A few months ago I went to visit my sister in Bristol. It was an enjoyable, though tiring trip (as it was sunny we spent quite a bit of the time walking around the city). We played scrabble with her friends, cooked and ate (well, she cooked, and I ate), and saw the charmingly quirky film The 100-year old man who climbed out of the window and disappeared.
The last day of my visit was a Sunday, and my sister had a treat in store for me. She had decided that we should pop along to the Bristol branch of The People's Assembly. I had no idea what this could be, and when I asked her for an explanation she told me that it was an 'athiest church' (but not to tell our mum that we would be going). Intrigued by this description, and even more so by my sister's injunction against familial publicity of our outing, I was keen to accompany her on what turned out to also be her first visit to site of non-religious congregation.
The first thing I was surprised to find was that the 'service' was being held in a church, which didn't strike me as a particularly atheist. We arrived, as is customary when our family attends church, fifteen minutes late. Atheist or religious, we certainly weren't going to break the long tradition of late church attendance! We arrived then, as a woman was stood in front of the assembled congregation just finishing reading a passage from a book. Thus far, so much like regular church, I thought to myself. I later learned that the book was Little House on the Prairie. This was followed by some teenagers who told us about the campaign which they had been successfully waging to increase awareness of FGM in institutions, particularly schools, in Bristol. The 'atheist church' line, although amusing did not at this point strike me as a particularly relevant tag at this point, though when the girls sat down and we all got up to sing, I could suddenly see why the comparison might be made. The song was Bob Dylan's The times they are a changin. The congregation sang with gusto. Change, it turned out was the theme of today's meeting. After the sing-a-long we were told that we would have five minuted to mingle with others in the congregation, to talk to people we had never met before (in my case everyone bar my sister), and that we should tell them about a change we had made in the last year, and a change that we wanted to make. I got talking to a nice chap who had, if I recall correctly, come up from Cornwall for the day. When I told him that I had come down from St Andrews he was immediately interested, as he said he had performed poetry there in the Byre theatre some years ago. It turned out that he was to be the next act on, so to speak.
