. The 8 O’Clock Service – a Personal View.

I love the 8 o’clock service. I love it because it is the early service that opens the Lord’s Day, quietly and with space for prayer and contemplation, whether in the bright sunshine of summer or in the grey of a December dawn when the birds are still only at the throat-clearing stage. I can start Sundays with worship and then let the rest of the day unfold. For the rest of the day I know it is Sunday because it started in the proper way. I love its language – not 1662 any more but still near enough to the phrasing and cadences of the time when the English language was at its peak. I love it too because – as befits a service that opens the day – it is calm and without most of the (very amiable) chat and gossip that goes on around the other services. Very amiable and often good fun and important too, but distracting from the business in hand. Of course even at the early service we talk to each other, but mostly it is afterwards, when what they sometimes still call Divine Service is over. It suited me very well, and I felt it was very much ‘my’ service – I don’t mean this selfishly, but for a time David Salvage and I used to alternate as lay assistants: at least one of us was always there, and after he died it was just me until more people came forward to be lay assistants. I am told that there are folk living on Acrefield Road who set their watches as I walked past at 7.45 in the morning – I hope I maintained my punctuality.

I miss it now it is in abeyance.  I know that not everyone is at their best first thing in the morning (I am a lark who has been married to an owl for more than forty years), and I couldn’t argue with the costs of heating the church for a tiny congregation during one of the colder winters in recent memory: as I serve on the PCC I am only too well aware of the state of the church’s finances. Yes, there was one Sunday just after Christmas when Chris and I were the only people in the church, and we agreed to go home unshriven (it was so cold that Barbara, ever-faithful, had come out to open the church but had fallen on the ice and been persuaded to return home). So I let myself be persuaded to propose to the PCC at its meeting in March that we abandon the service. I felt like an ancient Roman being asked to fall on his sword.

“Go to St John’s,” they said, “they still have an 8 a.m. service but of course it is not in traditional language.”  Some 8 o ’clockers have tried this option; I haven’t, yet. In the end it is not the language that is the point. St Paul’s is MY church: I have been worshipping at St Paul’s for forty years, ever since we came to the Heatons, I have been sidesman, reader, now lay minister, both our children went to Sunday School, our son was head chorister and was allowed to play the organ. There were times when I was in St Paul’s two and three times a Sunday.   If I start going to St John’s now because they still have services at the ‘proper’ time then I should surely become a member of St John’s congregation.  That is not one I have resolved yet, but aside from Easter I haven’t been to church since the Day They Abandoned The Eight O’clock Service. Not good.

It hurt.  It hurt in so many ways and it clearly hurt many more people than just me. Back in March we had discussed the option of having a service at 8 a.m. on the third Sunday in the month: although there are practical reasons why this was the best Sunday to choose, at the time that seemed to most of the PCC to be too awkward a schedule to remember easily. However, by the time of the May meeting many of us had realised how much we missed that service, and I asked for the service to be restored. So to my joy it is back, once a month on the third Sunday, beginning on 19^th September – with the absences in the team caused by holidays and other commitments over the summer it did not make sense to reinstate it any earlier. It is not an ideal arrangement, but it would surely encourage Chris and those others who do take part in this service if more people did come to take part. Then perhaps we could look at the question again later. Many of you have muttered your thoughts on this topic into my ears, sotto voce: in the autumn it would be good to see a few more coming into the church with the larks.

John Prag