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I went to a baptism last weekend. It's a relatively large church in a suburb of Copenhagen. Your typical generic Danish church, 700ish years old, made out of brick and tile, big open room with arched ceilings, wooden pews, choir in one end and an altar in the other.
It was an awful experience. And more puzzling, I remember visiting the exact same church two years earlier for the big brother's baptism and it was just the same.
The room was not even a quarter full but there was a cacophony of children wailing and fidgeting, people coughing or murmuring to one another, loud echoes from people's feet on the wooden floor, etc. To drown this out the church had installed small speakers down the sides of the walls. But the sound wasn't loud enough and the mic quality wasn't sharp, so you couldn't understand half of what the priest was saying, nor could you tell what the choir was singing but that's mainly because of the archaic way these people sing these terribly outdated songs in a giant open room with bad accoustics.
On top of that the Priest seemed pretty pissed and didn't want to be there. He started out berating the audience because everyone didn't stand up when he and the parents entered. Then he had all these acerbic remarks in between the ceremony parts, saying things like "You'd think the birth of a child would be a cause of celebration" or "People think the birth of their child will bring them happiness. But what really does bring people happiness now a days and did some bit on materialism or something like that. And he ended the whole thing with something like either him or we not really caring and let's just end it here and then he just stood there looking at us for a second and started walking down the isle, with the family scrambling after him.
It was a thoroughly weird experience. I'd have been pissed if I'd paid money for the ceremony.
Which made me think about what churches really are about now a days. Now, of course, your milage may vary from church to church, priest to priest but it just felt like such an antiquated experience.
Terrible service where the priest and helper dude was clearly dissatisfied with the heathens in their church who were unfamiliar with the churches traditions and didn't share their reverence for a crumbling religious institution.
And a facility that just feels utterly unsuitable for the purpose it's used for.
As a person who's studied service design and customer user experience, there's so many things about that experience that could have been optimised. A smaller room, better sound isolation, more comfortable seating, better speakers, preferably a bunch of large TVs hanging around the room with instructions, like what the days program is, what song or sermon is next, maybe some scrolling text or lyrics so you don't have to frantically flip through a book with a thousand songs most don't know how to sing.
And just a more understanding form of addressing a crowd that doesn't hinge on the frustration that the general public in Denmark doesn't give two shits about Church ceremonies.
And maybe this is just me but some kind of epic light show on the baby fountain, maybe with some dry ice smoke and some Dolby Surround sound angel choir when the kid gets dunked in the water would also be cool.
This post has been edited by Aptorian: 12 September 2020 - 02:40 PM
