St Clement’s Church

Forty years on – how the world has changed

Do you recognise this man? Yes, believe it or not, it is Yours Truly – the photograph being the one that appears in my first-ever British passport, issued to me forty years ago in 1974, by the British High Commission in Canberra, Australia. It dates from the days when you were actually encouraged to smile and show your teeth in a passport photograph, something that is now no longer acceptable or allowed 🙁

It was with this passport, that in 1975, I travelled from Australia, where I had lived for the previous four and a half years, back to my country of birth, the United Kingdom. After flying from Sydney, to Kathmandu in Nepal, the rest of that journey was overland, taking a period of two and a half months.

It is amazing to think how much the world has changed since I made that journey. I travelled through three countries that no westerner in their right mind, would currently seek to visit – Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. For at that time, there were no Taliban in northern Pakistan, the Soviet Union was yet to invade Afghanistan, and the Shah still ruled in Iran.

I also travelled the length of a country which has since ceased to exist – Yugoslavia. This does create problems when I’m asked how many countries I’ve visited. Do I count Yugoslavia as one country or as seven 🙂 To be fair, I usually ignore Yugoslavia in my calculations, but include Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Serbia, as I’ve visited all five of them since they became independent nations. But in 1975, I did also pass through what are now Macedonia and Kosovo, but have not been back there since then.

Whilst I am saddened by what has happened since 1975 in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, as I have fond memories of my time spent there, including attending an Easter Day Communion Service in a little chapel of the Episcopal Church of Iran in Isfahan, the last forty years has also seen one massive change for the better that I never, ever expected to see in my lifetime – the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989. As a result, I now live in a country which was once part of the Soviet Warsaw Pact. I still smile and pinch myself when travelling by tram past the headquarters of the Czech Ministry of Defence and see the NATO flag flying on top of the building.

That dramatic change has, since moving to live in Prague in September 2008, allowed me both to explore the Czech Republic, but also to at least briefly visit, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Poland. And visiting the Baltic States and properly exploring both Poland and Slovakia, is firmly on my agenda during the next three years. Until twenty-five years ago, freely being able to visit any of these countries was well nigh impossible.

Finally for this post, any intelligent individual reading this and wondering how on earth I managed to travel to Australia, without previously holding a passport, the answer is that I travelled on a ‘Document of Identity’, valid for a single journey to travel to Australia as an approved migrant. The photograph of me on that item of paperwork is so awful that I’m surprised the Australian authorities ever let me into their country 🙂 I have no intention of reproducing that photograph here, without a generous donation first being given to support the work of St. Clement’s Anglican Episcopal Church, Prague 😀

Holy Week and Easter Day 2014 in Prague and Brno

With Rev'd Dr Karen Moritz and Jack Noonan outside St. Clement's Church, Prague on Easter Day © Celieta Leifeste — With Rev’d Dr Karen Moritz and Jack Noonan outside St. Clement’s Church, Prague on Easter Day © Celieta Leifeste

I have to admit that I much prefer it when Easter Day falls well on into April, as it did this year, rather than being in late March as it was in 2013, when I experienced a ‘White Easter’ in Brno. The warm Spring weather we have enjoyed in Prague in recent weeks, has brought all nature alive in a whole variety of colours, which in its own way, does speak of the new risen life of Jesus that we celebrate at Easter.

After the most pleasurable surprise on Palm Sunday, of a congregation almost twice as large as on a normal Sunday, I was also pleased that the number attending on Maundy Thursday evening, was larger than it has been in previous years. Our Good Friday evening devotional service was notable for a couple of things – a reflection on the Cross of Christ by my Licensed Reader Jack Noonan, which you can listen to and read here; and my accidental omission of the final Bible Reading, John 19. 38-42, meaning that I failed to have Jesus laid to rest in the tomb!

With 2014 being my sixth Easter in the Czech Republic, I knew from past experience that our Easter Day congregation would be likely to be in the region of one hundred. The other fairly accurate indicator of attendance is always the number of hits that the Church website receives during Holy Week. This year, these ranged from between two and five times the average daily level, though admittedly, some would be the regular congregation wanting to listen to Jack’s Good Friday sermon, or even to mine from Palm Sunday 🙂

Upon arriving at Church with Sybille, at around 10.20, we almost immediately started the task of assuring arriving foreign visitors that, ‘Yes – you are at the right place for Easter Day worship in English. But no – you cannot go into Church yet. You must wait outside here with us, until the Czech service has ended’. This has then to be followed by explaining that the Church building does not belong to us but to the Kliment congregation of the Ceskobratrská církve evangelické, the main Czech Protestant Church, and that they worship at 9.30 each Sunday, in advance of our service at 11.00.

