Sunday With Scruff

Scruff here. Sis suggested I might like to write about the time Alice took me to an 'emerging' church that met in a club near Leicester Square.
Alice, by the way, is one of the young people who grew up at Salem. She has a boyfriend who goes to All Souls and friends who go to other churches in London. A few weeks ago she came up with the idea of us ('us' being her friends, including me) going to the Puddle Church. In disguise, of course, so the Puddle Church people wouldn't recognise us as coming from Salem.
Which is why I was wandering through London dressed as a Goth. Alice has some crazy ideas. She thought that turning up in Goth outfits would help us to fit in. And oddly enough, it sort of did.
The Puddle Church met in a seedy-looking building. Alice suggested it suited me. I thought it suited me better than fishnets and black lipstick, but that wasn't hard. And my tummy felt cold.

We walked right into the club and we were welcomed by a couple of disappointingly normally dressed people who showed us into the club. It had been fitted up with circles of chairs, a silver tree and a couple of dozen candles. They didn't have hymnbooks, so I couldn't use them to build a tower. Since the Puddle Church wanted us just to express ourselves in worship I told the pastor that, and he sent one of the members out to find some hymn-books. I thought that was very nice. The others were less pleased when twenty minutes after the service was meant to start we were still waiting.
"I'm sorry," the pastor said using his microphone, "But Lil (I sort of gave a false name) needs some hymnbooks to worship with." I got some nasty looks.
Fifteen minutes later we were ready to start. The pastor put on a CD and I started building a tower out of dog-eared copies of the Methodist Hymn-book.
Five minutes later four irate Methodists turned up and forcibly recovered the books the Puddle Church member had taken. By now the worshippers were very unhappy, some of them at me. I ignored them and tried something else. They had a sort of tree thing - some silver-painted twigs we were encouraged to stick 'leaves' with our prayers written on to. I'm not very tall, but all the low branches near me were taken.
I was even less popular after I broke their 'tree'. It didn't look the same after Alice tried to mend it with some sellotape.
Then I managed to set fire to my skirt (hey, I'm not used to people leaving candles on the floor!). After I was put out using the water that was meant for one of their other 'worship activities' someone suggested I ought to go to the City Temple, where I'd cause less chaos, which I thought was very unfair. We had a little Bible study after that, but the Puddle Church people were all using someting called 'The Message', which I accidentally called 'The Mess' during the study. It's kind of different from my little AV, but apparently I wasn't allowed to think it was wrong in some places. I did, and I upset some people. Still, because of my disguise they were all fairly supportive.
We were looking at Psalm 110. Apparently I was rumbled when I referred to John Gill. I was asked to leave, as I was suspected of being a spy from the 'Gospel Standard' Magazine, and Sis collected me soon afterwards.
I thought it was rather fun. Apart from my skirt catching fire.

[Note from the Outsider: Next! Scruff goes to a Charismatic Prosperity-Gospel Church!]