Ricky Yates

The Prague crew, together with Katka, gathered around the organ. From l to r, David Hellam, Karen Moritz, Katka Bánová, Larry Leifeste, Celieta Leifeste, Gordon Truefit, Ricky Yates © Celieta Leifeste

As I wrote in my previous post, last Sunday evening, 18^th December 2011, the Prague Anglican congregation created a little bit of history by holding the first ever English-language Anglican service in Brno. In the appropriately named Betlémský Kostel / Bethlehem Chapel, we held a Service of Lessons and Carols for Christmas.

Brno is the second largest city in the Czech Republic with a population of about 400,000 people. It is home to a number of high tech companies together with numerous university and research institutions therefore meaning that there are quite a large number of English-speakers living there. But unlike Prague (population 1.3 million), where St. Clement’s Anglican Episcopal Church is one of eight mainstream English-speaking congregations, in Brno there are only two – a Roman Catholic one and an small Evangelical Fellowship with no Pastor. In terms of the Christian spectrum, there is a large gap in between for which there is currently no provision whatsoever.

Officially the whole of the Czech Republic is my ‘parish’ and in the more than three years I have been here, I have had a couple of enquiries from individuals spending a few months in Brno, asking if we ever hold English-language services in the city. Sadly, I’ve always had to reply saying that we don’t. In recent months, as I have talked with members of the Church Council as to how we might ‘grow the congregation’, it has often struck me that we ought to look at doing so away from Prague in places where there is ‘far less competition’ (if you will excuse that expression this context) and where there is almost certainly far greater need.

Earlier this year whilst I was pondering all of this, I had a totally unexpected phone call from a fluent English-speaking Czech young lady from Brno called Katka. I should really say extremely fluent as she makes a living as a freelance interpreter and translator. What Katka wanted was any old hymnbooks we might have, so that the Czech congregation to which she belongs, could occasionally sing a hymn in English. Taking her phone call as the prompting of the Holy Spirit, I put to her the idea I had of trying to start a satellite English-speaking Anglican congregation in Brno.

Fortunately, Katka was immediately enthusiastic and has since spent numerous hours doing research on my behalf, finding possible Church buildings to use, and helping to organise publicity, particularly via the Brno Expat Centre. The project has also involved me in two day trips to Brno by train, in order to meet people and look at venues. But all of this preparation led to the successful holding of our first ever service last Sunday evening.

I’ve also been most encouraged by the support and enthusiasm of members of the Prague Anglican congregation regarding the Brno venture. As can be seen in the photograph above, five of them volunteered to come with me to Brno for the service. All of them first came to our Sunday Eucharist at 11.00 in the morning in Prague, then managed some quick refreshment at our post-service Coffee Hour, before taking the tram for three stops to the main railway station in order to catch the 13.42 train for Brno. The return train got back at to Prague at 23.15 meaning that we didn’t get back to our respective homes until around midnight.

Larry & Celieta Leifeste at the organ with no volume pedal! © Ricky Yates

Our organist was Larry Leifeste who with his wife Celieta, only joined our congregation in August when they moved from Texas to Prague. It was obviously the first time he had ever played the organ in the Bethlehem Chapel and he found that much to his surprise, it had no volume pedal. How then did he increase the volume? By literally ‘pulling out all the stops’!

Celieta sang two wonderful solos – a setting of the Magnificat and an American spiritual ‘Sweet little Jesus boy’. David Hellam and Gordon Truefit both read a lesson and together with me, sang the individual verses of ‘We three kings’; Gordon as ‘gold’, myself as ‘frankincense’ and David as ‘myrrh’. David along with Karen Moritz also did the important job of welcoming all those who came.

Katka also read a lesson as did three other Brno people that she successfully recruited. Katka also helped to lay on some wonderful post-service refreshments giving me the chance to talk with several of those who attended.

Several of the thirty-strong congregation filled out contact forms with various expressions of interest in being part of future services. Currently, these are planned to start on a monthly basis on Sunday 8^th January 2012 using a smaller nearby venue belonging to the Czechoslovak Hussite Church. More details can be found on the new Brno page of our website.

I am really quite excited about starting a satellite congregation in Brno. I suspect that we will be quite small to start with but, as Jesus said, “For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them.” Matthew 18. 20 TNIV Or alternatively, ‘from small acorns, large oak trees grow’. Watch this space!

