Tower and Town, August 2021 (view the full edition)Memories of a Reluctant Church WardenSt John the Baptist church, Minal is ranked among the ten most beautiful churches in Wiltshire. After Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’ was filmed there it was described to be one of the five most romantic churches in the country in which to get married. What does a church warden do? The background to my becoming the church warden of Minal church was that the previous one, Mary Fishlock, had wanted to retire for about two years because of ill health and no one had been found to replace her. The situation was becoming desperate and I decided that I must step in. So I went along to the Rector and asked what a churchwarden did. He gave me a book. It described how the church’s assets were divided into the fixed ones, the building and the real estate, mainly the churchyard, which the rector owned, and all the moveable assets, which I would own. It went on to explain that the Parochial Church Council, and NOT the church warden, was responsible for the maintenance, preservation and insurance of the said movable assets but I would be responsible for keeping the record of them and reporting additions, changes and deletions each year. In other words, I would merely report the work done by others. This seemed a bit odd so I went along to see a dearly loved retired Canon and asked him what a church warden did. His reply was, ‘Anything the Rector wants’. So I went back to the Rector and asked him what he would want. I received the classic reply, ‘I don’t know - I have never been a church warden’ (It was a jocular remark during the middle of a useful discussion). I then asked an experienced church warden. His reply was, ‘Everything else’. I assumed this meant things that were unallocated or unexpected and anything others did not want to do. Cleaning the loo? I made a mental note to make sure I retired as church warden before the planned toilet was completed. The best way of keeping the church records was easy to decide but involved a great deal of work. There had been a very good survey by the National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies (now the Arts Society) in 1996. This was put on to a computer and the annual changes recorded in a supplement, with the approval of the Archdeacon. One thing boomeranged. The Sacristan of the church kindly agreed to check the records of all the textiles, his own responsibility being the altar linen and communion vessels, plus the altar frontals. He checked everything else too and came up with 15 corrections to the NADFAS report. I would have liked to have ignored them because they greatly complicated the supplement but I did not dare. Further according to the regulations all the maintenance work carried out in the church should be recorded in a log book kept in the church. I thought up a lazy way of recording it – copying the relevant extracts from the PCC minutes into a separate file in my computer - the cheeky thing was calling it ‘Church Log Book’. I tried it out on the Archdeacon expecting to be told not to push my luck. Her answer was unexpected, ‘What a good idea’. She had made a friend for life.
One final thing about the job of a church warden - he or she has the same power of arrest inside the church as does a policeman outside. This raises the delicious possibility of me being authorised to arrest my son-in-law if he should sing out of tune! For Bishop Andrew’s survey of the church see Gordon Pepper |
The day after I asked the Rector what a church warden does we went for a walk in Savernake Forest with our dogs. We lost my dog, a lovely lemon and white working cocker who we found waiting by my car. A few days later I discovered that another church warden had walked with the Rector in the Forest. They lost the warden’s dog too. Of the three of us the Rector was the common denominator. To a statistician this was proof that he was the one at fault. My apologies. I am an actuary. This is a good example of a very bad actuarial joke - a joke because it is so ridiculous. Anyone with an ounce of common sense would realise that the explanation was that the Rector’s dog was better trained than the other two. The lesson is always to check that statistical conclusions are in accordance with common sense.