Sex and Drink and Bad Coffee

There was a little surprise for the users of the Baptibus this morning.

Since the Baptibus people are all, by definition, not inhabitants of Frisby-on-Soar, we rearranged the service without telling them and started it two hours later. And we had our coffee time before the act of formal worship (for surely, drinking coffee in the Lord’s name on the Lord’s day is itself a form of communal worship.  And given the appalling quality of our coffee, drinking it is a kind of sacrifice as well).
The Baptibus arrived towards the end of the coffee time, and the people on it were most surprised to find that we all filed into the chapel at the end of it. However, we had placed a couple of the matrons of the church with the sternest expressions by the door, so the Baptibus guys didn’t leave, and instead followed everybody else into the chapel.

I felt the worship this morning was not overly improved by our new singers, Kayleigh and Kylie. Apparently they are serial failures on the “X Factor”, whatever that is. And they could probably do with some device that automatically brings their voices into tune. But on the plus side, in their shapeless gingham dresses and matching berets, they brought a certain youthful, feminine and yet modest charm to the music group.

After the service I had a chat with a passenger on the Baptibus that I’d never met before – a young man called Simon from Oadby. It turned out he’d had no idea when he set out this morning that he was going to a church service. The other people of the Baptibus community had told him that they’d bring him to Frisby for a cup of coffee, before a motorised pub crawl around the Leicestershire countryside. However he was most taken by Kayleigh – or possibly Kylie, he wasn’t quite sure, and they do look quite similar in those outfits - and was still hoping that Oz might be brought to visit a few pubs on the way home. Indeed, given what he described as this “winning combination”, he promised he’d be back next Sunday.

So a mixture of the desire for alcohol, the sex drive of the young male, and a certain deviousness on my part in re-arranging the service.  And as a result we may have found ourselves a convert of sorts. I am in a slight measure distressed and confused by the way this has come about. And yet I give my thanks accordingly.