The expats.cz Survival Guide & Business Directory 2012. Photo © Ricky Yates

In more than one previous blog post, I have mentioned the extremely helpful website expats.cz. For example, it was through the forum on their website that I found Adrian Blank of Nepomuk to help me through the various hoops in order to register my right-hand drive car here in the Czech Republic.

As well as their website, expats.cz also annually publishes the ‘Czech Republic Survival Guide & Business Directory’. A new edition comes out around the end of September each year. We discovered the then new edition of the ‘Survival Guide for 2009’ within a few days of our arrival in Prague back in September 2008. At that time, expats.cz were specifically asking for new locations from which the guide could be distributed to English-speaking expats. Finding it such a useful source of information ourselves, we offered to take copies to distribute to newcomers who come to St. Clement’s Church and ask for one of our welcome booklets. Since then, we have distributed around forty copies each year.

The ‘Survival Guide’ is distributed free of charge as the cost of production is more than covered by advertising. It contains a great deal of highly useful information that any expat coming to live in the Czech Republic might need, covering employment and business, accommodation and real estate, health, education and leisure activities. This page of the expats.cz website gives full details of the guide including the claim that it is, “Known locally as the expat ‘bible’”.

Each of the three editions that we have previously helped distribute have included just over a page entitled ‘Religion in Prague’ giving basic details of the English-speaking Churches as well as contact information for other faith groups. Therefore, when I discovered whilst attending and exhibiting at the Expats Expo on Saturday 8^th October, an event sponsored by expats.cz, that the new 2012 edition of the ‘Survival Guide’ was now available, I picked up a copy for myself and made a mental note to go to the expats.cz office during the following week, in order to pick up a supply of the new edition to distribute from Church.

The first thing I did upon picking up my copy of the 2012 ‘Survival Guide’ was to check that the information about St. Clement’s Anglican Episcopal Church was accurate. I went to the contents pages at the front and then to the index at the back, to try and find ‘Churches’ or ‘Religion’. Could I find the information? No – because the 2012 edition of the so-called ‘expat bible’, has been published with all information about both Christian Churches and other religions, completely eliminated.

As well as immediately speaking with two staff members on the expats.cz stand, both of whom claimed to know nothing about the decision to exclude all information about religion, I also sent off a strongly worded email via the ‘contact us’ page of their website. When several days later, I had not received a reply, I rang the expats.cz office. No one there would admit to having even seen my email. But about half-an-hour later, my phone call was returned by their Creative Director Dominic Bignal, who also claimed not to have seen my email but knew about my complaint from feedback from the staff members on their stand to whom I had spoken.

There followed a rather interesting twenty minute phone discussion. Mr Bignall’s main points were as follows.

• They had to reduce the size of the new 2012 ‘Survival Guide’ from 220 to 200 pages because of not having sold sufficient advertising, therefore something had to go.
• They had judged what to include or exclude based on the number of visits to the various parts of their website.
• If we had paid for an advertisement then we would have been included.
• Going to Church was so specialised that if people wanted to find us, they would.

I have to say, as I also personally told Mr Bignall, that none of these arguments hold water and/or contradict what expats.cz claims.

• If they needed to reduce the size of the ‘Survival Guide’ by twenty pages in order to be commercially viable, why didn’t they just slightly edit down each section rather than completely cut out one section? Allowing for the fact that 25% of guide is advertising, they needed to reduce about 165 pages of text to around 150 – hardly an impossible task.
• How does expats.cz know that what people look for on the website is the same as what they look for in the ‘Survival Guide’? Bearing in mind that the information about Churches is already well hidden on the website, it’s not surprising that it doesn’t get so many visitors.
• Expats.cz claim to provide unbiased information. But if you advertise……
• The last argument can apply to anything that appears in the ‘Survival Guide’. Yes – put ‘English-speaking Church, Prague’ into Google and up will pop St. Clement’s and six or seven other possibilities. But the same applies to Tennis Clubs, Museums, gay bars etc, all of which are included. It is an argument for the ‘Survival Guide’ not to exist in the first place.

What expats.cz (or Howlings s.r.o. – the company who run the website & publish the guide) have done, is a combination of discrimination and ignorance. Discrimination against those who practice the Christian or any other religious faith. Ignorance in thinking we are so small a group of people that we can be safely ignored.

