From telegraph.co.uk
Father Ben Bell shares the joy, challenges and sense of belonging the festive period brings
The role of a parish priest is rarely predictable. One of the questions I’m asked most often is what, exactly, I do.
My answer usually involves some mixture of plate-spinning, presiding at services and pastoral encounters that can sound faintly implausible.
December, however, brings a sudden clarity. “It’s your busy time of year, isn’t it?” people say. So I decided to keep a diary, to record what the festive season actually entails, and what it asks of a priest, a church and a community.
10 December: Fireworks for the homeless
The day began with Morning Prayer at St George’s, joined by a handful of colleagues in the sustaining discipline which roots parish life in prayer and scripture. The theory is sound – the practice rather less so, given the insistent mental catalogue of urgent tasks in the run up to Christmas.
Dave has slept rough for the past 20 years and visits us most days for coffee with seven sugars. He used to steal our candles for light and heat, so I bought him a gas heater and gave him cylinders every few days. A couple of weeks ago, he asked me out of the blue if I could buy fireworks for him if he gave me the money – he wanted to do something to remember the anniversary of his brother’s death.
I said yes, confident he wouldn’t come up with the cash. That’s now come back to bite me. This morning, he slapped a bundle of notes on the table, saying, “I just want rockets and air bombs.”
11 December: A troublesome street preacher
I unpacked the new figures for our nativity scene. They’ve been lovingly made by a community of French nuns and are beautiful. That is apart from the donkey, whose eyes look a little frightening. He’s been sitting on the vestry table, glaring at me all morning, to the point that I had to turn him around. I think we’ll go traditional and put him “out the back” of the stable, where his intense glare can’t unsettle members of the holy family.
We had a regular visitor asking if I could help with something to eat. I walked down to Tesco with them to get them a sandwich and a drink. On the way back, I passed the street preacher who’s been setting up next to the church, drowning out any sense of reflective space with amplified warnings of eternal damnation.
I went to talk to him about possibly moderating his approach, or at least his decibel level, but he would only converse via his PA system, resulting in a bizarrely amplified one-sided conversation. Ironically, despite the assumption that we might be on the same team, he wasn’t remotely interested in supporting us in creating a quiet space for our lunchtime Mass, preferring instead to continue shouting at passers-by about the consequences of their choices, as if volume were a reliable indicator of theological truth.
At Evening Prayer, the Advent antiphon (a short chant or verse) tonight is about the Key of David – opening doors that are shut. I thought about all those in our parish who have experienced endless doors being shut in their face. It’s why we try and keep the church doors open.
12 December: ‘George Clooney’s glove’
After long and complex negotiations with my team, I’ve secured consent to use confetti cannons at our primary school’s nativity service. This won’t be my first deployment of confetti cannons in church, hence my colleagues’ reticence – they reminded me that we’re still finding pieces of coloured tissue paper in the building’s crevices after a spectacular celebration of Easter. My offer to bring in my leaf blower to aid the clear-up operation was met with expressions of disdain.
I popped down to the food cooperative and encountered Jenny, one of our long-standing volunteers, wearing a diamanté glove on one hand à la Michael Jackson, whilst sorting through a crate of Brussels sprouts with the ungloved other. When I questioned the meaning of this sartorial choice, she explained that she’d met George Clooney at the National Theatre two evenings ago and shaken his hand, and the glove was preserving the moment for posterity.
It’s this sort of cheerful incongruity that makes parish life endlessly surprising and occasionally incomprehensible to those outside it.
Evening Prayer was themed on that great Advent carol, O Come, O Come Emmanuel. I’m reminded that the incarnation happened in the mess of real life, not in the aesthetically pleasing version we curate for carol services. This is, frankly, a relief.
13 December: A bell-ringing crisis
Our prayers this morning focused on those for whom Christmas is a difficult time of year – which is to say, a considerable portion of humanity, though we tend not to mention this during the more determinedly cheerful carol services. I will seek to find a carol or poem that speaks to this, a little at least.
