I wrote quite some time ago as to how the church needed to ‘raise its game’, and move with the times, to stem the terminal decline in numbers.
Thankfully, small seeds have begun to sprout as many places of worship now use electric speaker systems and other new-fangled modernities come kicking and screaming into the 2020s.
Another criticism from yours truly, a devout atheist, was the need to update the musical output as well.
The hymns are little but a relic from the past, duly wheeled out every week whilst they continue to fail to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand erect.
It got me thinking about days of yore and the school assembly ‘banger’. Schools now do not, unless they are faith schools, generally have assemblies where singing is involved.
It is a shame for the kids as when I was a bairn, it was the highlight of my week as we battled to see who could screech and sing out of tune the best, as we chuckled at the history teacher who would boom ‘we plough the fields and scatter’ as if his life depended on it.
My favourite was “I was cold, I was naked, were you there?” I used to watch our young chemistry teacher whilst she sang the ditty and my imagination, along with other teenage boys in attendance, would work on overdrive as we waited for something a little more serene, such as Morning Has Broken to snap us too.
Despite not being a fan of ‘dancing’, I thoroughly enjoyed the gaiety of “Dance then wherever you may be” as we would all, peculiarly, put on a cockney dance with elbows out and a bow-legged stance.
But no matter how good it was at the time, it will not be coming back, bar in religious educational settings, which is a crying shame.
Assembly was a midweek relaxant - to belt out tunes and smile and laugh at the sensory overload around you as your head of year stared daggers for being the last one to end the note a millisecond after the song had finished.
But we move on as the landscape of society changes and no doubt we will look back in 20 years and wonder why on earth we drove petrol cars, why we used big lumps of plastic to make calls and why we needed a real live organist instead of a computer sampling machine with which to offer our praise to a higher power.
- Brett Ellis is a teacher.
