Church in a spin

Happy Christmas, traditionally a time for giving, festive fun and the best seasonal/religious headline of Christmas competition. First prize in this year’s headline competition looks like going to the Yorkshire Evening Press for ‘Bus crash shame of ‘knicker vicar’’, the sorry story of a former vicar who lost his job, became a bus driver and then allegedly knocked a boy off a bicycle while swearing. Technically this is not a Christmas story, so may be disqualified, whereas this startling headline, ‘Jesus born in manger to Virgin Mary, affirms Archbishop of Canterbury’ is clearly seasonal - and wins the ‘dog bites man’ category.

Actually, I suspect it is also a contender for the ‘man bites dog’ prize because in the rest of the BBC Five Live interview, the Archbishop casts doubt on everything else including the wandering star, the date of Christmas, snow lying on the ground, donkeys and even oxen! Is nothing sacred!? It is this aspect of the interview on the Simon Mayo programme that is picked up in the Times headline, ‘It’s all a Christmas tall story’. However, winning the prize for the-most-oddly-written-final-sentence, Ruth Gledhill's piece concludes, “Dr Williams’s views are strictly in line with orthodox Christian teaching. The Archbishop is sticking to what the Bible actually says”.

News that the new Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg ‘does not believe in God’ made lots of headlines and vied for the prize of most-anti-Christian-headline-in-the-week-before-Christmas with news that Richard Dawkins is going to go on a speaking tour of the Bible belt. The Clegg story could I fear spell doom for Claire Kelly, the very nice (churchgoing) governor of St Aidan’s school in Harrogate who is also the Lib Dem candidate for Harrogate at the next General Election. Harrogate is, of course, a high churchgoing area and atheist politicians don’t go down well in these parts.

Midnight Mass, or Midnight Communion as we call it at St Mark’s Harrogate, was the subject of a Jonathan Petre piece in the Telegraph, 'Midnight mass at 8pm to fool drunks'. He rang up during the week to see if I could find any Anglican churches which were doing the same as some Catholic churches and making their midnight services earlier in the day to avoid drunken rowdy behaviour. I was about to say that we’d only had one or two cases of clergy who’d been drunk and disorderly during midnight mass, when I realised the gist of his question. Here, we have something called ‘Journey to Bethlehem’ earlier in the afternoon for families, but we also have the ubiquitous midnight service which caters for both party-goers and shy people. Both groups, for different reasons, want to avoid coming to church on Christmas morning, and as Christmas is a time for coming together and burying differences it seems an ideal mix. Being neither, I won’t be there at all.

Finally, the Churches Advertising Network is going all cyber this year with an island on second Life and the following little cartoon..So until 2008, Happy Christmas again.