendance is C1000 spread over 5 masses.

I go to a Methodist church in the suburbs of a city. It's a lovely modern building and we get on average around 100 people on a Sunday morning I would guess. There are lots of families with young children and lots of events that go on that the wider community attend such as Messy church. Lots of house groups and a good worship band. I feel very lucky to have it on my doorstep.