Days to Remember 10: Dem Bones

One memorable day the builders laying the foundations of the Church's new building downed tools and left the site.  They had found human remains.

 

A very detailed plan of the graveyard the Church had between 1845 and 1854 (after which it was closed) exists.  However it has no reference point, just lines of named graves.  If you could find Mrs Jones you could possibly find Mr Smith a few feet along but there was no way of fining either of them.  Tales were told of a line of headstones that once formed a kind of fence down the side of the property next to the car park.  The assumption was that they had been moved in some previous building enterprise.  They exist no longer.  Plainly Baptists are a lot less careful about the dead than the Church of England who seem to have graveyards of antiquity well-kept around many of their churches.

 

The coroner however did not question my predecessors' carelessness in respect of their predecessors remains.  Instead he declared me entirely trustworthy - 'as priest' - to judge the remains as old and to 'reinter them with suitable dignity'.  I suppose this conjured up the idea of the churchyard sexton doing the honours with a robed vicar overseeing with prayers.

 

Baptist Colleges, though useful in many ways, help little with the really scary things of church life like baptising people without drowning them, dedicating infants without dropping them or marrying people without embarrassing them. Failure in such common practicalities indicates the total unpreparedness most Baptist ministers would feel at standing on a building site with a builder in a suit holding a black bag full of unearthed bones of former members and the Church Administrator standing nearby watchfully.  I duly felt unprepared.  The coroner's trust weighed heavily on me as the builder turned the sack over and a pile of old bones fell at my feet.  This action did not lend itself to great dignity, any dignity really, though I was wearing a jacket and tie as a start.

 

The plot of land where Mrs Jones and Mr Smith and the others would end up would be hidden under the path and entry way of the new building.  The temptation (had I been alone) to leave the pile intact would have been strong.  A sort of old Baptist ballast.  My onlookers and the distant brooding instruction of the coroner ('due dignity') led me to attempt a certain dignified reconstruction. 

 

Suppressing the part of me that wanted to burst out in despairing laughter, I began the task of placing the parts of Mrs Jones and Mr Smith in reasonable order - two leg bones, two legs, two hips, the middle bit (if the reader is unfamiliar please rewatch the earlier YouTube).  I laid these ancient Baptist remains with admirable dignity given my internal sense of the bizarre.  But like any old jigsaw from before 1854 there were pieces missing - most alarmingly a shortage of skulls which created special problems as it was not a lack that could be hidden from the beady-eyed builder in a suit.  There were too many legs as well though that was easier to deal with by some clever positioning as I learned my new trade.

 

Quite what parts of Mrs Jones and Mr Smith ended up in what order I shall never know and I trust the Good Lord to sort matters out on the Great Day.  I reflected that it was the one experience of Christian Ministry when I had the most authority over Church Members and even then I couldn't get them into order  . . .

Days to Remember: 9. The danger of parking outside the Church (Part 2)

The relatively unusual experience of a minister is to travel in a hearse while fully conscious (before the later single trip more universally undertaken).  Nobody who has spent any time in local church ministry is short of funeral stories, though public blogging is not the most pastorally sensitive way to disseminate them.  I will stick with just one from my time in Wycombe.  It's about that busy street outside the church where, on the snowy night previously reported, people nearly died. 

 

The service was over.   It is a few hundred yards to the town cemetery and the easiest way as minister is to take the hearse there and walk back.  I sat in the rear seat, my head adjacent to that of the deceased.  

 

She'd had just a tenuous connection with our premises through another church. As best I recall, apart from the family and friends only our church funeral functionaries (me included) had been present.  The funeral directors, unusually, were from out of county.

 

 

'Nice cars these hearses,' I often thought, 'shame about the function.'  In went the ignition key.  A kind of electronic whirring but nothing resembling an engine sound.  And again.  And again.  I thought, 'This is going to be interesting.  I wonder what they do when the hearse won't start?'  Unfortunately it turned out that the driver was also thinking, 'I wonder what I do when the hearse won't start?'   The Funeral Director was pulled away from the family gathered by the other funeral car to be told the news.  He then seemed to think, 'I wonder what you do when the hearse won't start?'