As a commercial organisation, expats.cz/ Howlings s.r.o. are free to choose what they include in their annual ‘Survival Guide’ and what they exclude – a point Dominic Bignall reiterated to me several times over during our phone conversation. Whilst this is true, they also claim that their ‘Survival Guide’ is ‘Prague’s most comprehensive and objective expat publication guide’. As far as I am concerned, following their unilateral decision to exclude all information about the practice of religious faith, both Christian and otherwise, their guide is no longer comprehensive and certainly not objective.

Ancient tower and town gate in Tábor © Ricky Yates

I’ve become very aware that in recent months, my blog has been predominantly a travelogue with a bit of history thrown in, together with articles describing the changes taking place in and around the Podbaba area of Prague 6 where I currently live. The more spiritual or reflective posts have been somewhat absent. I hope that with this post, the balance will begin to be corrected.

Last week, the news was dominated by the death of Steve Jobs, the co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Apple Inc, whilst the sports pages reported the death of Graham Dilley, the former England test cricket fast bowler. What most struck me about the death of both these individuals was their age – Jobs was 56 and Dilley only 52 – therefore both were younger than I am now.

Around the same time as the deaths of these two well-known individuals, I passed a significant milestone in my own life – I am now at least ten days older than my father was when he died nearly forty-one years ago from an acute myocardial infarction or a heart attack as it is commonly known. I was just eighteen years old at the time of his death.

In some ways, I feel a certain sense of satisfaction that I have now passed this landmark. And whilst I cannot change my family history, my father being only fifty-nine when he died and my mother dying ten years later aged sixty-three, I do find it somewhat reassuring that both my sisters are now older than our mother was at the time of her death. But having said that, I have also become very aware of my own mortality. Who but God knows when my time to die will come?

In reporting the life and recent death of Steve Jobs, numerous journalists have made reference to a speech he gave to graduating students at Stanford University, California, a few years ago, soon after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In it, he spoke quite openly about the one fact of life that most of us rarely dare to mention – the fact that sooner or later, each one of us will die. He reminded his audience of what he himself had read when he was 17 which went something like, “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.”

In one other memorable quotation from that address he declared, “No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it” In the light of this important truth, he encouraged his hearers to make sure that each day in the future, they were doing something worthwhile and something that they wanted to be doing, recognising that their lives are finite.

On Sunday 18^th September, the last Sunday I officiated at St. Clement’s before attending the Eastern Archdeaconry Synod and then taking two weeks annual leave, we celebrated Harvest Festival, giving thanks to God that ’All good gifts around us are sent from heaven above’. For the service, I used the Biblical readings set for Harvest Festival in Year A of the three year lectionary cycle. This meant that the Gospel Reading was Luke 12. 16-30 which begins with Jesus telling the parable of the rich fool – the story of the farmer who pulled down his barns and built bigger ones in order to store the abundant harvest from his lands.

Whilst the parable does have a harvest theme in its story line, that isn’t the reason Jesus told it in the first place. In fact the compilers of the lectionary have unfortunately omitted the three previous verses, which clearly put the account in context. In Luke 12. 13-15, the Gospel writer tells us that a person in the crowd asked Jesus to instruct his brother to more fairly divide the family inheritance of their late father. In response, Jesus both declines to do so and reminds his hearers that, “life does not consist of an abundance of possessions” – a verse I’ve referred to previously in this blog.

In telling the parable of the so-called ‘rich fool’, Jesus does not condemn him for pulling down his barns and building bigger ones. No – it was a perfectly sensible thing to do. It is his attitude that he can, ‘Take life easy, eat, drink and be merry’, that causes God to call him a fool. It is his failure to recognise in the words of Steve Jobs that, “Death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it”.

The challenge to me and to us all, is to live our lives in recognition that, in the words of a well-known Negro spiritual, ‘This world is not my home, I’m just a passing through’. We do not know when our lives will end and, when they do end, to recognise that we will not be able to take our possessions with us. Whilst I hope to be able to retire in just over five year’s time, I cannot guarantee that I will still be here to do so. Who knows when God will say, “This very night your life will be demanded from you.”?

Tram 8 at the new Podbaba tram and bus stop © Ricky Yates

Yesterday, for the first time in more than three and a half months, Sybille and I were able to travel from the Chaplaincy Flat to St. Clement’s Church, in one uninterrupted tram journey lasting just 17 minutes. Further to my earlier post entitled ‘Extending and upgrading our tramline’, on Thursday 1^st September, the re-laid and extended section of track between Podbaba and Vítezné námestí re-opened.

