Too crowded

City Centre Churches together met last night. It was such a pity that only one representative from the Welsh speaking churches was present. All the others were at a Lenten prayer meeting whose dates had been fixed without awareness of CCCT's fixed date. We had a clergy meeting beforehand to arrange another Fraternal meeting. Having attempted to meet for breakfast on first Tuesdays for a couple of years, and often failed to sustain the habit, we needed to think about a workable alternative. The difficult thing is that often we get pulled about by demands which arise after dates have been fixed, and for reasons outside our control, these have to take priority. All our lives have become too crowded. It's harder than ever to take time to reflect together, but the need to do so is undiminished.

I met with Roberta and Anthony for a wedding rehearsal this afternoon. They brought lots of family members along with them. Not so much as spectators, but to see the church, as many if not most of them were unfamiliar with the building. Theirs is the second of two weddings on the same day, a week tomorrow. It's strange, with only 4-5 weddings a year, this is now the second time in as many years that I've had a pair of weddings on the same day, and for no obvious reason. Back in the days when I was Rector of Halesowen with 60-70 weddings a year, mostly bunched in spring or early summer, we had requests for as many as five weddings on certain days. We had to impose a limit of three in order to manage the use of the building, which all would expect to find pristine, as if it they were the only users. I don't think St John's or I would easily cope with that sort of regular demand nowadays.

Churches and change

City Centre Churches Together meeting tonight at Tabernacl Baptist Church, right opposite the huge hole that contains the SD2 construction site, amazingly changing from day to day as new structures if steel and concrete reach up to join the forest of giant tower creans in the late autumnal sky. Tab. is a lively church, but has been caught on the hop by the invasion of its world by the many changes being imposed upon their domain by redevelopment which takes away from them free access rights, and overshadows their building with this massive shopping mall and pedestrian zone designed around entertainment and leisure of a decidedly non-church nature.

I was rather disconcerted and disappointed to discover when I reported on the research project that my colleagues present were quite unclear about whether or not they had received, let alone filled in the questionnaires sent to them. I know how clergy get overwhelmed by mail, but really, had we got all the addresses wrong? Fortunately I was able to had out spare copies that I had taken with me - just in case. It makes me wonder exactly who are the 30% of questionnaire recipients who have returned their forms by the deadline, and how we're going to get more responses, and how useful the final outcome will be. At the moment the research team are being rather un-forthcoming on the outcome so far. Is all this work worth it, I wonder?

Tonight we received a letter from the Pastor of Tredegarville Baptist Church that they no longer intended to be part of the City Centre Church Together. A previous Minister has encouraged the congregation to look towards the city centre, and his successor a conservative evangelical, has led them in the opposite direction. It was brief and formal. There was no quarrel or policy dissent expressed, just disinterest. Sad to say, there are really deep unspoken disagreements between church communities struggling with similar issues in a similar context about the nature and purpose of the Gospel in the modern secular world. It's easy enough to agree about the need for witness, service and proclamation, the need for compassion and reconciliation and forgiveness to fill the world, but little common understanding about the real nature of authority, partnership and how living together with differences.

One crumb of comfort. At yesterday afternoon's meeting, I met the son of the former Tredegarville Baptist Pastor, who told me with great enthusiasm that he and his family had all been received in to the Church in Wales and were greatly enjoying a measure of stimulus and spiritual fulfilment in a suburban parish which they'd not been able to find in the conservative evangelical congregation they'd previously been part of.

Churches and civil society - raising the debate

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It's nearly three weeks since my last written posting. I've been somewhat sapped of creative energy due to a persistent virus on the one hand and persistent problems with getting the religious communities research project up to the launch pad. Slowly, mostly by trial and error, the right people have become involved and CDF, the funding agency seems to be OK with our proposed way of approach. I would have happily renounced the good fortune of a large grant to pursue an investigation I feel very strongly should be made, had I known about the hassles in advance. However, at last Wednesday's City Centre Churches Together there was unanimous support for the path we propose to take - more on this when the deals are clinched and working.

At the same meeting we had two Local Government officers from Community Planning giving a presentation on the recently launched City Centre Strategy document 2007-2010. It's the first time they've attended a church meeting, as opposed to church members attending one of their meetings. And to be fair, they seemed pleased to have been invited, even though they were given a hard time. There was some very strong articulation of concerns felt by churches about the impact of taking traffic out of the city centre - top of the planners' wish list, when there's such inadequate Sunday public transport at times to permit people to attend worship.

It was also interesting to hear people other than myself expressing concerns about the way religious communities don't seem to appear even photographically, to figure as part and parcel of Cardiff's social and cultural life. Airbrushed out of the picture, was my phrase for this kind of social engineering. I've been striving to awaken some kind of desire for dialogue between city centre churches and the local authority about plans and development policies ever since I discovered the poverty of the situation over four years ago. Now the churches are, it seems, taking notice, finding a voice. So there's all the more reason to continue with the religious communities survey project, and deliver a quality product into the public realm to stimulate the much needed debate.

Also, of late I've put more time and energy into publishing photographs, rather than writing, but even this has slowed down somewhat now. Almost all the redevelopment site has been levelled and now piles are being sunk and foundations excavated. There remains one huge mountain of rubble as high as a house, being kept in reserve for use on-site. For most of the past four months over six thousand tonnes of rubble a week has been removed by lorry to other sites. New tower cranes and piling rigs have sprung up to add to the ones on the former Toys 'r us and Ice Rink sites. Movement is now more restrained. The sense of drama conveyed by the changing scene of demolition has been replaced by a kind of calm purpose.