Okay, I'll admit my attendance at church has been a bit sporadic over the last couple of years. It's been awkward, and I'm lazy.
You see, I found a church I particularly liked, and started semi-regularly attending a particular meeting time... which they then "rationalised" away. They decided they couldn't have evening services at both the main church and the daughter church, so they dropped the Sunday evening service (the one I could make it to semi-regularly) at the main church in order to keep the Saturday afternoon service going at the daughter church.
I switched to attending the daughter church, which I came to regard as "my church", but Saturday afternoons have always been awkward for me, so I haven't exactly attended regularly. In fact, since Christmas, I think I can safely say I've visited other churches more often than I've attended my own.
Still, about a month and a half ago, I checked to make sure we still had the Saturday afternoon services at "my church" so I could come the next time I managed to have a free Saturday.
Yesterday (a Saturday), I had managed to block off the afternoon specifically for going to church. I scooted over (literally - for some reason I thought taking the kick scooter would be the most convenient way to travel there) only to find...
You guessed it - they no longer have Saturday afternoon services at the daughter church.
But you probably didn't guess that the church wasn't there.
And, yet, *a* church is still standing exactly where my church used to be. In the month or two since I last walked past "my church" and checked the times on the sign outside the building, the building has been taken over by a different church.
I came to the building from the wrong side (most convenient for scooting) and assumed they'd just changed the times. When I walked around to check the sign, I discovered it was now a completely different church. And I mean completely different.
It was St Oswalds Anglican Church. It's now St Mary's and St George's Coptic Orthodox Church.
It's been so long since I attended "my church", I didn't even know they were getting rid of the thing. I feel both amused and chastened.
Update! Well, after doing some poking around, I found out that the last service in St Oswalds was in May (that helps me put the year in perspective - I think I last went to "my church" in February, but because I've visited a couple of others, and I've been keeping myself distracted with studies, I hadn't realised how much time had passed).
ReplyDeleteAll of the signs and information everywhere still said it was running on Saturdays, so I just assumed I'd be able to pop over when I finally put aside the time...