Sunday is busy, with two or three services — attendance isn’t bad, about 70 at the 10.30am — and usually a baptism or two, plus choral evensong once a month. We have a midweek service too; many older folk come and some of them won’t meet anyone else that week. So just having that connection is important.
On other days there are weddings and funerals; worship assembly at our primary school; choir practice; helping to run our community café; our courses — “Beer and Bible” at the pub is particularly good with the blokes — and visits to the sick, the lonely, the old. There’s also a lot of admin, which is not my favourite.
But the majority of my time is spent with people who are on the edges, who’ve fallen through the cracks. They could be struggling with poverty or addiction, it might be issues around homelessness, or not being able to put food on the table or afford school uniform. They need someone to talk to and to help them, often with quite practical things, and no one else will do it. We try to help, often by advocating with the local authority.
People ring my home doorbell every day wanting something: a sleeping bag, a flask of drink, whatever. I get exasperated with some of the “frequent flyers” but when you look at the lives they come from, there aren’t many options for these people.
We don’t give out cash: we don’t have enough, and that’s just creating a new dependency culture anyway. We find other ways to help. Really what we’re looking at is getting people to help themselves, to be more hopeful about their situation.
My job is to represent hope: hope that things could be better, hope that there’s a God who’s interested, hope that love triumphs. That’s kind of the gig…….
………And there are good days: transformations, when we’ve been able to help someone completely turn their lives around. It doesn’t happen often but it’s great when it does. And when someone’s been on the fence about their faith in Jesus and says, “Go on then, I think I believe it. What next?” That’s exciting, it gives me a boost.
Rev Chris Krawiec. Vicar of Morecambe Parish Church
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