"Oh go away we can't be bothered - we're busy with Holy Week"

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Comments

  • The 'official' format is in rather small print - not really suitable for an exterior board, however well-protected, but I take your point. Maybe we should put one in the porch proper, even though it's only open at service-times, or during 'Office Hour' on Mondays and Saturdays.

    Yes, it is small print, so at our place it has been blown up (A4 to A3 so 41%), matt laminated and so easily read by most in all weathers.
    Zacchaeus wrote: »
    But outsiders, like the people who want funerals, very rarely see church notices or understand them if they did..

    Not seeing them isn't something too difficult, they are easily found on the web. As far as understanding them goes, you can see the notice here to see just how complex, or not, it is.

    The point is though, that the average person in the street has no idea of how CofE fees work and wouldn’t know or think to go looking for them on the web or church porch, particularly at a time when they were stressed and grieving and if they did they night be surprised.
    I have been told that our local FD’s charge the family the same minister fees for whoever takes the service, the going rate is £200, so the cost of the celebrant is not a factor in a decision as to who takes the funeral .
    Also the cost of a CofE church funeral and burial around here is marginally cheaper than a council cremation. Though the cost of the minister is not included in that crem price like it is in a church funeral making the cremation even costlier. It would seem that the cost of church is not likely to be the reason for the rise in straight to crem funerals without a Christian minister.
    Neither can the cost be the deciding factor in where to get buried. As a burial in the local cemetery costs £882 to buy the grave - plus £890 for the burial itself – over £1700. A church service and burial is just over £500 plus the extras like the organist and gravedigger.
    If people were looking at fees and comparing prices they would choose church every time.
  • Gill HGill H Shipmate
    The only time I have seen a civil celebrant (if that is the correct term) take a funeral was that of my father-in-law. He was a lapsed RC and 'religion' was one of those subjects he didn't discuss - but he wasn't avowedly atheist or even agnostic. The family asked for a 'non-religious' funeral simply because they felt he would have been uncomfortable with a standard RC one.

    None of us were prepared for the result. The celebrant spent much of the occasion banging on about how this was not a religious service, how we didn't need to believe in an afterlife, and how we should just remember the good things about FIL because he was now dead and that was that.

    It left all of us pretty shaken. It was just as dogmatic in its way as any hellfire-and-brimstone preacher could have been. And if it had been someone else's funeral and FIL had been alive to hear it, he would have walked out in disgust.

    Obviously, this was just one experience and I'm sure there are plenty of wonderful civil celebrants out there. But in my experience (and as a vicar's daughter and amateur organist, I've been to a load of funerals) the vast majority of those conducting them do so with appropriate levels of care and thought, and certainly not for the money.
  • rhubarbrhubarb Shipmate
    The details in the post remind me of when I had surgery for cancer only 2 days before Christmas. The nurse in charge rang the minister at my church (which incidentally is over the road from the hospital) to ask him if he would bring me Christmas communion. He declined to even come over the road to see if I was ok, the excuse being that he was too busy and anyway it wasn't his job. At the time I was a member of the choir and on Parish Council. Once I was home I swapped to another church where the pastoral care proved to be exceptional. Karma caught up with the priest who died of cancer a couple of years later.
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