Minding the Gap
After being involved in leading the service in some way or another I have always had the habit of standing by the door as people leave. This is obviously to allow people to interact with the content of the service and of course to put some human contact into the sometimes detached sense of being ‘up-there’ at the front.
In previous churches this exercise has always had some pretty stiff architectural opposition since the location of the coffee has conflicted with the location of the door. In the end this usually meant that I stood at the door for a few minutes until I felt completely left out of it and then joined the queue for drinks and biscuits.
Having stood at the door at St James’ now a few times there is a clear difference. At the door you have contact, physical and vocal, with everyone at the service. It would have to be their intent if someone wanted to leave without speaking with the vicar. At coffee, I would normally end up speaking to those who wanted to speak to me, either with and agenda or more often simply because they were friends.
Now I understand there will be all kinds of problems with the door model. Primarily, it would only work if there were no coffee. At St James’ the coffee is at the beginning of the service time for those who would like it. Additionally, it could take a long time for everyone to leave if the congregation were of any size, although it did not seem that cumbersome even at Christmas. It would also be easy to count this brief contact as a substitute for the genuine and sustained contact of meeting and visiting the parishioners.
However, the way the door works here at St James’ is that it becomes the link between the ministry in the building, on Sundays, marriages and funerals, and the ministry of being around the town. Speaking to the same person at the church door and behind the post office counter or just simply as they are walking their dog physically breaks a very real mental gap between church services and life. This is perhaps even more so for the non-regular-church-goer who perhaps was only in church for a funeral and Easter but who now knows who the vicar is when they meet in everyday life.
This door ministry has a particular place in small and market town parishes where the vicar does their life in the context of the few thousand people in the parish. There is of course less opportunity as the specific place becomes larger and where community is less tied to place and more to network. But perhaps the challenge arises wherever the church happens to be, how can you help people cross the gap between service and life by your physical presence as the vicar?