Empty vessels

I can’t be the only one here who wonders why Manx churches hire out local schools for Sunday services when most churches are empty.
For example, why do a bizarre collection of evangelical misfits meet in my daughter’s old school when the entire congregations of all Ramsey churches would fit comfortably in the hall of a village church less than a mile away?
Many Freethinkers also wondered if some denominations have a special relationship with the Education Department, if they were paying to use the schools, or if anyone else could use them on the same basis. So, we asked our secretary to make enquiries, and the reply makes interesting reading.
In short, the Education Department admits to five 'Christian groups’ using schools for Sunday worship (which in turn might have a cynic asking what other worship and what other days). We’re told they pay normal rates, that other groups could hire schools though not at the same time, and that the Sunday rate is £26 an hour.
I find it all very silly, to be honest.
From other items at this blog you’ll know that one amongst many Ramsey churches with single figure congregations expelled its only teenage worshipper for singing too loud, while on the other hand the Anglicans went so far as to seek a law change to enable church sharing, having ‘rationalised’ almost all their professional clergy, put the vicarages on the market and handed the Synod management over to right wing hobby vicars (mostly old school financiers made redundant by the tightening up of offshore finance or soon to retire civil servants who got our island into the current recession in the first place).
I’m reliably informed that when the last guest workers leave Catholic priests will be no busier. Meanwhile the Methodists, like some strange Celtic variant on Sicilians, still have family feuds going back over a century rooted in grievances from the original split between ‘prims’ and mainstream Methodism. As for Baptists, Pentecostalists and the rest of the lunatic fringe!
Why do they hate each other? I don’t expect them to approve of us, but wouldn’t it be a start to like themselves?
I tell you straight, put three Manx Christians in a room and two will excommunicate the other one, probably citing any suitable verse from Levicticus. And I’m honestly convinced that the only folk they hate more than each other are themselves. Seriously, isn’t it strange that so many loons who claim to be pro-life end up either self-harming or trying to blow up the rest of the world for being ‘sinners’?
All in all, a case of ”Give ‘em enough rope….”
Sorry, shouldn’t laugh.
I just laughed.