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Finding God in Wonderland

By A John Rowlands-Jones.

Each day since early 2003 begins at 6.30am as the alarm drags us back into the parish we affectionately refer to as Wonderland. We call it Wonderland because, as far as we can tell, everyone here is delightfully, entertainingly, inspiringly potty, including us! They’re all related to each other (very shallow gene pool - more of a mud patch really!) and they’ve taken us to their hearts. We’ve never worked harder or for longer hours at any time in our lives, but we’ve never been more contented either, in spite of the many pressures.

The parish is both urban and rural. Like most Welsh valleys, there’s an urban bit (in our case only about 200 yards wide) following the main road and the river until the valley becomes too narrow, where the coal and quarries used to be, then pure unspoilt farmland and mountain for as far as the eye can see. Not many farmers, though - mostly smallholders and English down-shifters. Much of the rest of the population are the retired artisans who worked the mines and the quarries, along with the retired service providers, and of course, their children and grandchildren.

Young people leave here to go to university, but a surprising number of them come back, then travel many miles to and from work each day. One teacher does a round trip of 80 miles each day, across some of the most inhospitable mountain roads, just so that she can live here. There’s not much work of any kind hereabouts. Most employed people commute to the nearby towns and the city (all within 20 miles).

The landscape is strikingly beautiful, a mixture of unspoiled and completely ruined. Once there were many more sheep than people, but that’s not the case any longer with sheep farming in steep decline. That will allow the hills to become wooded again, for the first time in centuries.

Church attendance is poor, but better than in much of Wales. The last surviving chapels are on the brink of closure, barring a miracle. We Anglicans muster an average of about 80 on Sundays (from a population of about 2500), although if they all turned up on the same day, we’d be about 130.

About 30% of the population are first or preferred language Welsh-speaking, so we worship in a mixture of Welsh and English, with the occasional Latin or even Swahili word thrown in. It’s become a local spectator-sport to see which bit of the Holy Communion service the Vicar will mangle as with effortless aplomb he manages to pronounce words like ‘buddugoliaethus’ (victorious), then gets hopelessly tongue-tied with a much shorter and simpler word. 

How does one do ministry here? The answer is slowly! This is not a place for a minister in a hurry or one who wants to grow a megachurch. This is not a parish for those who want to climb the greasy pole of ecclesiastical preferment. Nothing much spectacular happens here. “Shine, Jesus, shine” is a modern worship song, and there is still a hankering for the days of revival over 100 years ago. But the reality is that there is nothing of the 1904 revival left. The many chapels were built before the revival, not after it, and the chapel congregations had returned to their pre-revival attendance levels by 1914. Even the Easter ‘gymanfa ganu’ (literally ‘singing festival’, a cross between an act of worship, a concert and a choir practice) fails to fill the local chapels now.

Clergy numbers are falling as congregations in all denominations become too small to support full-time leadership. As a result, the number of ‘entry points’ (acts of public worship) is also dropping. I do three every Sunday in my parish, but some of the chapels now only have a monthly service. To many it feels like an ever downward spiral of despair.

And yet there are signs of hope along with many, many causes for joy and a confidence that God has not abandoned us. Far from it in fact! Our Anglican parish congregations have more than doubled in numbers in recent years, a growth which has included a number of young families and gifted middle-aged people (the leadership of the future). The Assemblies of God have opened a new congregation four miles down the valley and have seen it grow from nothing to a total attendance of well over 100 each Sunday. Our Sunday School has grown as well, and we now have a small youth group meeting weekly.

We’ve been able to run a year-long enquirers group with a group of adults who were wedding and baptism contacts. Three of them were confirmed recently.

We’ve also started a leadership development group for the Deanery, offering entry level theological education to lay people.

How has all this been done? Well, I wish I could say that it was all carefully planned, but it wasn’t. Actually, we simply responded to opportunities as they came along. So where did the opportunities come from? That too is surprisingly simple and unglamorous. We’ve made it our aim to do the simple things as well as possible. We concentrate on what we can do rather than worrying about what we can’t. For example, we can’t have the music led by a gifted band of musicians, because we’re a bit short of such people, so we thank God that we have a couple of gifted organists and a fledgling music group which helps lead the worship on special occasions. For the same reason we can’t have a regular choir to lead the singing, but we thoroughly enjoy getting a scratch choir together for Christmas and Easter. Nor do we have the resources for choral evensong every Sunday or for ‘alternative’ worship activities, but we love our ‘normal’ Sunday services and work hard to make them as good as possible.

We don’t lose any sleep over what we can’t do. If God wants it to happen, he’ll provide the resources. He hasn’t seen fit to do so yet, so we do what we can do.

And what we can do is to ensure that people get an excellent welcome as they arrive at church, whether it be on Sundays or at the inevitable round of baptisms, weddings and funerals, and also at Christmas. That means being sensitive and responsive to their needs, which includes making sure they know how our bi-lingual worship works.

We can and do make sure that visitors know exactly where we are and what to do at any given moment in the worship (e.g. “Now we turn to page 6 in the blue booklet and we stand to say the Magnificat”).

We can and do go into the four primary schools and build relationships between the children and the church which may open up evangelism opportunities in the future.

We can and do put a lot of effort into making sure that no-one who visits our church, whatever the occasion, can leave without a sense of having enjoyed their visit.

And we can and do make sure that we follow people up and invite them to the enquirers group or to major services. We also involve them in fundraising (with the emphasis on ‘fun’!) and in doing work caring for the churches and churchyards.

Finally, we work hard at building relationships with people in the wider community, particularly through funerals, which are big occasions here in Wales, with often as many as 300 people attending (nowhere is it more true that a vicar is only as good as the last funeral he did!). In our 4th year in the parish, it is likely that by now every adult in the parish will have attended at least one funeral led by me. It’s the most exciting part of ministry here, because it’s the one which has the highest risks and the greatest potential rewards!

Where is God in all this? He’s in:

Ø           the delight on the face of a small child as she cheekily asks for a second blessing at the communion rail - and gets it!

Ø           the struggle to master the language and the encouragement from the Welsh speakers at the end of a Sunday service.

Ø           the dear parishioner who, on the day my wife joined me in the parish, said: “Welcome home”.

Ø           the sense that two of my churches are on sites where Christians have worshipped for perhaps 1,500 years.

Ø           the family who, mourning the death of their severely handicapped son, said: “We’re all better people for having known Chris”.

Ø           the middle-aged man who came with his wife-to-be to an enquirers’ group and said: “I don’t think I believe, but I’m willing to travel and see where we end up”.

Ø           the excitement of getting a team of lay people together to lead a monthly service for children and their parents.

And most of all, he’s in the many little signs of spiritual awakening as the old religion slowly dies, to be replaced by a new, vigorous, owned and explorative faith which is being embraced by the newcomers to the congregations.

Yes, there are setbacks. A couple of people have left for various reasons, feeling that they no longer belonged. And sometimes it feels as though we’re pushing water uphill as we try to help the people understand that newcomers to church don’t automatically know what to do in church. All three churches need extensive (and expensive!) repair work done.

We’ve no idea where this journey will end, but the journey is such fun that we have no doubt that Wales will be revived, probably not in the 1904 sense (the socio-economic factors which led to that revival no longer pertain), but in a new sense which we have yet to understand, for God is always doing a new thing.