As in previous years, the clear indication that the Czech service was coming to an end, was hearing the organ strike up with the hymn tune Maccabaeus by Georg Friedrich Händel, with the congregation giving good voice to the Czech translation of ‘Thine be the glory’. Only when a reasonable proportion of the Czech congregation had come out of the Church, could I and those helping with welcoming, move in and start getting the Church set up for our Sung Eucharist. Altogether we got about twenty minutes which was better than in one or two past years!

This year, we started Easter Day worship in a different way, with Celieta Lefeste coming out of the vestry, dressed as Mary Magdelene, and singing ‘Where have they taken my Jesus?’, accompanied by her husband Larry on the organ. You can listen and see her solo in this video.

I then gave the Easter greeting which answered her question. ‘Alleluia. Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Alleluia.

It was a great privilege to have both of my ministerial colleagues helping with our Easter Day worship. Licensed Reader Jack Noonan led our intercessions whilst American Presbyterian Minister Karen Moritz, read the first Bible Reading. Together, they then administered our two chalices at the distribution of the sacrament. The photograph at the beginning of this post was posed at the Church door, following the service. Karen has previously joked that when she & I are both robed, we look like the black sheep and the white sheep. With Jack in his black cassock, white surplice and light blue Reader scarf, he must be the the black, white and blue sheep 🙂

The official head count was that one hundred and thirteen people were present at worship. Around half were members of the regular congregation, including a few stray sheep that we hadn’t seen for sometime. The rest were visitors – mainly Americans, (there was a joke amongst them as to how many of the fifty states were represented), together with some Brits. Overall, at least fifteen nationalities were present in the congregation.

After refreshments and fellowship at Coffee Hour, I then jumped in the ‘Carly’ and headed off down the D1 – the Prague-Brno motorway, in order to celebrate Holy Communion for Easter with our Brno congregation. Our evening service there was the first to be held in the Brno congregation’s new home, after we were told with very little notice, that from the end of March, we could no longer use our previous venue belonging to the Czechoslovak Hussite Church, because of the change in time of the host congregation’s service.

The Brno Anglican congregation’s new home belongs to the Jesuits and is known as ‘The Upper Room’. As one of the congregation remarked in an email reply to me, it was most appropriate that our first service in ‘The Upper Room’ was on Easter Day! I promise a further post about Brno, including some photographs, after our next service there on Sunday 4th May. In the meantime, full details can be found here on the Brno page of our website.

Farmer’s Market on Saturday – Worship on Palm Sunday

Market 1 — Crowds at the Farmer’s Market © Ricky Yates

In early March, after a two-and-a-half month winter break, the Saturday morning Farmer’s Market at Vítezné námestí resumed. So now nearly every Saturday, we take a short bus or tram journey from the Chaplaincy Flat and explore what the market has to offer. As you can see, we are not the only ones who do so and at times, it can get quite crowded!

There are a number of stalls that we regularly visit each week for supplies of bread, eggs and potatoes. Whilst we can buy such things from our very convenient Kaufland supermarket, the produce from the Farmer’s Market does always seem fresher, is often cheaper, and one can be almost certain that the producer obtains a far better return for their labour.

Stall selling Moravian wine © Ricky Yates

Another of our favourite stalls is this one, selling Moravian wine. Whilst they do sell it by the 0.75l bottle, you can also have a plastic bottle filled from the tanks behind the counter. Two litres of extremely quaffable white wine costs around CZK 150 (just under £5.00 at current exchange rates).

The senior proprietor, (the gentleman behind the stall on the right in the photograph above), is Czech. However, he also speaks reasonably fluent German and has some English. So we frequently conduct business with him in a mixture of all three languages! When we are about to depart, his farewell words are almost always to wish us ‘Ein schönes Wochenende‘ 🙂

Flower stall at the Farmer's Market © Ricky Yates — Flower stall at the Farmer’s Market © Ricky Yates

Czech people do love their flowers and there are always numerous stalls that sell them. I couldn’t resist photographing this colourful stall yesterday which, as you can see, was doing a thriving business.

In the centre of the market area, there are various stalls selling freshly cooked food with tables & chairs where you can sit down and eat. And you can usually do so to musical accompaniment such as this young accordion player/singer was providing yesterday morning.