Here is the new Podbaba tram and bus stop with Tram 8 about to set off for the centre of Prague and then on out to Starý Hloubetín on the eastern side of the city. The new stop is about 200 metres further on from the old one and thus slightly nearer to where we live. Travelling on the tram along the extended and re-laid section of track for the first time yesterday, I certainly noticed a much smoother ride than the one previously experienced.

Although the disruption and mess caused by all this work has been at times quite irritating and frustrating, especially for the poor souls who live nearer to works than we do, there has been a lot of attention to detail with many sections of pavement being re-laid and new pedestrian crossings created. And the area either side of the tramlines has been nicely landscaped with older trees protected and preserved and new ones planted as I hope these before and after photographs will illustrate.

The new tram turning circle under construction with archaeological work in progress © Ricky Yates

New tram turning circle © Ricky Yates

The new tracks of the tramline extension under construction © Ricky Yates

New tram tracks landscaped and in use © Ricky Yates

The existing tram route with old track lifted and new ballast laid © Ricky Yates

New tracks laid and surroundings landscaped © Ricky Yates

Regular and very observant readers of my blog may have noticed that each of the three photographs on the left above, all appeared in a larger format, in my earlier post entitled ‘Extending and upgrading our tramline’. In that post I also included two photographs of the previous Podbaba combined turning circle and tram stop, one taken on the last day it was in use and the second, a few days later. Below are both of those photographs, together with a third showing how the same spot looks now with new tracks going straight through and on to the new tram stop 200 metres further away.

Old Podbaba tram terminus on last working day 15th May 2011© Ricky Yates

And a few days later! © Ricky Yates

Same location on Thursday 1st September 2011 © Ricky Yates

With Rev'd Dr. Karen Moritz outside St. Clement's Church on Sunday 1st May 2011 © Gerhard Frey-Reininghaus

In recent months it has been a great privilege to have another lady called Karen join the St. Clement’s congregation.  She is not to be confused with Karen the TEFL teacher, who has been the subject of several of my previous blogposts and who now lives in Istanbul, but remains a very regular and faithful commenter here. Nor is she to be confused with Czech/Australian Karen, who helped us with adopting Sam the dog. Nor is she Karin, (note the slightly different spelling), who has also previously worshipped at St. Clement’s, currently lives on the Greek island of Paros and, from time to time, also leaves comments here.

This latest Karen is the Rev’d Dr. Karen Moritz, an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA). She came to Prague at the end of September last year as a Mission Co-worker with the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren (ECCB), the joint Lutheran-Presbyterian Church who are the largest Protestant grouping in the Czech Republic and who own Kostel Sv. Klimenta where we worship.

Between Monday and Friday each week, Karen works in the Ecumenical Department at the Headquarters of the ECCB. She is also having Czech lessons three times a week and has become far more conversant with the Czech language in seven months, than we have managed in two and a half years. Since late October 2010, she has made her Czech worshipping home with the ECCB Kliment congregation. She attends their 9.30am service each Sunday, joins them for coffee after their service in the hall on the third floor of Klimentská 18, but then she returns to worship with us at 11am because she likes our liturgy and hearing a sermon in a language that she fully understands!

I was delighted to discover when I enquired earlier this year, that under the Ecumenical Canons of the Church of England, it is possible for Karen to be licensed to do within our worship, what a licensed Anglican Reader can do, namely preach, administer the chalice and lead a non-Eucharistic services. We are currently getting her through the various hoops of child protection procedures and references being taken up, to enable this to happen.

We are still waiting for the official formal permission but, in anticipation of it being granted, it was a great pleasure to have Karen preach for us on Sunday 1^st May, the Second Sunday of the Easter Season. This was Karen’s first time ‘back in the pulpit’ since leaving the USA last year. Her boss in the ECCB Ecumenical Department, Rev’d Gerhard Frey-Reininghaus, very kindly attended the service to support her and also took the photograph above. The photograph below was taken by Sybille using Gerhard’s camera.

From l. to r. ; John, a Canadian member of the congregation, myself, Rev'd Dr. Karen Moritz, Rev'd Gerhard Frey-Reininghaus © Gerhard Frey-Reininghaus

Having Karen join our congregation has been a great joy and the possibility of using her gifts and talents within our worship in the coming months and years will undoubtedly be a great asset to both me and the wider congregation. Her sermon on Sunday 1^st May was very much appreciated by all those who heard it and can be also be listened to here on our website. Karen is also providing a wonderful strong link between the English-speaking St. Clement’s Anglican Episcopal Church and our host ECCB congregation.