Church sound system.

And should still be done as it is the only way some oldies manage to hear well.

As far as I know it still works.

As a community thing, churches ought to be great, but they suffer by being full of intransigent and righteous people with too much time on their hands.

ReligionUK is dead in the water as it doesn't have anything to offer. The majority don't want to be lectured on a Sunday morning and have far better things to do with their time. That and they can see through the thin veil of (attempted) social control.

I went to Midnight Mass last year as I live 100yds from the church and it's a terribly convivial thing to go to the pub (80yds) beforehand, see faces down for xmas I've not seen for a while and then stagger over for a bit of a sing song.

I'm never going again.

It was the most painfully dull, dreary hour possible to spend. Being lectured by the dullest man in the village (the Rector had just moved away so we had a lay preacher), made to listen to dirges from the choir, given the dullest hymns to sing, forced through what amounted to an entire Sunday Service of mouthed responses - it wasn't uplifting, fun or enjoyable.

The attendance was down on the year before and this year it'll be even worse.

I do a lot of AV work in churces and boggle at some which have reams of equipment that only one person (and sometimes less than that) knows how to use and wonder why they bother.

However, projectors and accompanying powerpoint presentations of words for hymns, etc, are mystifyingly popular with the ordinary folk in the pews.

Falacy these days. Hearing aids with T position switches are dying out, the ordinary earpieces are now very good. That and, IME, most loop systems don't actually work. No-one posesses a loop tester so can't tell if the system works and asking chronically deaf members of the congregation just elicits nods as they quite like the peace and quiet.

Not a bad thing, either. Loop systems are the very devil with modern kit about due to the RF wash they chuck out.

Yes, its not a solution to for every church in every town. However, there s eem to be quite a few (including one I used to attend) where the building f eels like a millstone around the congregations neck and the radical approac h of selling the church and moving might free up a lot of energy and enthus iasm that is otherwise being sucked away by worrying about the building.

OTOH if there's no where to move to and the building can pay for itself by being rented out then it doesn't make sense to sell up.

However what sometimes seems to happen is that the congregation is aging an d there's not enough money to convert the building to make it suitable for other uses so it is dying a slow death.

I do - I bought it from Canford. It wsn't very expensive,either.

In the pantos, they used to have the bouncing ball on the words.

In Elizabethan times, a Vicar would be expected to give a sermon lasting

Colin Bignell

It wasn't a too serious suggestion, but that is not a small congregation. One of the local churches is lucky to get into double figures.

Colin Bignell

It seems small to me - it was packed every Sunday when I were a kid. About

I once worked for a large company that was often needing venues for meetings, breifings, courses and team events. We normally went to proper conference facilities in hotels. A colleague (with much mocking) used a village hall. The Womens Institute did the catering, The Scouts laid out the furniture. The events saved the company loads of money and it helped the village hall funds considerably. Good lateral thinking.

Then join the Scouts.

My dad says that in his young day, in his mining village, the churches in all their manifestations were just about the only place to meet girls. For that reason he reckons the C of E and the Methodists were jointly responsible for a great deal of illicit sexual intercourse.

Bill

I put a TV system in a converted church a few years ago. For some reason there was a ground floor flat only in the tower area. The flat had a suspended ceiling and it was really weird to lift a tile and look up all the way to the tower roof, fifty feet above. I couldn't have lived in that flat, with all that voided space just above me, and only a sus ceiling to protect me from falling masonry.

Bill

Or getting locked up for kiddy fiddling.

Bill

In our church we find many denominations in the collection bowl. Especially in September.

Bill

The worst thing is when they modernise the hymns. "We plough the fields with tractors" my arse. And as for all that happy crappy business!

Bill