You never know who is hanging around the church. Especially if the church is St Andrew’s Bo’ness.

It could be a group of teenagers preparing for the Children’s Holiday Club. You might even meet the phantom gardeners who turn up unannounced and have turned a wilderness into a garden.

If you stay long enough you are bound to catch up with some young musicians hanging about waiting to rehearse. Then there might be a suspicious bunch of old guys that could talk the hind legs of a donkey making as much noise as the Rolling Stones on a good day! You could be excused for mistaking them for the “Last of the Summer Wine”

Then there are the people who drop in for a chat, for a coffee, or to be part of a planning group. And just in case you are looking for a bit of culture there is the piper who turns up to rehearse in the church because his neighbours have a contract out on his life.

Of course there are the members of staff who work in the middle of all this, who feed off this. One of them will no doubt be writing a proposal for a grant to fund some aspect of the church’s outreach, another will be talking on the phone to a parent looking for advice, another will be up dating the sermons on the web page, while another is editing the latest video commission. Meanwhile if it is a Wednesday the morning service will have finished and a faithful group of praying people will be interceding for us all while we’re at work ,in Edinburgh, Glasgow, or at home. The phone will ring and it is Captain Thacker from India checking up on some aspect of our partnership. Or it might be Willie from the Vine Trust looking for me.

So who ever said church life is boring? They need to spend a week with St Andrew and you know what they will meet a whole lot of saints they never knew existed. Truly anything can happen here, and nothing should ever be a surprise. Oh and one more thing the place is a lot quieter now that Erica Bonnar is on her Soul Touch Trip.