Usually when I go to the July Synod I take up the offer of a lift with one of the other Oxford members. It’s useful to chat through the agenda, and just to catch up. But this time we have a House of Laity meeting before ‘Synod proper’ begins so I asked for a room the night before, to make sure I’m there for it. However, the train journey hasn’t exactly been uneventful.

It’s the cross country service, which takes ages but means I don’t need to wrestle my case across London, up and down lots of stairs. But we had an ‘incident’, of which more shortly.

Last night I accepted the invitation to speak at another deanery synod in my diocese on ‘How does General Synod work?’ and felt supported by the members of that synod who assured me of their prayers for the days ahead. This morning, I had a couple of ‘hope it goes well’ messages, one from someone who is nothing to do with the church and the other from a friend at church: ‘Hope you’ll be very conscious of God being with you all the time in the next 5 days’.

Thinking about that, I’ve been gazing at the passing countryside, reflecting on what I saw and what it could say to me about this Synod session. I noticed a very small bridge between two fields separated by a stream: a bridge which isn’t even visible until you are quite close to it. I saw sheep getting on with ‘safely grazing’.  I thought again about yesterday, when we had a walk not far from our home, which involved dropping in on a local church where the electoral roll is 8 people, but which operates a mission of hospitality to local walkers, with a loo, tea-making facilities, and home-made cakes. On our journey the train is now passing industrial buildings with no current use. And the clouds are becoming larger, and darker, as we travel north.

Which brings me to the ‘incident’. While we were waiting for our departure from Birmingham, there were suddenly shouts and banging. A man was upset, and kept saying ‘I’ll f***ing annihilate them’. This was at one end of my carriage. There had already been something going on in which a person was ‘detrained’ but the Birmingham transport police had dealt with that. People on our train drew their attention to what was now going on. There was a lot more shouting and clearly some people on the train were very frightened (me, I’m a street pastor, I’ve seen this sort of thing before). 

Various police and other rail staff talked to the man. He had a ticket, so they couldn’t remove him for not having one – I got the impression that they’d rather hoped he didn’t, because that would give them grounds to take him off and the train could continue on its way. The ‘discussion’ went on, and on (30 minutes of this). By then, some passengers were – not surprisingly – getting upset about the train connections they’d miss. Several of us were wondering when it would be safe to go to the loo, as the one in the opposite direction has been out of action all journey, but the shouting man was between us and the other loo.

Eventually the train manager – a reassuring and efficient woman – spoke to the man. She led him through to an area where there was luggage and bicycle space and installed him there on his own. His luggage – 5 bags of it – went back and forth during all this. On one of his trips through the train with a bag, he announced that we were all his supporters, that he was ‘Sheffield steel’, and that he was travelling to see his goddaughter. 

Now, I know I’m already tired, that this has been a long journey, and that I’m reading too much into this. But still. Does this say anything to the Synod agenda?

We’ve been travelling for a long time on LLF. The various meetings I’ve been at, the documents I’ve read, have done to death that metaphor. Moving forward as one church, the direction of travel, ‘we need to walk this through’, is it the end of the road or the beginning? 

On that journey, there is the occasional ‘incident’: there tends to be one speech which is really hurtful. This train incident appeared frightening, but was somehow defused by a calm person, in the course of which we learned something of the shouty man as a person, not as a problem. At the time, I wasn’t sure about her action, but it proved to be correct. Many of us were delayed in getting to the destination to which we were committed, but he made it to the place he needed to be. And we’ll get there soon. Are the letters about LLF issued in recent days similar to this ‘incident’ and can we find a way to stay on the LLF train, together?