God's worried

An unusual event occurred a couple of weeks ago. I found myself without a new book to read. This hardly ever happens. I am not a voracious reader by any stretch of the imagination, but I do usually have one or two books on the go at any one time and, because I am a fairly slow reader who buys books in bulk, there is usually a reserve supply for me to tap into when I finish one. Somehow the system broke down and I had to turn to the bookshelves for something to read.

The book I chose is a strange little one. It's called 'A Little Light Worrying' and is best described as a very short collection of the works of a cartoonist called Mel Calman. He was the front page cartoonist for the Times for many years, back in the days before the Times went tabloid and shunted the cartoons - and therefore the brilliant Jonathan Pugh - onto an inside page. Calman died suddenly in February 1994, suffering a heart attack in the Odeon cinema in Leicester Square. His last cartoon was of a man in a hospital bed, reading a newspaper saying something like "NHS in crisis" and with the caption "Looks like it's sicker than I am". You can read more about Calman - and indeed a whole host of cartoonists - here.

Calman was known for two characters. One was a worried little man, such as the one depicted here. The other was God himself, who was basically a celestial version of the little man. I can't link a picture here because I simply cannot find one anywhere on the web, but perhaps the most famous of all Calman's cartoons showed God lying on a psychiatrist's couch, saying "I'm not as omnipresent as I used to be".

Coincidentally, as I was reading this book, the Church of England published yet another document wondering where their congregations had gone. The combination of the two made me think. I've never made any secret of the fact that, every now and then, I like to go and mither God on what, technically, is his day off. But the problem is that the times at which I can do this in any sort of formal way simply are not made for a 21st century way of life. This is the schedule in my parish:

8am Holy Communion
10am Sung Eucharist
6.30pm Family Service

Those are times which have not changed since the Industrial Revolution. They are times suited to an agrarian economy. They take no account of modern life, where people work later hours, work at weekends and no longer have anything like as much leisure time.

Similarly, each service is at least 90 minutes long. Do most people have 90 minutes to spare like that in a week? Is there anything going on which could not be compressed into, say, 30 minutes? How many hymns do you need, for God's sake - literally, in this case?

I don't know what Calman would have made of all this, but I reckon God would be much happier if people were having a word for less time more often than trying to fit in around a system that hasn't changed since electricity was discovered. So here's an idea for the CoE (and indeed any other denomination): Why not have shorter services at times when people are on their way home? Forget 90 minutes on a Sunday, why not have three services on weeknights as people are on their way home from work? I bet you far more people can manage one or two visits at the end of the working day than can get out of the house at sparrowfart on a weekend. You never know, it might make God less worried.

(Yes, I know that "God's Worried" was a book by Roger Woddis. Thanks)