Palm Sunday processions in rural and inner city parishes
Rev Barbara Smith, Associate Vicar of St Christopher’s Church in Norris Green, Liverpool, and Rev Nicholas Lowton, vicar of the Black Mountains Group of parishes in Herefordshire, with six parishes, write about how Palm Sunday processions are received in their local communities.
Rev Barbara Smith: “We start outside the local co-op in Norris Green, there is a foyer just inside and the manager lets us take shelter there if it is wet or windy. Last year it was glorious and the sun shone. The shop is usually just about opening at 10am and people are coming in for newspapers. People don’t generally tend to stay but when they are offered a palm cross, nobody says no, they always graciously take one. They are used to seeing us, they take their crosses and they smile. I think of it as sowing some seeds. We usually sing a hymn on the way back and the Sacristan carries the cross. We always carry complete palm branches and I wear my robes so that it is clear that it is church event. We do another bigger procession on Good Friday that is ecumenical. We have coffee and hot cross buns after the morning service and we then walk about a mile with other Christian denominations to West Derby village for a big outdoor service with all the churches around – Methodists, evangelical churches and Catholic churches and the Church of England. It’s brilliant that we do outdoor processions because a lot of people do not know what goes on in church on Palm Sunday and Good Friday. If we take the church into the community we make ourselves visible and take God and Jesus outside the boundaries of the church walls. Being proactive and visible is really important.”
Rev Nicholas Lowton started a Palm Sunday procession five years ago. “The great thing about the Palm Sunday procession is that it is absolutely public – church doors can be intimidating and it is not something that happens behind church doors, everybody sees it and experiences it. We start in the village of Longtown and go down the road to the Clodock Church for the family service – around a mile and a quarter. We have children from the local primary school who take part and ride the donkeys, hired from a charity in Abergavenny. We pass by the village shop which is open on Sunday morning and somebody goes in and distributes palms. I think there is a huge difference between serving in a rural area and a town – here everyone in the 40 to 50 square miles knows who the Vicar is. I think there is a general revival in ‘public professions’ of faith – our brothers and sisters in the Methodists and Baptists join us too on the procession which is lovely. There has certainly been a growth in people coming along to church, a lot of them in the last two or three years. We have also started a tradition of holding a dawn Eucharistic service at the summit of the Black Hill, the highest mountain in southern England, on Easter morning.”