Chaos in Kibworth

After last Friday's debacle I suspected that Joseph might be following me around, spreading his heresy of the infinitely deep furnace in an infinitely deep pit and trying to steal my converts on my weekly evangelism trips. So today as I stood by the side of that King's Highway of a thoroughfare, the A6 in Kibworth, I was unsurprised to hear the sound of his flip-flops shuffling into place behind me. Truly his flip-flops have the strength of many, for the noise of the A6 reacheth up even to the heavens.

Truly Joseph had his reward today. As he stood behind me, shouting his heresy through his ungodly amplification system, he suddenly had a look of alarm on his face as he heard the sound of fifty pairs of small, stamping feet.
And there they were. The children from the Holiday club, full of the evangelistic fire with which Bob the Baptist had filled them and seized with zeal for the True Light.  A dozen of them picked Joseph up,  carried him down the main road, and were last seen heading for the Golf Club with determined looks on their faces.  I gathered from their cheery cries that they planned to bury him up to his neck in a bunker, as a warning to all heretics.

Please don't misunderstand my intentions here.  I didn't want to leave him, unregenerate backslider that he is, undeserving of Grace as we all are. I would have gone to help him. But I had to deal with the  the other children.  They were supposed to stick around near me and sing evangelistic choruses. But in the light of this morning's teaching, they were off and running round the Kibworths.  And together with the other leaders I had to try to get them all back together before they caused any more devastation.

It didn't help that the subject today had been Ananias and Sapphira. Nor that there had been a lot of coloured candy-covered chocolates handed around.  The middle-class denizens of the Kibworths Beauchamp and Harcourt are a flinty-hearted bunch with necks as of brass. If I were on my own I wouldn't reckon on much in the way of blessing. And yet there's something disconcerting about a gap-toothed little blonde moppet of seven looking up at you. Especially when she says "Give me some money or God will kill you." So little Epangelia did very well, raking in nearly a hundred pounds in donations that I really wasn't looking for, as well as five or six people who agreed to say the "Sinners' Prayer" if her little brother would stop crying.

A bunch of the kids picketed the local licensed establishments, asking people if they were sacrificing the well-being of their own children to pay for their loathsome drinking habits.  While a group of nine or ten stamped down the street, shouting "Sell your house and give the money to Mr Parslow".  I had some quick talking to do, to try to persuade the local constable that I wasn't some kind of middle-England religious Fagin.

The kids came back for the post-Holiday Club ice cream in a fine mood, convinced they had made a major breakthrough against the Gates of Hell. And the people of Kibworth were able to take the boards down from their windows and get on with their lives.