Goths and the harvest in Chafford

Fr Alex Gowing-Cumber Vicar, All Saints' Church, Chafford Hundred

BBC Essex came live from All Saints' Church during August 2009

All Saints has been open for over a year now, and our second harvest festival is not far away.

It has caused me to think a little about fasting and feasting or festival living in the modern age.

Now the big stress of the building project is behind us and we have started to fall into a routine it would be easy to get complacent.

Sometimes to stop and start to do less, is actually to do more, and that is what I've been doing.

I am definitely eating and sleeping more, and in need of a diet more than I was as the building project came to an end.

So, to stop eating junk is to detox and feel healthier.

Festival time

There is a theme of harvest in the bible which takes us on a journey from the first fruits ready for tasting in early summer, right through to the all is safely gathered in of late autumn.

We have set up the facebook group 'Diocese of Chelmsford Gothik' which is growing in membership and content. Fr Alex Gowing-Cumber

Over the summer Kat [My wife] and I were out for some food at a pub, and they had run out of vegetarian food, so I decided having been a veggie for many years to try a beef burger and it was very nice.

I now have a whole world of new food to explore, so stopping one lifestyle has definitely given me a lot of something new to explore.

The only down side is that choosing a sandwich at a petrol station now takes much, much, longer!

From the first fruits of All Saints opening, we have had a year of gathering the harvest into the barn of our church, but we are far from being at the point where we can say all is safely gathered in.

We have gathered much in terms of experience, spiritual adventure and people power, but we still have much more to harvest, and to find those people in the church with rare qualities and experiences.

Fr Alex Gowing-Cumber has been the Anglican vicar for just over a year

We have more women than men, is this because men like to stay in bed or play cricket on a Sunday?

Or because men are less spiritual? We have plenty of under 10s and plenty of over 30s but could do with more teens and 20 somethings [On a Sunday].

We have more traditional hymns than new songs, and yet more services by electric light than candle light. Although we did have our first night-time christening of the child of a goth couple at 10pm by candle light.

Which brings me on to my final point, what do we need to stop in order to make our harvest more complete?

We need to stop pre-conception and stop prejudice.

I have just had a wonderful time at the Greenbelt Music and Art Festival, I enjoyed being part of worship lead by Enchant [the band that Kat my wife sings with].

I also had the joy once again to lead and preach at the gothic eucharist.

That service and the conversations over tea and coffee [and this year by popular request snuff] that follow it have become for me a place of honesty and wholeness where people can be truly themselves.

And I want All Saints to be like this in the ordinary times, the space between fast and festival, the 24/7, 365-day-a-week spiritual home for the whole community.

A place where honesty is the commodity, where to be gay or straight, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, emo, goth, liberal, conservative, healthy or sick, homeless or at home in the house of lords, is all good and all equal.

I have had the joy in the last few weeks of being contacted by other people within the diocese who enjoy things of a gothic nature, we have set up the facebook group 'Diocese of Chelmsford Gothik' which is growing in membership and content.

We are also looking into establishing a goth-style worship event similar to those we have been doing at Greenbelt and others have been doing at Cambridge, and here in Essex.

In the mean time, I pray that All Saints becomes ever more an inclusive spiritual home for the whole of our community in Chafford Hundred.