What About The Rest of the Week

It is a known fact that God only works on Sundays. This is the reason why most churches only open on Sundays and why most attendees to those places of worship only do their religion on a Sunday.

It is also a known fact that a life of faith only really needs an hour a week as a booster, and that for the other days of the week, worshipping folk need not concern themselves with the God of Sundays. To best work around this, churches are closed from noon on Sundays until 7.48am on the following Sunday - time enough for the God of Sundays to be looked at, prodded and poked, sung about, and prayed to. This is also the reason why the sallow-eyed Dog-Collar folk only come out on one day of the week, in line with a carefully prepared rota to lead the prodding and the poking of the God of Sundays. 

That today is Monday need not worry you. The God of Sundays is on his day off, playing golf and attending to a little decorating. In any case, we are unlikely to visit the church, so that its doors are closed is of little consequence. Why would you open a church on a Monday anyway? What has the week-day life of those who worship the God of Sundays have to do with anything?

Parody or not, this is how it is in many places I think. Some of you will find this harsh or uncharitable, but I think in the end you will accept that I am right! In my own edifice, through no fault of anyone, and with a care to protect the goods and chattels of the parish and spare the organisation needless heating bills, it has fallen into a habit of closure or a habit of using 'secular' rooms instead of the church itself. I estimate that the church here is open no more than three hours a week - which is quite a lot more than most. It is an unfortunate symbol of the mindset of church life, that it is open for you on Sundays, but closed when you are not being religious. 

We have two issues, that can both help the other. If we are Christians all week, why don't we pop into the church and visit it on other days of the week, be it the one we normally attend or the one near where we work. There might not be a service on, but in most cases God can be found in the perfect beauty of the silence in a still church. The other issue is in the opening of our church buildings. Yes, it costs money to heat and light, and you may even need people to be there to look after the place when scallywags come knocking - but I firmly believe that a church has a duty to be open for as many hours of the days as it can possibly manage. Those who value our sacred spaces on weekdays may even help towards the cost of keeping them open, if we but asked them. Also, an open church is a church that takes people seriously on days other than Sundays - acknowledging their need for sustenance in the course of a working week. 

Push hard enough, and you may even find an ordained person in there sometimes, when they are not on the Rota!