What is a good Church Service?

  This Email from another medium....

  Quote: "A medium from the USA who is a Spiritualist Minister in Washington made the comment in his email - which I oh so recognised – he said:

  “I know that if a medium gives me another ‘spirit says eat more broccoli’ message that I’ll scream

It is this sort of nonsense that we are trying to combat. We get demonstrators coming to the platform who say the person receiving the message “must” do such and such a thing – and it makes me very annoyed – spirit never tells us what to do in that way.

Worse the ‘proof of survival’ element of messages of often entirely missing or at best they say “I have a man in Spirit with you dear” but then give a message totally unrelated and never again mention the man or who he might be.

These are NOT mediums at all - only psychics!!

Lack of proper training, [bugs us all] and also we find that the poorer quality ones if at all mediumistic have been pushed into platform work too soon due to the lack of 'workers' in general - a few open circles a medium does not make!!!!!
There are times when I think I would rather we didn’t have any demonstration! [Not really!]

Hey! Look! In the old days a speaker did NOT demonstrate! That was left to the physical mediums!

Think about that a moment, there were two kinds of mediums on the platform in those days, and people actually paid to hear just philosophy.  

Spirit have said through the usual channels - books etc - that the changes into 'mental' mediumship, i.e. clairvoyance demonstrating, was a deliberate strategy to reach the greater number of people, and in that respect it has worked, but in my opinion the human ‘organisations’ [perhaps a misnomer] have let spirit down by not giving the teaching to keep up standards.

Churches of any kind attract the lazy egotist as well as the opposite unfortunately!
I was 'chair' for a couple of years and had many a discussion about this with my friends in the SNU, about what to do in difficult circumstances.  Drunks in the church etc...[I could go on for hours on that note...!!]
In short this is the FILTER SYSTEM.

1) It is up to the committee to get references from other church secretaries, [or teaching circles or mediums].

2) The secretary to make it clear about standards -  I mean by making the thing clear that "this church will not accept only psychic demonstrations" ...both in the booking arrangements ....and if in doubt by confirmation of a letter before-hand.

3) And lastly the ‘chair’ - if a dud slipped through the net - if / when the speaker [through perhaps ignorance] proceeds to drop the 'ball' then with a clear explanation to the congregation the chair-person halts the proceedings.

Preparation of the congregation.

This sounds like a nightmare...but no...if all the congregation are in the 'know' i.e. have a clear indication of what to expect,  by saying every week  before each service – be it a full service or only ‘an evening’ – begins, perhaps saying "The demonstration of Clairvoyant Mediumship means that a clearly described spirit person, not a guide, must be recognised with each and every communication."  Then they too will accept the decision to stop a demonstrator who is not giving evidence at all [regardless of how entertaining they might be!]

This is the only honest and truly sincere way - to halt the service and move on to the next part of the proceedings.

E.g. "We will end [this purely psychic demonstration] here and now move on to.... healing / open circle .... all rise and sing hymn number...."
Then get everyone moving chairs into the appropriate shape as if this was totally normal...!!!
.... I truly thank heaven I never had to do it!!!

But I was ready!!!

Comment by Stella:

I have been hearing people say in churches up and down the UK for years that the quality of speakers is going down. I don't think so, because there will always be poor quality when the churches keep booking them, but the good ones are there still, you just have to keep going to church and telling the people who run them when you want better speakers - otherwise how are they to know that you do know the difference!

End.