A Train-Wreck of a Sermon

We are excited to give you a sneak peek at Rev Dr Marjory A MacLean's upcoming book "Oh All Right Then: Stories from a Varied Ministry":

One Sunday during my probationary placement at Fairmilehead Church in Edinburgh, I was due to preach the sermon while my supervisor, Rev Murray Chalmers, conducted the rest of the service. By the Saturday night my cold had reached the point at which I knew I was not going to be able to read my sermon out loud the next morning; and it was really too late to expect Murray to prepare another one from scratch. But he, being a gentleman as well as the kindest and wisest of supervisors, offered simply to read my script with all due attribution the next day.

This was 1991, in the earliest days of Amstrad computers and the printers that went with them. And those printers used ‘continuous’ computer paper, the kind with micro-perforations separating the pages from each other and from the punched margins that fitted onto the printer’s toothed guide-wheel. Is it all flooding back into the memories of readers of a certain age? Perhaps my head was befuddled by the cold; perhaps, even so, I should have thought to split the script into its individual pages.

I was well enough to attend the train-wreck, I mean service. Into the pulpit went lovely Murray, and commendably gave his oratorical ‘all’ to reading his probationer’s best homiletic efforts. It was grand for the first page, and then he tried to turn to page two, and discovered that page two was attached to, and below, page one. All he could do was push page one up the pulpit’s lectern to reveal the second page; which was sort of OK in a pulpit with a decent-sized lectern… but only until he got to the bottom of page two. As he pushed page two away from him to reveal page three, yes, page one started to work its way – visibly to the congregation and horrified Probationer – down the front of the pulpit fall, like an enormous roll of escaping loo paper. And then, like something out of a Gerard Hoffnung song, there eventually came the point, in a six or seven page script, when the cascading pages weighed more than the remaining bundle on the lectern.

If you want to know how this train-wreck of a sermon ended, pre-order the book now!

There will be three book launch events:

September 22 - Edinburgh
September 29 - London
October 1 - Orkney

Don't forget to book your free tickets in advance so that your refreshments are ready for you!