Burton's Worship Meter - The Rapture

Dear Readers, always nice to be home. Even though the Archdruid is, for reasons best known to herself, sobbing and throwing darts at her special "Rafa Benitez" dart board.

I've just got back from the Bedford Reformed Church of the Coming Advent. Every Thursday, these faithful and lovely people hold their Service of Waiting for the Return of the Lord. And every Thursday they go away disappointed. So I had to get the old Spurgeonometer out and see how they rated

Bless their hearts, they don't grumble. Even though their notice board proclaims that all church events are provisional - "3pm Ladies' Bright Hour - Unless he comes". And yet every week all their events come round.

Note that for these highly spiritually-charged people, mere Spurgeons are not sufficient to measure the Worship Temperature. Even Wimbers aren't sufficient. The chart above is plotted in the natural log of the Spiritual Temperature in Wimbers.

I do wonder though. If every Thursday they expect the Rapture to come - why do they have notices? And why do they bother putting the water heating urn on at the start of the service?

Cheap, Renewable and Useless

Worshippers as a renewable energy source. Why has nobody thought of it before?

See, when Eileen told me about Burton's new research into Spiritual Temperature, I had a bright idea.

Burton's proved that he can measure the Spiritual Temperature of a worshipper and that there can be quite a difference between different environments. But according to the 2nd Law of Pneumodynamics, you can't tap the Spiritual Temperature directly. But you can if you can somehow attach a spiritual themocouple - a pneumocouple - between points of different Spiritual Temperature. I estimated that between a Pentecostal meeting and the prayers at the start of a PCC meeting, I could generate maybe 0.3 milliWimbers - enough to power a small town, or maybe Mad Priest's comments pages.

I wanted to start on a slightly smaller scale. So I hooked up the "positive" end to the Beaker People's Worship Focus Festival - seventeen "stations" scattered around the Moot House, from the "consider the beauty of an elephant" icon to the "creative tambourines" workshop. And I attached the "negative" end to the local Methodist Ladies' Bright Hour. There's only three of them left, and they mostly have a cup of coffee and a natter.

Well, you've already imagined what happened. That's because you're probably cleverer than I am. You're all druids, rectors, priestesses and bishops and things and I just work for Mid-Beds Council.
So it turned out the real source of spiritual power was the small, dusty room off a decrepit chapel just over the Buckinghamshire border. While 50 Beaker Folk making themselves feel self-fulfilled and signing ancient praises didn't generate enough spiritual energy to blow your hat off. My machine, effectively having Live plugged into Earth and vice-versa, suffered a massive unexpected power surge. Took out the wall of the Doily Shed. Eileen is, once again, really annoyed and I now share with the Mona Lisa the absence of eyebrows.

Don't forget, I do these experiments because you don't want to.