Sunday 11 March 2012

Clergy Fishing

One of the most enjoyable things I've ever had the pleasure to witness during an extremely tedious services was two of my clergy colleagues playing 'clerical fishing'. The game is simple, or at least it was when I saw it played (but I understand there are various extended versions with increasingly complex rules).

The basic game

Equipment:

Modern mobile telephone (an Iphone is ideally suited to this game),
Mobile numbers of those who are to be players in the service you are attending,
Pencil (or pen) and scorecard (service sheet will suffice)

Aims and Rules
In the basic game the aim is to try and ring the mobile telephone of those who are doing various tasks. There are degrees of points awarded and for the game that I watched the scoring was:
Congregation member - One point
Choir member - three points
Person taking collection or reading notices - five points
Any clergy Member - Ten points
And senior clergy member - Game won (although you need five points before you can go for a higher scoring target).

I only saw the game played a couple of times (thank goodness) but was at a service a while back where a senior cleric had their telephone ring during the service and this raised a bit of a smile at the thought of some naughty person still playing the game.

So my question what games have you (or colleagues) played during those never-ending services? Fishing appears to be a fairly limited game (thank goodness) but I know there are many others played from time to time - what games do you know of?

Happy Sunday

1 comment:

Bob said...

At my previous Church we had a variation on this - "Concorde Spotting". Our then minister had quite a good collection of gestures which would be liberally scattered through the service. At the end those of us partaking would compare notes, and declare one of us "the WINNER"....