Drayton Parslow's New Year Message

Hello! Hello! Is this thing working? I know it is important to keep up to date with modern technology, and that we communicate with a new generation with such cutting-edge techniques as Blogs, Myspace and Google Plus. On the other hand, never forget God's warnings to those who went
whoring with their own inventions - surely a prophecy of certain dating apps on mobile phones?

 But nevertheless I am willing, as was Tyndale with the printing press, to make use of new technology to spread God's word. In association with other of the more godly preachers of this land, I developed a dating app for the faithful - "Believr". It matched up different people - of the opposite sexes, of course - on the basis of their agreement on 96 key principles on which the Godly may differ. Adult baptism, for instance, the Rapture, prelapsarianism, the consumption of low-alcohol beer, whether to use wholemeal or white bread at the Lord's Supper, the ideal number of hymns, how large a hat women should wear, the correct hemline height for skirts, and a selection of images of beards with the option to identify them as either "hipster" or prophetic.

We may have been a little too granular in our selection criteria. After a massive 32 downloads from across the world, there were no matches at all. And half of the young ladies that signed up seem to wear clothes that are unsuitable for any Baptist chapel that I know of. 

It has been quite a year for Husborne Crawley and the Bogwulf Funambulist Baptists. I think, when I consider the continuing raging heresy of the so-called Archdruid, that we have certainly won the argument. People were broadly in favour of our promises of eternal life, lots of rousing hymns and 2-hour sermons. However, we have to balance this against the way our congregation numbers have halved. And that some people, hearing about our Camp Revival meetings, assumed it was something to do with the B52s tour and started attending worship dressed up as Ru Paul. In other news, we need to raise some money for the tin roof, which is rusted.

Speaking of which, thank you to those who've asked me about my struggles with O'Vienna Syndrome, where you inadvertently use lyrics from 1980s songs in your everyday speech. It has often been the case that in the morning I awake, my arms and legs and body ache. But when the going gets tough, I depend on the power of love and even when I feel I'm better off dead, and so unstable - I remember that this church is like a city on a rock. And we built this city. I am no longer a small-town boy.

But I digress. If our numbers become any smaller we will need to resort to a schism. We will therefore take our arguments to the streets - to be exact by standing in Dunstable town centre, shouting at people that they are Satan's spawn, foul loathsome creatures, who should clear off to the Anglicans. Oddly, despite our encouragement, they never join us.

Wishing all God's elect a peaceful, godly new year and a terrible, gnawing vengeance for the rest of you. We are another year nearer the end, albeit we did have those six false alarms during the last twelve months. I hope those of our fellowship who sold all they had and gave to the poor, are somehow able to rebuild their lives and careers.

Yours in utter confidence for what lies ahead

Revd Drayton Parslow

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Want to support this blog? Want a good laugh? (or to shudder at death at any rate? Then here's two ways you can keep the Archdruid in doilies...
If you want someone to share the terrors of death while making you laugh, we have "A Hint of Death in the Morning Air" - 97 poems to make you wonder, laugh or shake your head sadly. At only £1 on Kindle. Or if you want to know what the people in the pews really think, and you prefer your words printed on paper, why not try "Writes of the Church"?  The letters to the Church magazine the vicar really didn't need.