Saturday, September 27, 2008

Church chairs dilemmas

One of the big positives of our campus chapel is that it doesn't have pews. We can have all kinds of flexible seating arrangements, from formal rows to the café style seating we use on a Sunday night for our new venture, Inspire. The down side is that the chairs are rarely left how you want them for the next activity. What's more we usually get blamed if User A leaves the chairs wrong for User B and we haven't been in to rearrange them first. It was the same for the Church Hall when I was in Coventry.

Today (Saturday) I called in to the chapel to leave some music for tomorrow's practise to find all the chairs, tables and other bits and pieces around the walls. Not exactly ideal for breakfast in the morning, or for Inspire in the evening. However, I didn't feel it should be my job to do all the lugging.

I fear Chaplaincy may yet have to produce a detailed diagram of "How Chapel Should Be Left", but that would be tedious and probably irritating to users. It all depends whether the irritation of stuff in the wrong place outweighs the irritation of us becoming sticklers for detail.

Hmmm

3 comments:

Fr Matthew McMurray said...

I am sure we tried putting together a diagram when I worked for you. I hope you come up with something that works.

Mike Peatman said...

We did, but that didn't take into account the new zone system I have developed! There's a bit to sit and eat lunch around a nice coffee table, an area where food/drink gets serves and a side chapel front right.

The back chapel now has a lockable door as we admitted defeat and called it the store roon it had already become (if you see what I mean)

Fr Matthew McMurray said...

It all sounds interesting!

They never followed that diagram anyway (apart from 'Encounter') as I remember.

Steve was telling me about some of the things you are doing. It all sounds very exciting and I hope it goes well.