Summer 2010 Edition

IS COOKING THE LATEST SPECTATOR SPORT?

Rev. Bruce Carlin

Cookery programmes fill our television schedules as never before. So called ‘celebrity chefs’ vie with one another to humiliate their staff or trainees, use the foulest language, or improve school or hospital meals. We can learn to cook Italian, Indian, Chinese or Middle Eastern, and we can watch people compete for cookery competitions between groups of adults, children, or the ubiquitous ‘celebrities’. There was even one this week on the links between food and opera.

Contrast this with adverts for new kitchens. Always immaculate with nothing out of place, they are illustrated with a young lady on the phone, a child watching television, or a group of people sitting on stools drinking and chatting, but never with anyone actually cooking in them.

It seems (at least among the younger generations) that we want to watch other people cooking, but not actually do it ourselves. We would much rather go and buy our meals from the take-away or supermarket, preferably cooked, or at least endorsed by, one of the chefs we have seen on television.

On the day I am writing this article there is also a piece in the newspaper about the Canon Chancellor of Lincoln Cathedral, who has written in his newsletter lamenting the increasing number of people who claim to be ‘spiritual but not religious’ and come out with that tired old oxymoron that ‘you don’t have to go to church to be a Christian’. He says that a Google search yielded nearly one and a half million results for this sentence.

It seems to me that there is a connection between these trends, and that religion is also in danger of becoming little more than a spectator sport. People want the church to be there and available to them when it suits them, but they don’t want to be involved. Try suggesting that a church should close and see what reaction you get from the local community. Try suggesting that you want to alter a church building to make it more suitable for worship and mission and see what kind of outcry you get, mostly from those who never actually worship in it. Like the kitchens in the adverts they want the church to be pristine with not a thing out of place, looking just like the day it was built, not (as they see it) spoiled by being used for anything like cooking, or in the church’s case anything equally messy like having children and families worshipping in an informal and friendly manner.

It is an old cliché, but the church is about people not buildings. And it is about joining in with things and taking part, not standing on the sidelines watching other people doing it, and then just consuming ready prepared services that someone else has made.

Now I wouldn’t say our kitchen is a mess (well, all right, it has its moments!), but it certainly doesn’t look like those in the adverts. And neither would I want it to. And this is because it is a working room, not a museum (I don’t know about you, but I never feel comfortable in museums). We actually cook in it, as well as eat in it and sometimes socialise in it. And that is what it should be. And while I don’t want our churches to look a mess either, I do want them to be somewhere that people work and even play in, as well as worship in.

It doesn’t mean that we don’t care for it, rather that it is a church that is actively used, rather than just a museum. Somewhere where we and our families can feel comfortable.