Sandwich course

BY no means without affection, the traditional Methodist service is known as a hymn sandwich.

Hymn, prayers, hymn, readings, hymn, sermon, hymn – you get the flavour, anyway.

It’s all very well, of course, but the diet can become a bit predictable, the palate somewhat jaded.

Last Sunday at Pierremont Methodist church in Darlington they spiced things up completely. By the young uns, at least, the regular 10.30am service may never have been consumed with such relish.

The squidgy tum song, for example, is unlikely ever to be mistaken for one of Charles Wesley’s:

I might have knobbly knees,

A squidgy tum

Hairy toes and a wiggly bum

But Jesus says to me

I love ya.

Pierremont church is in the Denes, an area of long terraces and longer standing. The pre-war building, unlikely ever to win an ecclesiastical beauty contest, is among ten of the 13 churches in the Darlington circuit that would cease to be Sunday places of worship if proposals revealed last week were accepted.

Pierremont, at least, would continue as an “outreach centre”.

Last week they’d staged the kids’ holiday club, around 35 primary school children in attendance. This is the closing service.

“Feel free to stand up, jiggle about, anything you like,” says Chris Russell, one of the leaders. There may not have been too much of that in the Wesleys’ day, either.

For holiday club purposes, the church has been transformed into Little Wiggleington-on-Sea, served by a fish shop called Rocky’s Plaice and imaginatively, enthusiastically decorated. They’d been planning it since Easter.

Chris Russell, brilliant with the bairns – “I go around talking to them all the time, some people think I’m a bit barmy,” she says – is joined by Mark McKnight, a full-time children’s and youth worker.

They play Billy and Milly Crabtickle, brother and sister, Mark wearing a pair of rather florid shorts and an Elvis mask that appears to have much the same effect as sticking his head in a microwave.

Throughout the week the kids have done all manner of daft things, never quite forgotten – or been allowed to forget – where they were, even had a “Memory verse”, the familiar lines from John 3:16.

It’s the usual Sunday morning service time. I’m sitting next to 83-yearold Nell Metcalfe – known, perhaps inevitably, as Little Nell – whose late husband Maurice was for 56 years a Methodist local preacher. “I love this.

It’s a lot more enjoyable than Sunday School used to be in our day,” she says.

“The children are going to remember this for a very long time,”

says Enid Shaw, her neighbour.

The holiday club’s been running for several years. Last year there was a circus theme, the leaders dressed as clowns. Mark, himself training to be a local preacher, had his quarterly assessment during the 2009 service.

“They said that dressing as a clown was very appropriate,.” He says, self-effacingly.

This time he also plays Mad Bad Black Jake McGee, retired pirate and occasional chiropodist, complete with clay pipe and Santa Claus beard. Only the florid shorts give it away – that and the pirate with an Archers accent, anyway.

Previously, Mark had been a teacher. “Schools these days have so many resources, all the interactive white boards and that sort of thing.

Anyone working with children now has the challenge of making it at least as good as school,” he says.

THE service continues the happy-holiday theme that the rest of the week has set, right down to the Wiggleington Wigglettes and a song about ancient wrecks in which all the ungrateful wretches point on cue towards poor Milly Crabtickle.

“I’m not as ancient as you think,”

says Chris, cheerfully.

There’s a bit in which the kids are invited to write felt tip prayers on a paper tablecloth – “Dear God, are you okay? Amen”; “Thank you for such a fabby fun week, Amen” – even a couple of Methodist jokes.

Perhaps the best asks what happened to the baby octopus that was taken away and held to ransom. It was squidnapped.

Asked the best bit of the week, however, they reply almost unanimously that it was throwing wet sponges at the poor Crabtickles.

John Wesley might (as they say) have empathised. When he visited Barnard Castle, they turned the town fire engine on him.

Chris is quickly onto it. “Dear God, thank you for the gift of water, so that we can throw wet sponges.”

At the end, 45 minutes, there’s a song called Our God is a Great Big God – “He’s higher than a skyscraper, He’s deeper than a submarine”

– with all manner of actions.

Little Nell’s enthusiastically doing the arms stretch, though the knees bend may take a little longer. On a window there’s a little card: “Thank you for a great time: Aimee and Caitlin.”

Mark says that he’d like to do that sort of thing every week, but that he’s aware there are many faithful older people who need worship more obviously appropriate for their generation.

“It’s very hard to evaluate how much this sort of thing is successful.

Sometimes you can’t tell at all until you see them growing up.”

Afterwards in the garden at the side of the church there’s a bouncy castle and a barbecue. Everyone’s thoroughly enjoying themselves.

The hymn sandwich may never taste the same again.