 

It became clear that in their home town they would have had a spare car as a rule.  They were not in their home county, never mind town.  They started ringing local funeral firms with whom they were connected.  These helpful funeral firms were being helpful by helping other people have their funerals.  There is a limit to the number of available hearses of course.  Hope dwindled. 

 

A few minutes later and a phone call came in.  One of the local companies had a spare hearse in a town a few miles away.  We sat, we waited, with reasonable dignity the transfer was eventually made.

 

I figured that the person (perhaps not quite the right word) for whom this was the least traumatic was the one whose head silently reclined a few inches from mine in her coffin.  RIP meant Rest in Peace for her, and Ring in Panic for everyone else.

Days to Remember: 8. The danger of parking outside the Church (Part 1)

Union Baptist Church is situated on the A404.  There are clues there.  At one end the A404 is Regent Street in Central London.  It is not a quiet road (though long years ago the cows walked along it to the common land east of the town, hence Easton Street.

 

No-one ever knows what the future holds but I am confident that at no time in the years leading up to that winter's night did anyone imagine that people would have to be encouraged to leave the cars they had abandoned on the street outside and come into the warmth of the church for their own safety.  It happened in 2009.

And so it was that we were asked to open our Church as an Emergency Rest Centre for people stranded by the snowy roads and icy hills. Roads normally busy with traffic had only pedestrians struggling between cars and vans abandoned at the roadside.  Read about it here.

Through to 2:00 am people arrived.  Some walked in as though they were arriving for a meeting, some arrived as though they had trekked from the Arctic, one or two looked as though they had been mistakenly delivered by emergency ambulance to us instead of the hospital.

Thirty five people slept for the night at 'Hotel Union'!  About 20 others came through the doors and were fortified and warmed for the next stage of their epic journey home.  Never has the town or Church witnessed the need to be a Town Centre Snow Shelter before!

God, on the other hand, seemed less surprised and to be working to a nicely visible plan (his plans are often invisible of course).

Days to Remember: 7. The Sick Pastor

A very arresting topic in Christian ministry is that of sickness and healing.  Some people don't believe it at all, some people are more devoted to it than anything in the whole panoply of spiritual things.  One way or another though, nobody seems to want a sick Pastor.  Sympathy is rife, but only briefly.  After all, a sick Pastor is like failure totem on the weekly notice sheet . . . 
 

From the point of being the pastor this is somewhat unfortunate because few of us choose to be sick or especially enjoy it and having a load of other people willing you better by next Sunday makes you feel worse.  Churches like to welcome the weak and sick - but not to the pulpit.

 

 My track record is not too bad but took a very unfortunate dip on my arrival in Wycombe.  I suppose I was vaguely aware of the existence of something called a gall bladder in the body.  Within a few weeks of touching down as the dynamic new Pastor of Union Baptist Church I became acutely aware of the gall bladder.  Several times.

Before the machinations of the National Health Service sent people in Wycombe to far-flung hospitals for emergencies as now is, I was admitted to Wycombe Hospital.  And a few weeks later again.  Once in a kind friend's car, once in a blue-light ambulance.  Each time I was in for a few nights.  Among the first church people I got to know were the nurses and volunteers who worked in the hospital . . .

This yielded a Day to Remember.  I sat by the bedside of an older, unwell lady in one of the hospital three months into the pastorate. 

"Well," I said, "this is the third time I've visited the hospital since my induction.  But it's the first time I've come through the main entrance and not Accident and Emergency.  It's nice to be a visitor instead of a patient . . ."

The church put up with all this fairly stoically.  I imagine that after a few years without a pastor, one in the local hospital is a small step forward.  One church member even brought their gallstone in a jar to church to show me, what had been removed from their body some years before . . .  In fact I think that I'll show you a picture so you can share the experience.  Nice, eh?