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The column visits a Mother's Day cafe church service to see what youngsters these days say they've learnt from their own mums

HUNGRY for more, or perhaps simply because someone has discerned the need to feed the inner man, we have been invited for the second time in a month to what has become known as a Café Church. It does much more than just fill a space.

The first occasion was a joint Methodist/Anglican gathering at North Cowton, in North Yorkshire. This one, feet beneath the tables, marks Mothering Sunday at Barnard Castle Methodists and has been meticulously planned by a group of seven students from Cranmer College in Durham.

The day previously they'd given out 250 little nosegays with an invitation to attend the service, helped the kids make some rather splendid clay roses, invited some of them inside to make Mother's Day cards.

The clay roses are still on display. I'm so hungry, I could eat those, too.

Though always hospitable, distinctly family friendly, the town centre church has been transformed. Little tables overflow with flowers and with food, the Reverend Keith Pearce - Teesdale's minister - acting as a waiter if not exactly being mother.

"There are going to be 12 baskets left over," he says, biblically, and thoughts turn to loaves and fishes. Do they still make Mother's Pride?

If not perhaps 5,000, around 80 are present.

While there are many more mums than young children, there's not a commercial café in Barney which wouldn't welcome half as many on a winter Sunday morning.

On the same table there's a delightful little two-year-old, all curls and cuteness, and a lady 90-odd years older who remains in hat and top-buttoned coat. It's hard to tell who's enjoying the proceedings more greatly.

The service is led by Anne Offler, who attends North Road Methodist church in Durham and is on a "discernment" place at Cranmer, with a view to possible ministry.

"It's going to be fun," she says.

Since it's Lent, the big wooden cross is purple shrouded. A young lad wears a Sunderland shirt; that seems pretty penitential, too.

There's a leaflet explaining how Mothering Sunday began - something to do with everyone going back to their "mother" church on the third Sunday in Lent, especially those poor souls in service - and on the other side, a quiz with a motherhood theme.

What famous mother starred in Pretty Woman? What's the name of Bart Simpson's mum? Who does the voice for Fiona's mum in the Shrek films?

How should I know? Wasn't Pretty Woman a Roy Orbison song? Who the heck's Shrek? This isn't maternal instinct, it's some mothers do have 'em.

For the second time in three days, proceedings start with the song Come On and Celebrate. The first, the previous Friday evening, had been at the opening of the new Methodist church at Witton Park, near Bishop Auckland, and there'll be much more of that next week.

One door opens, someone at Barney reports that the homely little Methodist chapel up at Lands, near Cockfield - from which we'd reported a golden-glowing harvest festival one sunny September Sunday in 2006 - had closed before Christmas.

Sunday's is one of the services in which folk are encouraged to participate, even to walk about a bit. They're asked to talk with their neighbours about what they learned from their mother.

I'm half way through a third buttered scone when the question's put by Alison Richardson, a mother of eight-year-old twins who lives at Leadgate, near Consett, and is an ordinand at Cranmer.

The answer about not speaking with the mouth full seems both honest and appropriate but sprays crumbs everywhere, nevertheless.

Others suppose that they'd learned to wash their neck, to be polite and courteous, to wrap dad around their little finger, just like mum did.

Anne says that she can identify four mother figures in her life - "probably because just one couldn't have coped".

There's also an exercise in which we're invited to make a pretty little box from folded paper, at which the admirable Alison is hugely adept. "I'm no good at theology, I have to be good at something,"

she says, self-effacingly.

There are those of us, alas, who are not only hopeless at such handiwork, who fail to tick any practical boxes at all, but who believe origami to be a breed of antelope.

As if by some minor miracle, the box also ends up containing a chocolate.

Could it be one she'd made a little earlier?

We've written before that they don't learn this sort of thing at theological college and were manifestly mistaken.

They must.

There's a reading, an address cleverly constructed, some prayers which the bairns have written. One simply wants to pray for everyone - "even those who are bad" - a second for his mum, "because she's crazy".

A third has a yellow streak. "Lord, you know I like bananas. Help my mum to buy them."

It ends after about 70 minutes. As probably they'd hope of a café church, it's been a thoroughly refreshing experience.

8:57am Saturday 8th March 2008

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