Easter feast

THE invitation is to the church reopening, Saturday 2.30pm. Sorry, I reply, but there’s football on foreign fields (or in Suffolk, which is far enough, anyway).

There’ll be a tea, they say.

In the evening there’s a band concert, preceded by a brew-up and with a supper at the interval. Next day, Palm Sunday, there’ll be another celebration service, ten o’clock. There’ll be a lunch, they say.

At 9.45am, an elderly lady arrives, all smiles. “I may just as well have brought my pyjamas last night,” she says.

Her friend asks if she’s stopping.

“Oh yes,” she says, “I wouldn’t miss me dinner.”

Lunch will be roast beef or vegetarian lasagne, three courses £4. It’s possible to smell it already, or at least to suppose that you can. “Ah yes,”

say the good folk of St Andrew’s in Crook, “but you should have seen the spread yesterday.”

St Andrew’s is at the back of the market place, next to the big-hitting cricket ground, a big old Primitive Methodist chapel which for the past three years has been a Methodist/United Reformed church in what’s properly called a Local Ecumenical Partnership, or LEP for short.

LEP in the dark? They seem to be getting along famously.

Architects inspected both the Methodist and URC buildings before deciding which would be more suited to its new role. The URC church was quickly sold (those were the days) but still stands empty.

“The URC people have been wonderful,”

says Edna March. “I don’t underestimate how difficult it was for them to give up their traditions and that part of their faith which they have had most of their lives, but their response has been delightful.”

They even undertook what trendies, pseudo-psychologists and the Football Association call a SWOT analysis, which stands (as bitter memory suggests) for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Swots used to be clever clogs; now they just think they are.

First, though, they had to refurbish St Andrew’s, not least to make it more disabled friendly – “so many steps,” someone says – though it’s far more than the physically handicapped who’ve been given a lift.

It’s cost around £300,000, partly from the sale of the URC church, including £50,000 on the roof. “It soon became apparent that there wasn’t much point working on everything down below if we didn’t first fix the roof,” says Edna. The kitchen was upgraded, too.

Within moments it’s equally obvious that it’s not just the building which has been transformed. The congregation, mostly getting on a bit, seem reinvigorated, rejuvenated, born again.

One or two even have tambourines.

It is to prove a lovely, lively, perhaps even a surprising morning.

The pew leaflet announces that it is to be holy communion. The Plan – best afford it a capital P, in the Methodist church almost everything goes according to Plan – says that it’s not.

John Bower, the retired Methodist minister in charge of the morning’s proceedings, recalls that a few weeks earlier the Weardale plan had indicated that a service would be lead by Bruce Willis. This appears to have been a confusion between Bruce Clark and Keith Willis, both admirable local preachers but neither particularly good at action films.

The Reverend Tom Wilkinson – Crook’s hymn writing last minister, now retired to Scotland – is back for the occasion, too.

BEFORE heading off to another service, in Willington, the Reverend Ann Shepherdson talks of the “vision and faith” needed to build an LEP and of their debt to Edna March.

“She has ploughed through all the paper work, worked alongside the professional team, taken an awful lot of responsibility on her shoulders.

“Her love of the Lord, of this church family and of the community is so evident.”

Edna, given flowers, is characteristically modest. She’s had no desire to be singled out, she says, insists that it was a team effort and that everything she did had been a privilege.

“Everyone has been generous of both time and talents.”

Had it been an Anglican church, the Palm Sunday reading – the year’s longest – would have lasted half the morning, the scriptural equivalent of Gone With the Wind. Here it’s two verses, though Neville Moore offers a dramatised account of another passage.

He’s very good, probably been a Glenholme Player. Do the Glenholme Players still tread Crook’s boards?

Wholly unselfconsciously, two members of the congregation also walk around waving palm fronds – frond of a treat, it might be said – before placing them at the foot of a large, purple-shrouded cross.

Another example of innovation meeting tradition, and getting along very well together, there’s a powerpoint presentation, too, and a video clip from the film Entry Into Jerusalem. “Let’s just hope the technology works,” says Mr Bower. It does.

The remarkable thing is that wherever they came from and no matter how recently, they give the impression of having done it all their lives.

Between seeing to the beef out the back, the beaming Denise Grantham talks of all the other things that are going on within St Andrew’s orbit – not least aimed at young people.

“We just want to take the church further out into the community, to let everyone know that it’s here and that they’ll be welcome,” she says.

On Fridays there’s even an afterschool drop-in club, 4.30 to 6pm.

“They even make their own tea,”

says Denise. “We teach them to make proper burgers, instead of the sort they buy from vans.”

For reasons wholly to do with eating out elsewhere, we’ve to forego the £4 feast – but at Easter, when a church community has so vigorously and vibrantly reinvented itself, there’s food for thought, nonetheless.