Yesterday Evening I attended the Maundy Thursday Eucharist at Caistor - this is the second year running I have been there as there was no service in the Swallow group of parishes. Like Ascension Day and Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday seems to be rather neglected by most church-goers, but that isn't what I am really writing about today. I read on other blogs about exciting and innovative services and wonder whether our local clergy are right in their assumption that innovation is not what Lincolnshire country folk want. Certainly at any hint of 'happy-clappy' the loudest chorus tends to be that of disapproval.

Anyway, what I am really writing about is what happens at the end of the Maundy Thursday Eucharist when the altar is stripped in preparation for Good Friday. For several years the Swallow Group gathered in Nettleton for Maundy Thursday where the altar was stripped with great ceremony. They are very fortunate in their churchwardens in that one attended the same Church of England primary school I went to (albeit he was there a good few years earlier) where ceremony seems to have been instilled along with the multiplication tables, and where many of the boys were recruited for the church choir and taught yet more ceremony. The other churchwarden is the son of a Methodist minister, is himself a lay preacher and has a naturally dignified presence in addition to any learned ceremony. Stripping the altar they always worked in perfect harmony of action, making even the folding of the cloth a precise and dignified action, while the crucifix was always handled with respect. At Caistor the man and three women who strip the altar and sanctury take far longer and have all the dignity of furniture removers.

Admittedly they have a bigger job to do - Nettleton has no side chapels, no banners, no miscellaneous saints in niches - but is it actually necessary to remove all these 'nick-nacks' (even the microphones from the pulpit and the lectern) when symbolically stripping the Lord's table?

OK, I admit that I seem to be making a fuss over nothing much, but I felt that the way it was done somehow lacked proper respect.

The Good Friday service was a meditation about choices made by Judas, Peter, Pilate, the crowd and the women, and by ourselves. I'm not generally a particularly meditative person, but it was good.