I spent the morning writing the nativity script for tomorrow’s carol service. Eighty biscuit-fuelled wrigglers will be singing their hearts out – so much joy, so much chaos. I’ve learnt to keep these scripts simple: shepherd appears, angel appears, everyone sings.
The theological profundity will be discovered in the joyful singing, inevitable tantrums and utter chaos of the service. Still, it’s our hope that many of these children will have enjoyed their day of singing and will want to come back in the new year to audition for our junior choir, the Borough Choristers.
The bell-ringing situation has become critical. We don’t have our own in-house team and, predictably, most churches have their carol service on the same day, so finding willing ringers is increasingly challenging. We do, however, have one faithful ringer who tolls the tenor bell beautifully before funerals. The issue is that tolling a single bell before a carol service sounds identical to a funeral announcement.
Still, he comes and faithfully rings the bell 200 times, as he has done for many services this year, to mark the 200th anniversary of the modern railway. The connection between bell-ringing and train enthusiasm isn’t immediately clear until you spend time with campanologists.
14 December: A profound sense of belonging
This morning began with the discovery that someone had broken into the church overnight and stolen our sanctuary lamp, leaving wax spilled everywhere – not the ideal preparation for worship. Yet an hour before the service, a number of our teenagers arrived for altar server training, and the morning service proceeded with its usual energy and remarkably high attendance.
Our congregation is a wonderful mixture of people who’ve made St George’s their spiritual home – long-time parishioners alongside those who’ve joined us in the past couple of years, creating a community that’s genuinely growing rather than simply maintaining.
Refreshments afterwards revealed what the service had already shown – people genuinely enjoying being together. Watching this diverse assembly interact with such obvious affection and ease, I find myself wondering, “Where else in London would all these people have such a profound sense of belonging to one another? Where else would their paths even cross?”
The answer is almost nowhere, which makes the church either a beautiful anomaly or a reminder of who we actually are. Probably both.
15 December: Winter partying with Tina Turner
During Morning Prayer, we prayed for Dave during the intercessions. Wondering if “rockets and air bombs” is an appropriate way to remember the dead. Decided it probably is.
Earlier in the year, I offered to host a carol service for a local charity working with pensioners, an offer made in a moment of seasonal generosity that I’m now questioning. After considerable back and forth, the proposed traditional carol service has metamorphosed into a “winter party” in our crypt, complete with a music hall singer banging out Tina Turner covers.
Evening Prayer consisted of O Rex Gentium (O King of Nations).
16 December: Death, love and God
The barrage of turkey and tinsel was punctured by a call this afternoon to say that a parishioner was in his final hours. I hastily grabbed my purple stole, some holy oil for anointing and my prayer book, and made my way past the Christmas parties spilling out onto Borough High Street to the stillness of his ground-floor flat.
As I stood next to his bed, his wife quietly keeping vigil, I was reminded of the inevitability of death and the invitation of the Christmas angels to not be afraid.
Surely, there is joy in embracing what we have no control over. I often encounter a deep sense of peacefulness in the rooms of the dying – such a contrast to the street preacher’s apocalyptic shouting earlier. He died soon afterwards, and we will now find time to plan a funeral amidst the hectic festivities that once focused on the unlikely birth of the divine in human flesh.
Through all this, I hold fast to the reading from John’s prologue that is read each year at Midnight Mass. It’s about the Word becoming flesh – God didn’t wait for us to have our liturgy sorted before showing up. Probably just as well.
Come what may, we’ll get on with telling the story of God born among us. And somehow, amidst all the chaos and bizarre requests, that story still has the power to stop me in my tracks.
In this season where everyone tells me, “It’s your busy time of year”, what they don’t see is that the busyness is just the wrapping. The gift underneath – in Dave’s remembrance, in the dying man’s peace, in Jenny’s Clooney glove, in children’s voices raised in song – is Emmanuel. God with us. Even here. Even now.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/12/23/parish-priest-christmas-diary/
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