March 30, 2003

St. Barnabas’ Anglican Church.

Last Sunday, we had attended St. George's Greek Orthodox Church. This Sunday, we decided to worship in English, a rare treat for us. We joined up with the other Presbyterian exiles at St. Barnabas' Anglican Church, which is known by its much more quaint (and British) name: Mission to Seafarers.

We were met at the door by children ushering. The bulletin had emblazoned at the top: Mothering Sunday. As we read, the children of the Sunday School would be leading the first half of the service, a tribute to mothers. The second half of the service would be led by the chaplain to the Mission to Seafarers, your standard Anglican eucharist service. We winced. Our experience of theme-oriented Sundays was that, while meant with the best of intentions, they end up getting bogged down in secular, sentimentality - a very Hallmark sabbath. The difficulty is that to state this is to risk attack: "What, you don't respect mothers? We should respect mothers! How can you not respect mothers?" Pastors often have to find that middle ground of how hard to push against these tides. "Ministry is the art of the possible," a friend of ours has said. The first half of the service was just as we feared. It was as though the liturgy were stitched together from all of the overly saccharine forwarded rhyming emails about mothers that we had ever received. Don't get us wrong - we love mothers (especially our own) and yes, the children were adorable. But we began to wonder just whom was being worshiped here.

Then the chaplain arrived. Finally, we thought - a little theology, a little worship of the divine. But when he presented the tithes and offerings as a token of our love of our mothers, we knew he was an accomplice. Alas. Unfortunately, the homily was little more than a call to modern women to turn away from smoking, drinking, and playing rugby like men. We comforted ourselves with the notion that on most Sundays, God is surely worshiped here.

The church potluck afterwards helped remove some of the bad taste.