A Tale of Two Church Signs - Blog by Neil Mancor
/A Tale of Two Church Signs
I give you Exhibit A. The Church sign, long out use, I came across when I was visiting my friend at St John the Baptist, Pointe-Claire. My first thought was: they don’t make them like that anymore! It’s hard to believe our many parishes could once sustain such a complex liturgical calendar of three services per Sunday with other weekday services as announced. It’s even more amazing that anyone could be expected to interpret the sign and ever know what kind of service they were going to encounter! Holy Communion at 8, Choral Eucharist and sermon at 10, 1st, 3rd & 5th Sundays; Matins and sermon 2nd and 4th. Evensong with sermon at 7:30pm. I guess they thought this would never change as the lettering was painted on the sign. Of course in those days everyone had curates so the preaching load could be shared. Note that they had Sunday School AND Nursery. But they had the people to run that kind of thing then. They probably had classes for every age. The Church was comprehensive in its coverage of every possible age group.
It might be hard for many of us to believe, but it was only fairly recently that weekly Holy Eucharist at the main service became the norm in Canada, and that even this was resisted well into the 70s. When I grew up during that era of liturgical experimentation, my church had a whole week cycle: 1st Sunday BCP Communion; 2nd Sunday Matins & Eucharist; 3rd Sunday Modern Rite Eucharist 4th Sunday Family Service; 5th Sunday Sung Matins. You never quite knew what you were going to get when you showed up. This was a compromise to ease us away from Sung Matins, but old Mr. Chutter at the church fought for Matins until the end. I started out as a choirboy and later became an organist and I always enjoyed Matins and Evensong because of all the music. Those were great times. But that was then.
This is now. I give you Exhibit B. I was walking Basco the Pug through my neighbourhood the other day and came across this Church sign. I have never seen a Church sign so of the moment. Closed during COVID-19 and like many of us surviving with online worship, this Church decided to create a sign that expresses their sense of mission in this moment right now. Someone in that Church was thinking clearly about the challenges faced by so many in the community right now and so expressed their desire to serve their community. They are not asking anything of anybody. Not expecting people to interpret what they were trying to say. Just offering help to the people around them.
Times have changed so dramatically and we need to read the signs of the times. Have a look at your church sign and all the ways you communicate, and ask yourselves what it says to the community in which you are placed. Think about the sense of mission it expresses, or do you still expect passersby to interpret Church language from another age? Because one thing I know is that it is worth making the effort to keep on reaching out beyond ourselves; to find ways to impact the communities in which we are placed. Not waiting for people to come to us we reach out to them. It’s what the Church is called to do: it is our passion and our hope. As Paul says in Galatians 6: let us not grow tired of doing good.
