It is 9am on the Saturday morning of a bank holiday weekend.  I am up, dressed and having – considering the time that my children had awoken – a relatively late and leisurely breakfast.  The vicarage telephone rings and my wife takes a call from a man in the North East of England.  His father has recently died and his mother is dying in a nearby hospital.  He is concerned that she will die without having had the opportunity of formally mourning her husband of 65 years. 

Would I be prepared to go into the hospital at the earliest convenient opportunity and conduct a substitute funeral service for the family around her bedside? 
Neither he nor his family are parishioners.  I don’t even know whether they are Christians in any meaningful sense of the word.  But, having established that there is some connection with my parish (I am the vicar of the church where his parents were married in 1948), I agree to do all that I can to help the grieving family.

Over the course of the bank holiday weekend, I take more phone calls and e-mails from the family.  I spend an hour or so preparing a service for this particular set of circumstances, even arranging to download appropriate music on to my iPod.  And then comes the question: “please tell me your fees, and whether you can take payment via bank transfer.”

There are no fees.  This isn’t a formal funeral service so the statutory fees don’t apply, and outside of weddings and funerals almost everything done by the parish clergy is free of charge.   My time, my petrol and even my music download costs are paid entirely through the generous giving of my congregation.  There is no direct cost to the family.  There is not even an indirect cost through taxation.  Some things in life really are free.

And this raised a question in my mind.  For where else could someone reach a professional at his home on a bank holiday weekend and at short notice, without waiting lists or queues, arrange for a bespoke service of this nature?

There is nothing especially laudable about this small episode in my ministry.  Countless clergy (and of course, laity) do the same week in, week out.  The sick are visited, the bereaved comforted, the troubled consoled.  I would hope that in most cases these people are helped irrespective of whether or not they share the faith of the church.  Certainly I believe that one of the strengths of the parish system is the onus that it puts on the church to serve all those in the local community irrespective of what identities they, or anyone else, place upon them.

Last week a relieved Church of England published the welcome news that attendance figures for 2011 showed only (!) a decline of 0.3%, allowing them – perhaps a little optimistically – to claim that churchgoing numbers had “stabilised”.  More positively, attendances at Christmas and Cathedral services continued to rise, and there had been a significant increase in baptisms.

One swallow doesn’t make a summer (and I’m not even sure that this counts as a swallow) but if the limits of the ebb-tide of faith have been reached, my sense is that this will in part be due to the growing distinction between a church that remains faithful to its community and its residents, whatever the cost, and a society in which financial considerations appear to be the final arbiter.

The author is a vicar in the diocese of Sheffield

Image by Le Grace Studio from flickr.com under the Creative Commons Licence.