Annual Report of the Mission Committee

This year has once again been a whirlwind of activity for the Mission Committee. Which means we have not actually been able to meet.

Charles works nights Monday to Wednesday, Dorice goes to see her mum from Friday afternoons to Saturdays, Sunday is a day of rest and Thursday is Arfur's darts night. So we actually don't have any chance to meet at all. We're hoping in five or six years, when a couple of us have retired, it might all get a bit easier.

So we tried recreating the Mission Committee as a "virtual group" online. We set up a Facebook group, and looked forward to the dynamic evangelistic ideas that would arise.

It was only after five months of radio silence that we realised that, since Dorice thinks Facebook is a CIA plot to steal your recipes for ginger cake, and Arfur does not have a computer, this was not going to work.

Catching ten minutes after the Sunday Tea Light Extravaganza, we did conclude that we had limited our ambitions by just using the word "Mission". After all, as the church in the West has gradually come to reason, it's not like anyone every actually gave the Church a "Mission" as such. And so, in order to broaden our terms of reference, we are now the Mission, Outreach and Bingo Committee. This has certainly given us more potential scope for activity. However, since Charles thinks that Bingo is the work of the Dark One, the actual scope is very little wider than it was before. And, since we collectively have no free evenings (see above), we can't actually hold any Bingo sessions even if we all agreed it would not be the road to perdition. Charles thinks this is a narrow escape.

Next year, our ambition is to organise a major outreach to the people of Husborne Crawley, involving a large Big Top, sky divers, the German electronic music group Kraftwerk and an internationally-famous speaker. We know we're aiming high. But if we don't shoot for the stars, where will we get? There is an evening in August when we reckon we're all free, and we could probably get it planned. As long as Arfur's shifts don't change.

The Mission, Outreach and Bingo Committee