A wedding spoof meets an unhappy Rector…the power of prayer…hoping lightning doesn’t strike twice…and the best seder in the USA.
Maybe booking a wedding on April Fools Day might have raised a red-flag or two? The Church Timesreports on a clash between pop culture and a local rector:
The Rector of St Paul’s, Covent Garden, in London, the Revd Simon Grigg, ejected Prince William and Kate Middleton lookalikes from his church last Friday. He said this week that he had been deceived into letting them book the building for a photo-shoot: he had been told that it was to be used for a wedding feature on a newspaper website.
Alison Jackson, an artist and film-maker who specialises in spoof shots of celebrities, had booked the church for 1 April. But when she turned up with a royal entourage, including a lookalike Archbishop of Canterbury and four corgis, and accompanied by dozens of press photographers, the Rector was “less than thrilled”, he said.
This item from the Clark County Democrat escaped our notice until today.
In a small Texas town, ( Mt. Vernon ) Drummond’s bar began construction on a new building to increase their business.. The local Baptist church started a campaign to block the bar from opening with petitions and prayers. Work progressed right up till the week before opening when lightning struck the bar and it burned to the ground.
The church folks were rather smug in their outlook after that, until the bar owner sued the church on the grounds that the church was ultimately responsible for the demise of his building, either through direct or indirect actions or means.
The church vehemently denied all responsibility or any connection to the building’s demise in its reply to the court.
As the case made its way into court, the judge looked over the paperwork. At the hearing he commented, “I don’t know how I’m going to decide this, but as it appears from the paperwork, we have a bar owner who believes in the power of prayer, and an entire church congregation that does not.”
Speaking of lightning, the Solid Rock Church in Monroe, Ohio, is praying it doesn’t strike twice. They are replacing the giant Jesus statue that was hit by lightning last year with a newer, bigger one…this time with legs.
Administrator Ron Carter at the Solid Rock Church in Monroe showed a model of the new, 51-foot statue to the Middletown Journal on Tuesday. Carter says construction will be completed by the end of the year at the site overlooking Interstate 75, where the original had been one of southwest Ohio’s most familiar landmarks.
That statue showed Jesus from the chest up and had been nicknamed Touchdown Jesus because of the way the arms were raised outward, like a referee’s. It burned down following a lightning strike on June 14.
Co-designer Tom Tsuchiya (su-CHEE’-yah) says work on the replacement will begin in May or June.
Here is the best Seder in the USA: