Church, eh? No one ever tells you the rules. Alright, I hear you – there are no rules in church. All are welcome, come as you are, just don’t sit in Marjorie’s seat. So perhaps they’re more guidelines. Social norms. Expected occurrences. In brief: rules. Marjorie can be fierce.

I’m easily baffled. When I first joined our church, I spotted in the newsletter: ‘We pray this week for those living on Farm Lane, Fullers Crescent and Grove Road.’ I thought, Wow, what’s happened on those roads?! Has there been some sort of localised natural disaster, sinkhole, or very specific vandalism spree? It turns out that, no, the church prays for different local streets every week. It took me another year to realise that we move alphabetically through the road names.

Every church I’ve frequented, it’s taken me years to puzzle out its ways. As a child, I used to mumble the word ‘catholic’ in the creed: ‘We believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.’ This was an Anglican church, so I thought it had included a misprint, copied and pasted from a Catholic church’s printout. Eventually I looked up the word and realised that you don’t have to be Catholic to be catholic, you don’t have to be Orthodox to be orthodox, and you don’t have to be United Reformed to be united and reformed.

Perhaps it’s because I became a Christian on my own that I learnt the building blocks of church gradually. I remember mistaking ‘The Peace’ for ‘comfort break’. As everyone wandered around shaking hands, I went to the loo then headed for a post-service coffee a bit too early.

I once went to a megachurch where the opposite happened. It was a long service with a brief interval halfway through. The regulars expected it but a visitor like me didn’t have a clue, and no one said what was happening. So when everyone got up for a mingle and a leg-stretch, I thought the service was over. It was only when I got to my car to see nobody following that I went back inside. In hindsight it was odd that we hadn’t had a sermon yet.

Newcomers need putting at ease, but even us oldcomers need reminders occasionally. I’d like to see an annual ‘Name-Badge Sunday’ with sticky labels to remind us of who’s who. There are people in my church that I’ve said hello to for years, but I’m only 80% sure of their names. I daren’t chance it, so I end up calling them ‘sir’, ‘madam’, ‘mate’ or ‘oi you’, depending on age and status. Just when I thought this was just me, our veteran head welcomer recently asked me the name of someone who’s been coming for years. Be honest. Do you know the names of everyone in your church? (Alright, show-off.)

Maybe even long-term churchgoers need treating like newbies now and then, with helpful reminders for us all. In the grand scope of eternity, ultimately we’re all newcomers, relatively speaking. A few decades are nothing in God’s time, so we’re all fairly fresh to this planet, let alone our place of worship.

You never know, ‘Name-Badge Sunday’ might reveal that Marjorie’s not been coming for years after all, and we’ve been needlessly saving her seat all this time. Perhaps Marjorie’s looking down from the heavens, chuckling as we bumble around like headless chickens, thinking, ‘Good. That’s still my seat. I’m glad they know.’

Paul Kerensa is author of So a Comedian Walks into a Church (DLT) and is on tour around the country. Paulkerensa.com @paulkerensa

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This article was published in the February 2024 edition of Reform

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