Happy Clappers?
Dunno what you guys call them, but the ones who go to a "church service" (not necessarily in a traditional church) and praise the Lord in a most enthusiastic and joyful way, with lots of singing and clapping hands. Kind of the opposite of a Catholic Mass. It's not a derogatory term at all - it's more a form of differentiation from the traditional liturgical services. To my mind, these people are more serious about their worship of the lord than those who recite responses learnt as child from a prayer book that was formulated hundreds of years ago for a congregation that was illiterate and uneducated. But coming from a family who attended the traditional (Anglican) service, Happy Clappers is common term. FWIW, my mother attends both types of church regularly.
The interesting thing is that the old fashioned services have a seriously old congregation (last weekend, I was far and away the youngest person there at 41, and my parents were among the "young ones") which will inevitably die off in the next ten years. By contrast, there are very few people older than me at one of the modern services run by local worship groups.
The traditional Protestant churches in Australia are in crisis, with their top-heavy bureacracies bleeding the parishes dry as the entire congregation passes retirement age, and the centralised administration being seen as irrelevant and culpable in their handling of child sex abuse revelations. (In Australia, our Head of State is the Governor General, basically the Queen's representative, and ours was the Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane, who has now had to resign as Gov-Gen over his handling of abuse by priests - when the country's head of state has to resign, you know you've got problems). The Catholics may survive because their school system keeps the flock close to the church.
So what do you guys call Happy Clappers?
Cheers Russell C.
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