My Sheffield Church Tour
When a non-Christian visits your church, how do they react? Finlay Hammatt worked with Together for Sheffield as part of their young adult employment programme for several months, writing articles for Arise! magazine. He hadn’t attended a Sunday service in years, but when we asked him to visit two Sheffield churches and share his experience, he embraced the task, and had this to say:
In Upperthorpe Library, on the right-most bookshelf in the children's section, there’s a picture book called Rooster’s Alarm. It’s a thin book, with twenty-something pages, with beat up corners, and a cover bleached by the sun. The story is a simple one. It goes that the rooster forgot to set his alarm one morning, so the sheep, upon awakening, announced the morning by crowing “cock-a-doodle-doo”. Next, the cow wakes up, and baas, then the pig moos, the horse oinks and so on. When reading the book, a colleague’s son - six-year-old Kalib - struggled to read the book. She recounts that he hesitated and mixed up words, expecting them to be different. Probably because the pages send mixed signals: the pictures presented and the words used don't follow the natural order of things. Each animal’s noise has been ripped from its context, and when the child sees the picture of a pig with the word ‘moo’, they’re confused: it’s not what they expected.
I was reminded of this book recently when I took a tour of different church services around Sheffield, trying to find the golden thread of unity that binds them together in their worship of Jesus. What I discovered was that the words of each of the services took on additional layers of meaning when combined with the rest of the environment: the clothes worn, the layout of the building, the images, music, and overall atmosphere. Each church I visited was different, but together they display the beautiful diversity of Christian tradition around Sheffield.
I started at Emmanuel. It's a young church - planted during lockdown - tucked away behind the Moor Market, on Arundel street opposite a car park. It has an unassuming facade, its front walls being covered in colourful graffiti. The atmosphere was lively: when I entered, they were already singing a Christian rock song, children were shouting in a playroom situated behind where the congregation sat, with only a thin wall dividing the two. The seats were filled with students, young adults, families and a few slightly older Christians. Church Leader David May said to me, “I often feel old here and I'm only thirty-five!”
During the course of the service, numerous people came up to speak, becoming the centre of attention; each of them made jokes and smiled contagiously. Two verses came to my mind when bearing witness to this scene. The first was John 4:16: “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.” The building was dingy, yet filled with light. The roof leaked, the paint was wearing thin, but despite this the atmosphere was angelic. Maybe it was because of this context that the second verse which came to mind was Matthew 18:20: “For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”
The scripture used in the sermon was - fittingly - from Nehemiah. Nehemiah was not a prophet like Malachi, or a priest like Ezra: he was a cupbearer to the king, yet had a relatively comfortable position in Persian society. The book documents his efforts to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem during the Second Temple period. Under Nehemiah's leadership, the Jewish people overcame opposition to rebuild the city walls. Dave May linked the scripture to Sheffield’s social situation by showing pictures of new building projects in the city and then a thank-you video from charity Together for Sheffield, showing the impact of Emmanuel’s donation to an employment programme which aims to help young people struggling to find work post-pandemic build their skills, network, and confidence.
Catholic Mass at St Vincent’s MissionHub has an entirely different aura to that of Emmanuel. The building is regal, the ceilings are high, the walls are white, the lights and chairs are modern. I was visiting in Lent, so the room was steeped in purple fabric, and the priest was dressed to match, in flowing white garments overlaid with purple vestments covered in golden detailing. The room's lighting draws the gaze to the central aisle: at one end is the entrance, and at the other stands the Eucharist: the bread that has become Christ’s body. Given that the word ‘mass’ is drawn from the Latin phrase “Ite, missa est” - or, “Go, it is the sending”, it seems appropriate that the two key purposes of the service - receiving Jesus in order to take him out into the world - would be aligned like this.
The ceremony itself is radically peaceful and ritualised. Everyone in the room follows an ancient holy script. The tranquil nobility of the scene encourages reflection and contemplation. The lack of music and the relative silence - with the only words spoken originating from the scripture-based liturgy, the Bible and the priest - radically separates the ceremony from the regular rhythms of modern life. The discontinuity puts those who attend on a different beat, at least for a period.
In one mass I attended, the scripture quoted was John 5:19: “Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever he does, that the Son does likewise.” The synchronicity between all these physical, and spiritual attributes is hard to miss. The service at St Vincent’s MissionHub instils a holy obedience.
Visiting these churches on different days, in different moods, with different reasons, reminded me of an ancient Indian parable, about the blind men and the elephant. If you haven’t heard it before, it goes like this:
Once, a group of blind men heard that a strange animal called an elephant had been brought to their town, but none of them were aware of its shape and form. Out of curiosity, one said: "We must inspect and know it by touch." So, they sought it out, and when they found it they groped about it. The first person, whose hand landed on the trunk, said, "This being is like a thick snake". To another, whose hand touched its ear, it seemed like a kind of fan. Another person, whose hand was on its leg, said, “The elephant is a pillar like a tree-trunk.” The blind man who placed his hand upon its side said, “The elephant is a wall." Another who felt its tail, described it as a rope. The last felt its tusk, and said, “The elephant is that which is hard, smooth and like a spear.”
Each of the blind men in the parable encountered just a small part of the enormous elephant, and each was able to testify to a different characteristic of the elephant. In a similar way, perhaps each of these churches is bearing witness in their worship to different aspects of the same God.
To use another simile, I was like someone too close to a great work of art, seeing a single brush stroke and thinking it a smudge; unable to bear full witness. But, at least, we can take satisfaction in the knowledge that this is not how God sees it. He sees the full picture and draws us all into His masterpiece. As Paul attests "For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known." (1 Corinthians 13: 12)