I had to attend a meeting in London on Tuesday, I haven’t been to London for several years and on the last occasion I had been with two colleagues who knew their way around train travel and negotiating the London Underground and I just chugged along following them. This time was different, I was travelling with one colleague who wasn’t a lot more familiar with train travel myself, I had been wise enough to ask a friend who is used to travelling to London and attending meetings in Methodist Church House in Tavistock Place and she suggested that we catch the train from Kings Lynn to Kings Cross where we would have a “gentle stroll” to our destination. I drove to Kings Lynn and as I parked in the car park discovered that there were no pay and display machines, just QR codes attached to the lamp posts. I was relieved that my much younger colleague had been wise enough to figure out how the payment system worked using his smart phone and added my car onto his app and paid. I wondered how I would have got on had he not been there and I consider myself reasonably computer savvy.
My friend had also booked the tickets on line and had fortunately printed off the two essential QR codes so that he could look after old man, who come to think of it was almost old enough to be his grandad, and I felt relief to sit on the train with people who quite clearly made this journey frequently and looked completely at ease. Back in the late 1970’s I used to travel the length and breadth of the country by train, but in those days, I paid cash for my ticket which was checked and punched by a conductor and as we trundled through the fens seeing the wonderful Ely Cathedral and passed through places like Cambridge, Letchworth and Stevenage en route for the Metropolis my stress levels increased.
Having lived in East Anglia for almost twenty one years and in the gentle little town of East Dereham for eighteen months, I have got used to a much gentler pace of life and whilst I know that there are thos who find London an exciting, wonderful place to live I felt completely out of my comfort zone waiting to cross Euston Road with a crowd around me and a terrifying crown facing us and knowing that we were going to collide in the middle of the road. I had a job to do, but all I really wanted to do was to retreat back into my own rural little corner. As I pulled into the drive at home later that day I was glad for the experience, but content to stay where I was.
The experience taught me a lesson about the Church in the 21st century, as I have listened to what seems like and endless string of party political broadcasts in the lead up the local elections and listened to all the promises made that I take with a pinch of salt, I feel bewildered in the modern works, things are moving too fast for me. I take comfort at this time of the year as I read the Bible stories of the life of the early Church as they are trying to figure out what life looks like with this new religion they call “Christianity” and like thos of old, I find myself continually asking “what does being a Christian men in the modern world?” and how do we convey that to folk who are searching for something meaningful in life?”