Day 23, "The day I went to a pub with Kathy Grieb"

This morning we headed to a village called Bishopsbourne which is home to about 200 people (about 12 out of 200 attend the parish church, St. Mary's). St. Mary's is the church that Hooker served at and is now buried in (somewhere underneath the chancel). While there we heard from a bunch of different people. The vicar of the church told us about the place and how there are about 16,000 parish churches in England and how about 10,000 of those are medieval churches which are both a great icon to the surrounding community but are also very expensive to keep up (especially when your congregation is about 12 people) and how preservation laws severely limit how they can adapt these buildings to make them more manageable. Then we heard about Hooker and his life & works from a local professor. After lunch we heard from two curates about what it is like to be a curate in the Church of England. One of the interesting things they mentioned was that with so many churches being so close together what some tend to do is have a small group of parishes specialize (so one church will focus on youth and families with young children, another will focus on seekers, another on more traditional styles of worship), they said that the danger of this is that it is very easy to feel that they are bad at a bunch of things rather than being very good at a few things.
This evening we went to the Thomas Becket again. This time Kathy joined us. It was a good time. It's been really great getting to know these people and hanging out with them.