Our visit to the Farmer’s Market at Vítezné námestí yesterday morning, when all the accompanying photographs were taken, marked the beginning of a busy but enjoyable weekend. Today, not only did we have our Palm Sunday Eucharist, but the service was to be followed by that significant event – our Annual Church Meeting.

Just a few minutes before worship was due to begin at 11.00 this morning, we suddenly had a problem of the nicest sort. We completely ran out of copies of the Palm Sunday Order of Service as the congregation became double the size for a normal Sunday. The cause was a large number of visitors, mainly Americans but also including a delightful Indonesian couple. The biggest visitor group was a party of high school students from Connecticut, along with their teachers. We solved the problem by me asking from front, for people to share, so that everybody could follow and join in the liturgy. Fortunately, we just had enough palm crosses to go around!

After reading the Palm Sunday Gospel – Matthew 21. 1-11, I led the congregation in a procession outside, all around the Church as we sang ‘All glory, laud and honour, to thee Redeemer King’. Fortunately, when we re-entered the Church, we were still just about in time with Professor Michal Novenko on the organ 🙂 Some of those living the apartment blocks that overlook the Church got a bit of a surprise, but at least they were made aware that today was Palm Sunday!

As for the Annual Church Meeting, it was much better attended than in a number of previous years, and despite the serious financial difficulties that we face, there was a real desire expressed to work together to overcome them. Both our worship and the Annual Church Meeting have certainly helped prepare me to enter Holy Week, and with Jesus, once more walk the way of the cross.

A very special Sunday morning

Silvia (Slovak), Karen (American), Ata (Iranian), Yours Truly (English) Jack (Irish) © Sybille Yates

To worship at St. Clement’s, Prague on any Sunday is always a great joy, with the possible exception of a few occasions in the depths of winter when coping with the cold can be a little difficult 🙁 But our worship yesterday morning was particularly special for two reasons.

Firstly, my good friend and ministerial colleague, Rev’d Dr Karen Moritz, was our preacher. As I have explained in two previous blog posts, ‘Welcome to another Karen‘ and ‘Pentecost in Prague‘, Karen is an ordained minister of word and sacrament in the Presbyterian Church (USA), and since September 2010 has been a Mission Co-worker with the Ceskobratrská církve evangelické / Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren, (Lutheran – Presbyterian), working in the Ecumenical Department at their denominational headquarters. The CCE / ECCB, are the largest Protestant denomination in the Czech Republic and are also the owners of Kostel sv Kliment where we worship.

Karen is licensed under the Ecumenical Canons of the Church of England, to preach, help in the administration of Holy Communion and to lead non-Eucharistic worship. She is a much loved member of the St. Clement’s congregation and a great support to my ministry. As always, it was wonderful to be spiritually fed by her preaching, rather than to always be giving out myself. You can listen to her sermon from yesterday by following this link to our Church website.

The second reason that this morning’s worship was so special was because I conducted the baptism of an adult young man named Ata. Ata is an Iranian Christian who, because of his adoption of the Christian faith, has had to flee his home country and is currently seeking asylum here in the Czech Republic. He has been worshipping with us for several weeks, supported by two female friends, Darina (Czech) and Silvia (Slovak), both of whom also speak Farsi.

It has been a privilege to spend time with Ata, preparing him for baptism, aided by Silvia who has translated into Farsi when Ata has had any problems in understanding my English. One of the many things that has impressed me about Ata, is the way he brings his Farsi New Testament with him to Church, so he can follow the Epistle and Gospel readings and improve his English at the same time. Ata also has a most engaging smile as you can see in the photograph at the beginning of this post.

It was very moving to hear Ata publicly declare his Christian faith before the multi-national St. Clement’s congregation yesterday morning – by my calculation we had at least twelve different nationalities present. Following his baptism and Ata receiving his baptism candle representing the light of Christ, the congregation burst out into a spontaneous and long round of applause. He also received many warm greetings at the Peace.

Ata and Silvia added one final nice touch to a very special Sunday morning, by bringing various Iranian specialities which they shared with us at Coffee Hour following the service. May Ata continue to ‘shine as a light in the world to the glory of God the Father’.

Happy Fifth Birthday to my blog

A rare sight - Charles Bridge with hardly any tourists! © Ricky Yates — A rare sight – Charles Bridge with hardly any tourists! © Ricky Yates

Tomorrow, Tuesday 4th February 2014, this blog will be five years old. My first ever blog post, entitled ‘Episcopal Taxi Service‘, was published here on 4th February 2009. Five years later, this is post number two hundred & fifty eight.

