Off your bikes!

Percy from the Pews

On the aspect of getting more posteriors in the pews, he might like to consider recent findings from overseas – that the answer could be among the gym junkies, pavement pounders and devotees of the cycle path.

So off your bikes lads – just don’t turn up at church in your lycra gear!

The two new assistant bishops (or missioner bishops as they’re termed) to Tasmania’s Anglican Bishop John Harrower were recently ordained in Hobart’s St David’s Cathedral with the expected pomp and ceremony. And in the expanded roles for Hobart’s Chris Jones and Launceston’s Ross Nicholson we are again told that they will free-up Bishop John for “frontline mission” efforts, although exactly what that entails remains to be spelled out to the public.

The description for Bishop Nicholson’s work says he will be overseeing “experimental projects outside the traditional parish structure” and that these will include an “outreach mission in the Huon” (although that seems a bit of a far commute seeing he’s based in the north) and his southern counterpart’s new role will be as a “steward for the church’s resources”.

Sounds like Dr Jones is to become the church’s “numbers cruncher”, given his financial expertise, and adding to his already busy duties as chief of Anglicare. There’s another numbers dimension, for he’s voiced his concerns about the decline in church-goers in Tasmania and has expressed the need to spread the religious message to the people “through a range of different mediums”.

On the aspect of getting more posteriors in the pews, he might like to consider recent findings from overseas – that the answer could be among the gym junkies, pavement pounders and devotees of the cycle path.

Research in the USA indicates that there could be better benefits to well-being through church attendance. The National Centre for Health Statistics based in Maryland studied 8,500 men and women over eight and a half years and concluded that those who went to church more than once a week were 30 per cent less likely to die during the course of the research than non-attenders.

The researchers calculated that weekly worship cut the risk by 18 per cent, and even less frequent attendance lowered it by 11 per cent.

The findings (in what was a project for the US Government and appeared in the journal Annals of Epidemiology) were that the link stood even when age, education and existing health problems were taken into account for the volunteers, aged 40 and over, from different faiths but Christianity the most common.

“Healthy habits associated with church-going folk, such as not smoking and being teetotal, explained some of the difference as did the psychological benefits of being part of a welcoming organisation,” said the report.

So off your bikes lads – just don’t turn up at church in your lycra gear!

An added note on health benefits of being in church. From England a report that clergy are offering gluten-free communion wafers so that worshipers with food allergies don’t fall ill. Seems that thousands have now been supplied around the country after reports of parishioners suffering from coeliac disease being laid low with digestive problems.

Wheat contains gluten as a protein, and wheat is one of the main ingredients of the holy bread used in the celebration of the Eucharist. A report on the gluten-free switch said that for centuries the plight of worshipers suffering from the potential fatal condition had been ignored, but greater public awareness of health issues has forced churches in the UK to make special provision for communicants who fear the normal wafer on their tongue might set off an allergic reaction.

The new wafers are square so they can be recognised from the normal round ones. There’s a cost catch though with the new version – they’re several times dearer than the usual wafers.