The British are renowned for their politeness and their unwillingness to disturb the status quo. This applies even more to British Christians: a whole language has been built up around it so that people don’t have to tell each other they’re wrong. The phrase “bring correction with love” might be employed in extreme circumstances, but generally there’s this sort of desire – so long as someone is generally headed in a sort of Evangelical direction – to not contradict or argue with someone.

This is all somewhat ironic, because speakers in Evangelical churches will continually bang on about how the Gospel is “confrontation”, “dangerous” and “at odds with everything the world stands for”, and the congregation will nod and shout “Amen”; once in a while, you get a properly shouty preacher who makes “dangerous” statements and the congregation get to sit their and feel edgy and sort of rebellious. But even if the speaker says something theologically questionable or controversial, almost no-one will comment on it afterwards, and they’ll say things like “Ooh, that speaker was really anointed” or “God really spoke to me today” and try to avoid that awkward situation that arises when someone says “Well, I didn’t really agree with him” and everyone falls silent and stares at their shoes a bit until someone else says “Isn’t God great?!” and everyone relaxes again.

Anyway. There was a point to all this. The point is this: the upshot of all this is that Christians don’t take direction well. If someone gives a group of Christians a direct instruction – say, “Please can you leave the building, we need to de-rig the PA”, or “Please can you not stand just there, you’re really in the way” – there’s this weird little mental filter that kicks in and they just don’t hear you, because it’s just inconceivable that someone could have been direct and even maybe a little confrontational, and so it’s better to pretend it just didn’t happen.

This applied particularly yesterday when trying to take photos of the couple. There’s this bit at a wedding, after the formal group portraits and before the receiving line (or main reception if there’s no receiving line) where the photographer gets to spend about an hour or so with the couple taking romantic, intimate and silly pictures of them whilst they’re still imbued with that rosy glow of the newlywed. The idea is that no-one else is around for that, so the couple can act natural and aren’t continually distracted by hangers on and other guests asking them to pose for photos whilst the photographer is trying to do his work. Anyway, problem yesterday was that the photos were being taken outside the reception venue – which was not ideal, because guests kept arriving whilst I was taking the photos; but what made it worse is that every time I asked people to go inside and to not disturb us, they basically didn’t hear me.

“Oh, I just wanted to take a quick picture, it won’t take a minute”.
“Er, please, no. I’m trying to take photos here, and you’re holding things up, and it’s much better if the couple aren’t continually distracted”.
“Okay, I’ll take this photo and then go”.
“I don’t think you quite understood me. Please go inside and stop bothering us.”
*click* *flash*

Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnngggggggg. And to think, if I’d beaten them to death with the soggy end of their own leg, I’d be the one to go to prison. There’s just no justice in the world.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 4th, 2005 at 2:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.