Carol Service Report

Success!

Despite having our original venue cancelled and moving to another room 1/2 mile away! Our minibus shuttle service between offices worked very well.

A decent number of people attended – my estimate is 70-80. There were many others who could not or would not attend, but still talked to me about it, and it all provides opportunities to raise the profile of Christ in our workplace.

The musicians were good.

The readers were good.

The Carols were loud enough and [mostly] in tune.

The soloist was very good.

The Bishop attended – but only just. He arrived 2 anxious minutes after we had started because instead of relying on the maps I had given him he relied on his new sat nav. I rest my case!

The Bishop’s talk was easy to listen to and very entertaining and certainly challenging. It was probably about 5% religion, and 95% Stern Report (the government-commissioned report into climate change). I’m not absolutely convinced that it fulfilled my brief to him that the service was to be ‘evangelistic without scaring them off’, but I suppose in theory at least the bishop should be open to divine inspiration without reference to my stipulations, and maybe my ideal sermon would indeed have scared them off.

Afterwards the bishop and our chief executive had a long conversation, so at least one objective of the occasion was achieved.

More importantly, when I had finished running the minibus shuttle, there was still one last mince pie left for me.

The only negative was that the envelope containing our collected gift for he bishop got left in my desk drawer, and will have to be posted on. Oops!

All in all, I was happy with the outcome. I can only recommend that any Christian in a workplace should use all means to communicate the faith to his/her colleagues.