In some respects, I’m a little disappointed with myself. Two years ago, I set myself the target of publishing fifty-two blog posts in the year – an average of one a week. As I explained twelve months later, I eventually only managed fifty. This year, having set myself the same target, I have again fallen short as, with this post, I have only managed to publish forty-six.

On the positive side as I look back over the past five years, I am quite pleased with what I have achieved. For example, if you scroll down and click on ‘Select Month’, under ‘Archives’ in the right-hand side bar, you will discover there isn’t a single one of the past sixty months, when I haven’t published a blog post. And in fifty-nine of those sixty months, it has always been more than one!

Without blowing my own trumpet too loudly, I do contrast this with several other blogs I’ve followed over the time that I’ve been blogging, which have gone well for a while and then have quietly died. Or those that start out very well-intentioned, and then have failed to manage more than two or three posts. If you are going to first build and then maintain interest in your blog, it is essential to add a new post at reasonably regular intervals which is what I have always tried to do, even though I haven’t done so quite as frequently as I would have liked to have done.

In some respects, my blog has become far more widely read and appreciated, than I ever could have imagined when I started writing it five years ago. As I’ve previously explained, the original aim was to update family, friends and former parishioners in the UK, about my new life in Prague and my role as the Anglican Chaplain. But I now seem to have gained a following amongst English-speaking Czechs, both those living in their country of origin and others currently residing elsewhere. Additionally, I appear to be read by other English-speaking expats living in the Czech Republic and by both current and former members of my Prague and Brno congregations.

One very satisfying result of my five years of blogging is that it has brought people to Church. Just a few weeks ago, I was standing at the door of the Church, shaking hands with members of the congregation following our Sunday Eucharist. A British couple who were visiting Prague, introduced themselves and told me that they had decided to come and worship at St. Clement’s simply because they had read my blog!

Another reason why my blog attracts as many visitors as it does, is that a small number of posts, rank highly in Google and other search engines, for the topic they cover. An enquiry as how to register a British or Irish right-hand drive car in the Czech Republic, will promptly highlight my two posts from 2009 – ‘Driving on the ‘right’ side of the road‘ and ‘Check this Czech car out!‘. Consequently, I’ve several times generated business for my friend Adrian Blank, who was so helpful to me in getting the ‘Carly’ through all the necessary hoops nearly five years ago.

I also really ought to be on commission from the Czech Tourist Board as my post from January 2011, entitled ‘Why I like living in Prague‘, remains as one of the most popular landing pages for new arrivals to my blog.

A major change in my blogging practice came at the end of May 2012 when I started using a brand new laptop computer, one on which I still work. This, together with the ever-increasing availability of wifi internet connection in restaurants and hotels, has allowed me to both write and published blog posts, without being located in the Chaplaincy Flat in Prague. Thus in June 2013, when flooding caused us to lose our internet connection for seventeen days, I was able to publish a post using the wifi provided by Bar-Restaurace U Topolu. Later that month, I both wrote and published a blog post, whilst on holiday in the Orlické hory.

This fifth birthday for my blog, has come immediately following the events I described in my previous post – the publication of an abbreviated and very poorly translated version of one of my blog posts, by the the online Czech tabloid Prásk!, both without any link to my original or seeking my consent. I have written to the Director of PR and communications of the offending media company, seeking a published apology, but have yet to receive any reply. However, without condoning the behaviour of the Nova media group, I’m increasingly taking what has happened to me as a back-handed compliment.

It has resulted in a massive increase in visitor numbers to my blog, with numerous English-speaking Czechs leaving interesting and appreciative comments. And the number of Facebook ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ for ‘How to be Czech in ten easy steps‘, yesterday went past 8,000! Twelve days after the offending article was published online, my blog which normally has around fifty or sixty visitors each day, still had well over four hundred. Clearly I had better take full advantage of my new-found fame 🙂

So as ‘Ricky Yates – an Anglican in Prague’, enters the sixth year of publication, I shall seek to continue to write and reflect upon my experience of ministering to English-speakers from around the world and living as an expat myself in this fascinating city and the wider Czech Republic. Hopefully, those who have recently discovered the blog for the first time, will continue to visit.

Whilst I have a number of plans for future blog posts, if there are any particular topics my regular readers would like me to tackle, please let me know your thoughts. In the meantime, join with me in raising your glass to celebrate the fifth birthday of ‘Ricky Yates – an Anglican in Prague’.