At Your Service: Ushaw College

USHAW College is a 200- year-old Roman Catholic seminary west of Durham, though these days – trainee priests being rather few on the ground – it serves also as a conference centre and for other more worldly purposes, too.

You can tell it’s become more secular.

There’s a notice advising that owners leave cars and contents at their own risk. Previously, it would have said “Thou shalt not steal”.

They do guided tours, too, starting at £7 to include tea and biscuit.

They’re very singular about the biscuit.

Probably it’s something to do with number crunching, as a creamcracker manufacturer might say.

Next month they host Jimmy Cricket.

Even Ushaw in its ecumenical, allembracing 21st Century incarnation may never have seen or heard anything, however, like that which took place last weekend.

It was the first Methodist Youth Assembly, officially hosted by the church’s Newcastle upon Tyne district, neatly called Why I and with a “Learn the lingo” glossary at the back of the weekend’s programme.

“Toon” was translated for non-football fans. “Canny good” sat alongside “canny bad”. Canny old soul was rephrased as “A nice old person”. It probably meant those of us over 30.

Mr Scott Dobson’s familiarly polysyllabic injunction to “Gizfowerbroonzanapacketoftabs”

was for some reason not included, though the house rules made it clear that there were to be no alcohol, no drugs and none of the other thing, either.

Clearly and manifestly, it didn’t stop them having fun.

They’d been there since Friday, 220 youngsters from all over the country urged, in short, to make their presence felt and voice heard within the Methodist church.

THE theme was “Go be something beautiful”, the emphasis on self-worth. They’d had to turn applicants away.

In the middle of the programme was a map to help the beautiful people find their way around the college.

It’s huge. A pair of trainers and an energy drink would have been useful, too.

Now it was the main Sunday morning service, the 220 joined by 160 others – mainly older, very much older – from across the Newcastle district.

Traditional Methodist worship is sometimes reckoned a hymn sandwich.

This in comparison was to be sushi salad – raw, fresh and invigorating (and perhaps not to everyone’s taste).

The service was held in St Cuthbert’s chapel, Grade II*-listed, high and handsome. Replacing an original Pugin building, its architects were Hansom and Dunn. Seminarians used to say the chapel was “handsomely done”. It was a little Catholic joke.

Over the weekend there’d been prayer pods and chill-out lounges, drop-in areas and graffiti boards. Had there been confessions, they’d have fessed up.

Now the chapel reverberated to a band whose leader called the service a gig, the congregation “guys” and thought proceedings “cool” though the central heating appeared in full vigour.

There were DVDs and inter-active whatnots, YouTube and euphoria, happy clapping if not necessarily happy-clapping. Some of them may have supposed Charles Wesley to be a West Indian leg spinner, some that that was his brother, John.

“I think there’s a willingness in many churches to make worship more relevant and more attractive, to make young people feel more at home,” said the Reverend Leo Osborn, the district chair.

Some were in Sunday best, others still scruffing it out. Sometimes it was hard to tell which was which. The hope was to make the Methodist church more accessible.

“I think that the church needs to move with the times a little bit more, we’re not just groups of old people singing ancient hymns,” said Ceri Howard, 24, chair of the planning team.

DAVID Gamble, this year’s President of the Methodist Conference – the titular head lad – was there, too. “I guess that some of the older people will be thinking that this is really scary and a bit weird,”

he said.

The young ’uns were working up a storm: clapping, whooping, hollering though asked not to dance. One or two of the older ones did, indeed, appear a little – what shall we say? – uncertain.

The technology only faltered once, but that was once more than ever happened with the Methodist Hymn Book. It lasted 90 minutes, time-anda- half beyond the customary Methodist hour.

There were prayers for self-image, prayers addressed to the “God of pimp and paedophile”, prayers led by the Association of Black Methodist Youth, prayers for fair trade and for victims of gun and knife crime.

A courageous young chap who’d worked among needy children in Mexico spoke of his experiences. You can tell youthful testimony. Every third word is “like”, like.

Ruth Burns, another planning team member, dodged the question about how they’d find the average Methodist service by supposing that there was no such thing; Ceri Howard talked of the potential stigma of going to church.

“It’s quite hard to get through the door of some churches when you know that everyone’s old, but I really look forward to going to church,” he says.

The collection had been for the Newcastle street pastors initiative and for a homelessness project in Gateshead.

Leo Osborn, canny old soul, supposed the weekend to have been a tremendous success. Visibly it had.

They still need to work out how to hang onto the kids, how to grow together, whether to seek a one-size formula, but it may not just be historic St Cuthbert’s chapel that had been rocked to its foundations. Methodism may be next. Ushaw, Ushaw, all fall down.