Some advice about your odd new church

Joe Cool

You’re in your mid-teens.  You grew up mildly affiliated to the Church of England and then you decided to become a witch, but you got bored of burning your fingers on candles.  A few weeks ago some woman knocked on your door and you answered in a sweatshirt depicting Snoopy in shades.  The woman gave you a leaflet and asked if you’d like to come along to her church one Sunday.  ‘You could bring Joe Cool,’ she said, pointing at your torso.

  Your cynical mother appeared behind you in the hall doorway, her arms in a tight mudra.  ‘What kind of church are you from?’ she shouted, making you jump.

  ‘It’s a free-church, non-denominational,’ said the woman.  ‘Like the early Christians.’

  You immediately loved the idea of that.  Non-denominational, like the early Christians!  Like the disciples themselves!  The woman tried to elaborate on the invite she’d extended to you and to Snoopy but it was hard with your mother glaring at her.  After the woman went away, your mum laughed with pity and plucked the leaflet out of your hand.  ‘I’ll just file this in the bin,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t!’ you screamed, feeling suddenly that you were at an important crossroads.  ‘I’m going to go to that church.’

  Your mother had made an art of never looking surprised.  She didn’t like to compromise her reputation for knowing everything that was going on, but this time she couldn't help herself.  She’d assumed that none of her offspring, not even a teenager who still couldn’t sleep with a foot poking out from the bedclothes at night in case a monster grabbed it, was gullible enough to get converted by some woman on a doorstep.

  ‘Well, good for you,’ she stammered, handing you back your bit of paper and backing into the doorway.  But her expression was saying, Are you mad?  It was hard for you to know what you should respond to, her statement or her look, so you just stood there clutching the King’s Church pamphlet to your chest.  Mum casually grabbed the doorframe above her head and rocked back and forth like an ape, scrutinising you.  She was trying to make sense of this development in the life of the weirdo she had borne.  Eventually she said to herself, ‘He should get out more.’  She frowned and made some biting motions.  ‘Out and about, meeting people,’ she said.  ‘Actual people.  Girls even.  It’ll be healthy for him.’

  ‘Mum, I’m still here,’ you said.

  From that moment on it was settled in her mind: this church business was not some veer into social deviance – it was a new hobby of yours.  A chance to meet wholesome girls.  And no matter how rabidly fundamentalist you become afterwards, her opinion will hold firm.

It turned out that King’s Church meet in the hall of your old primary school.  You’d had no idea that any Christians met in primary schools, let alone yours.

  Pitcherwood Primary is a mainly flat affair, clean-looking, a collection of three big bungalows connected at right-angles.  Its layout is roughly like a letter U with some outcrops.  One end of the dark-grey roof of the main bungalow, the part of the school containing the reception and main hall, takes off like a ski slope.  The bricks are the same light grey-brown as the surrounding houses, the colour of truckstop cafeteria tea.  Inside, the smell of poster paint and floor-varnish makes your memory sit upright with raised eyebrows, and for your first three or four visits you roamed idiotically with a sense of Wonderland gigantism.

  There are free jam-filled doughnuts and cups of coffee on offer at the beginning of the meetings.  If there is a knack to eating the doughnuts without acquiring a beard of sugar and jam you haven’t discovered it.  After three nervous coffees and two doughnuts you need the toilet and you don't want to speak to anyone because you smell of coffee and are sticky.  Some people try, grinning, to approach you, but you feign inordinate interest in the newsletter handed you by the welcomers at the door.

  It is, in all honesty, a scary place.  Those first few times you attended, there was no-one there you recognised.  The woman who’d invited you there was made unrecognisable by the fact that she spent the services with her arms in the air, which was not how you remembered her.  About half of the congregation worship in similar fashion, looking like a crèche-full of babies wanting to be picked up.  Picked up by whom?  By God.

  Jeff Gribb, the church elder, doesn’t really care how people worship as long as they keep their clothes on, and even then you imagine there's some latitude for flexibility.  People sing harmonies.  They get up and announce things uninvited.  They hum loud agreement throughout the sermons, which are about things like whether the apostle Paul might have written the epistle to the Hebrews and why he didn’t.  You position yourself at the back of the hall and stand up when everyone else stood up, and sit down when they sat down, and remain sitting down when, occasionally, people swooned under the power of the Spirit.  You watch, with car-crash-witness fascination, the people who dance or who burst into improvised praises or who utter fantastically non-specific prophecies.  You lick your jammy lips, and breathe slyly into your palm to test whether your breath has lost its coffee aroma in case someone forces you to converse with them.  You've tried once or twice to sing, but you could manage only a tiny falsetto sound in the back of your throat, like an elf in a well.

Yes, it’s weird, and you're wondering if you should stop going and be normal like your friends.  But listen.  It is all as it should be.  You're looking for God, aren't you?  Well, he's here.  What is a school-hall full of lower-middle-class suburbanites who had encountered the maker of the universe supposed to look like if not like this?

  Think about it: all the time you've been  there you've felt curiously and uncomfortably at home.  It was a sort of astonished recognition, the type a newborn baby might wordlessly feel, despite its trauma and wailings, when it gets its first gulp of air.  Sometimes you don’t like being there; but it is undoubtedly the right place for you to be.  And you know the things you don’t like about your church?  Well, either you’ll come to appreciate them in time, or one day you’ll be in a position to try to change them, if you’re brave enough.

  My advice to you?  Stick with it.  Yes, if you quit - whether it be now or in a couple of years' time -you'll get few more free hours in your week to watch TV, and you can gravitate towards the normal teenage life that your friends have – but you’ll wither.  And years later, you’ll try to find the church you gave up, and it won’t be there.

  Well, it might be there, but it won’t feel at all like you should be there.  It would probably still feel like home if you’d stayed, but you didn’t.  And you’ll spend your life looking for something that feels the same, and you won’t find it.

  You’ll have to trust me on this one.