Learning from each other

In the early hours of Sunday morning, Canada changed its clocks to daylight saving time, so we all lost an hour's sleep. However, as I'd swapped shifts to help another chaplain who wanted to work today rather than next weekend, Sunday became another day off for me, and so I didn't have such an early start as I might have done. This meant I could attend church in the morning with my host family. They go to a Community Church in the Pentecostal tradition, and so the service was quite different both to my church at home and to the one I attended last Sunday. I enjoyed it though and, amongst other things, was especially impressed by the ministry of welcome. My hosts had gone on ahead as they had responsibilities in church, and so I walked to church and arrived alone. I was greeted very warmly and sensitively, and then invited to share in tea or coffee plus cake before the service began. Although I slightly missed the pattern of a set liturgy, it was good to sing some of the same worship songs as we do at St Michael's, West Andover. Besides some fresh aspects to the ministry of welcome, there were also several other ideas that I wish to take back to the UK with me; as there are from last week's service at a very different church; as there are from some of the conversations I've had with other chaplains. This is part of the joy of belonging to a worldwide church: there are things that we can learn from each other and apply and adapt to our own context.
In the afternoon, we went into the centre of Vancouver and visited a couple of the exhibition pavilions set up for the Paralympics. The queues for a couple of others were much too long to join - the wait in the queue for one attraction was said to be 4 hours but this was short compared to the 8 hours that I was told was the case sometimes during the Olympics!! One sadness connected to these exhibitions is that there are far fewer of them for the Paralympics than for the Olympics. Whilst I realise that there is a smaller number of both athletes and spectators, plus acknowledge the financial implications of them all staying open for both events, I do wonder what some of the Paralympians thought when they arrived to find so many things already being dismantled. With this and other factors in mind, it was interesting to hear the debate in the Vancouver media last week as to whether the Paralympics should perhaps precede the Olympics or even run concurrently..... The numbers of athletes would almost certainly be too big for a Summer Olympics and Paralympics to run concurrently, but this is certainly an interesting issue to ponder - balancing the positives that each event could give to the other with the loss of more narrowly defined and specific focus for each event.