Always something new in the SEC. ‘Have you seen the doll?’ they asked yesterday in Alloa. And there it was – a fully computerised racially-non-specific doll. This is the programme which gives teenage girls electronic babies to look after in an effort to curb teenage pregnancies. This really was something new – if you know the SEC, you will understand that our fertility profile tends to be a bit Abraham and Sarah-ish. ‘So how has your baby been?’ I asked. ‘Oh just up twice during the night’ was the reply.
We’re doing a lot of thinking about vocational discernment at present. Is this not a useful principle which we could apply? We could give the person who is exploring vocation an electronic congregation to live with for a while. It would telephone at all sorts of odd times to complain about this and that – about the graveyard and the church being cold. It would be overwhelmingly friendly for a while and then go all funny. It would sing hymns too slowly. It would have a sort of soap opera life of tensions and misunderstandings. In short it would be delightfully and overwhelmingly human. I do miss parish ministry – a bit. . sometimes.
What a brilliant idea! You could receive 100s of emails each day to represent the piles of mail we have to sort through. And one morning you could wake up and find your boundary wall has caved in and is going to cost all your savings for interior decoration to repair it. (Too close to home, that one!)