View from the pulpit

LIKE Scott in April’s issue of Life and Work, I find I’ve been moved on from pulpits by force of circumstance, and I could not be more surprised by how well I’ve coped.

A younger me needed a lot of external ‘scaffolding’ to help me worship: music the more ethereal the better, windowglass stained to splash heavenly colour on people’s clothes, choreography to nudge me into a sense of process. I still love it all, and I still freeze when faced with a soul-less building which suggests that atmosphere counts for nothing in aid of worship.

But when I came to St Margaret’s Church here in South Ronaldsay two and a half years ago, I found the congregation had radically refurbished their old, toolarge, cruciform church into the kind of community asset that these days makes the General Trustees’ hearts sing. With the new worship space created from just the nave of the old church, the pulpit has gone, and everything is done from table or lectern. And with a congregation sitting snugly together in a smaller space, that limited scope for movement and gesture turns out to be enough – the place of Word and the place of Sacrament side by side and never lost from each other.

Well, that wasn’t the half of it. One year ago, with 18 months of South Ronaldsay and Burray under my cincture, I became Interim Moderator of Hoy and Walls Church, just at the point of the final shift from their last historic church building into a modern facility next door called ‘Kirkside’. Kirkside has basic but comfortable accommodation for a visiting preacher, but isn’t a manse; it has a sitting-room/conservatory big enough for its Sunday morning congregation, but isn’t a church. Pulpit? Pah, this doesn’t even have a lectern (though with the flooring of its conservatory recently finished, the communion table - yes, apparently it should fit through a domestic door, I’m told - will be through from St Columba’s next door by the time you read this).

My mission on a Sunday morning is to make the kitchen and bathroom presentable for congregational use, and then the elders throw furniture about from room to room with great gusto to turn my living-room into a perfect little sanctuary. By lunch-time, when domesticity is restored, it’s hard to believe how it looked and how full it was an hour earlier.

And the older me loves something that the younger MacLean would have hated down to her toes. I can truly welcome people into a space that is somehow mine and somehow theirs, and I realise what those wealthy women in the New Testament were doing with their homes. I can robe up to the nines (you can take the girl out of the big liturgical space, but…), and I discover that gesture and symbol still work on a tiny scale. It just… kind of… works.

In the spaces you occupy when you are worshipping with others, what are the things that matter, but why do they matter? When the hard decisions are being made, what does your soul need to conserve, and what for, really?

The Rev Marjory MacLean is minister, South Ronaldsay and Burray Parish Church and Interim Moderator at Hoy and Walls Parish Church.