Looking Back: The Kirk Needs an Open Door

From June 1984

By T. Howard Wright, elder of Sauchie Parish Church

In the recent furore over Sunday football one of the reasons given for deploring it has been that it prevents people from going to church – not just spectators, but players, groundstaff, and transport workers who would otherwise not be working and would therefore be able to go to church.

The implication is that if people are prevented from attending church, at the times when the church happens to provide the opportunity, it is wicked.

I think it is time that the Church really faced up to this problem – acknowledged how big a problem it is, and did something about it. Surely it is not our job as Christians just to open the doors of our churches for public worship once (sometimes twice) on one day in the week and then shake our heads in self-righteous sorrow when people who have to work then do not come.

SHIFT WORKERS

Sunday morning service is often held at a time which is inconvenient or impossible, both for people who work on day-shift and those who work on afternoon-shift. Even the few evening services still left are usually arranged at a time suitable to let worshippers home fairly early in the evening. Consequently they are often too early for the people who have to work during the day and need a meal when they get home – very few midweek meetings start at 6.30pm.

NOT ENOUGH

Really, our hours of worship on a Sunday have been devised to suit only the person who is on holiday on Sunday, and in the Church Of Scotland we make no other provision for the rest of the population to worship.

Most people think that working on Sundays is confined to a few people who work in hospitals, utilities such as gas and electricity, a few transport workers, and radio and TV staff. In fact, in the complex and interdependent society we now have, there is a surprisingly high proportion of work which has to be carried out on Sunday. Without it the civilised life we know and want would just not function.

The steel, plastics, chemical, glass, brewing, distilling, and farming industries, to name some, are all large industries with a lot of Sunday working. Many parts of them are continuous processes which must be continued on three shifts a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks in the year. Any other arrangement would make their products prohibitively expensive or even impossible to make.

It simply is not enough for the Church to open its doors for public worship one hour in the week and hope that people in these industries are free to come at that time. What is the point in holding a mission in an industrial parish, with door-to-door visitation, special meetings, etc., when those contacted cannot come when the church is open?

How can the young chemical worker, for instance, newly admitted to membership and keen, be expected to develop the habit of regular public worship when his work rota gives him only one free Sunday in four? It would be quite wrong to tell him to change his job to one which allows him to attend church because that would just make him a hypocrite – someone refusing to work on a Sunday but quite happy to buy the product of other people’s Sunday work (how many of us does that define?).

SOMEBODY’S SUNDAY

No matter how strictly Sabbatarian, we are in our own personal observance today, we cannot avoid buying a lot of things which depend on the Sunday work of many people as they progress from basic raw materials to finished goods in the shops. And, let’s face it, we are glad that these products and services are available relatively cheaply, and contribute so much to the high standard of living we enjoy – we depend on Sunday work done by others.

There is clearly a real need for the Church to make provision for the fairly large minority of people whose jobs require them to work on Sundays. What I have tried to do here is point out the need rather than give a solution. If we claim to be the Church Of Scotland the least we can do is make sure that the whole population of Scotland has a chance to take part in public worship. The Church Of Scotland lags well behind the Roman Catholic and Episcopal Churches here.

Perhaps one solution would be for the churches in a small town to unite for week-day worship so that on each day of the week a service was held in one of them. Or perhaps five or six city churches could do the same.

In today’s complex and interdependent society every day is somebody’s Sunday.

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