“You are the Church”: SPANNED at 50

Fr Frank Daly had the script in his hand from the last rehearsal just before Mass to the final blessing. Members and volunteers held hands at the back of St Peter’s in Hinckley, half on each side. Slowly they moved towards the altar until the two halves met, then made a circle around it. Nobody spoke, and two little girls on the front bench leaned forward, not wanting to miss a thing.

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The music was Reel Around the Sun, the opening number of Riverdance and of SPANNED’s Dance of the Light. Fr Frank staged it in Derby on 16 July 2000, teaching 169 people to dance the story of Jesus’s life. Asked for his greatest joy in fifty years, he names that day. “The beginning is what you saw at the beginning of Mass today.”

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SPANNED stands for Supporting People with Additional Needs in the Nottingham Diocese. It began in 1976, when Bishop James McGuinness appointed Fr Frank to set up this work. The Bishop knew he already cared about “those who had no one to care for them and no one to think positively about them.” Around 250 people came to its Golden Jubilee on Saturday 26 September, from groups in Leicester, Scunthorpe, Hinckley, Derby and Nottingham.

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“It was very hard,” Fr Frank remembers. At that time, “a person with learning difficulty was regarded as subnormal. That was an educational classification.” SPANNED’s first task was “to make sure that everybody was respected as a person.” The next was to help members contribute what they have.

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Fifty years on, he goes further: “they are part of the mission of the church and have a mission that is completely unique, which you’ve just seen.” The hardest thing now, he says, is indifference, a world where “nothing seems to touch our souls deep down.” “You can’t force that. It’s a gift.”

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Bishop Patrick McKinney, who celebrated the Mass, spoke of the people Jesus noticed when the crowd looked past them. There was Zacchaeus the tax collector, left up his tree, and a blind man the crowd wanted to keep quiet. In SPANNED, he said, “people are noticed. People are welcomed and invited into friendship.” Their share in the life of the Church is “theirs by right of baptism and not by anyone’s kindness.”

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Then he spoke to the members directly. “You are the Church, and for 50 years, you have, in many respects, been showing the rest of us throughout the diocese just how to be Church. You’ve taught this diocese what welcome really looks like when it’s real.” Fr Frank and the first volunteers, he said, “saw something that needed doing, and rather than just talk about it, they began.”

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Barbara Drummond, one of SPANNED’s two original volunteers, still isn’t sure she chose to join. “I don’t know if I made the decision or whether Father Frank made the decision for me.” He “guides us all through it, and ‘bullies’ us into doing it,” she says fondly.

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Every member had a part in the Mass, wheelchair users included. They carried the group banners, read from the First Letter of St John and signed a prayer. For James, who joined in 2019, SPANNED means “being with SPANNED family, being together, enjoying different things all together, and being happy.”

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Then came the memorial. One by one, members placed the names of friends who had died into a bowl, 340 of them across fifty years. For Barbara, the names brought faces back: “Oh, I remember her. I remember him.” Fr Frank wanted to make sure they “were not forgotten because what they’ve done and been is so important.”

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At his request, everyone had stayed seated throughout the Mass. At the end, as the members gave him a painting, the whole church stood and clapped for the first time. Asked afterwards what he would say to them all, he gave thanks for “what you’ve been and done.” They were almost the words he had used for the 340.

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A reading at the end of Mass called SPANNED “a bridge between exclusion and welcome”, and ten more bridges besides. One was “indifference and concern”, the very challenge Fr Frank named. The last was “existing and truly living.” Asked what she would say to someone who has never been, Barbara is plain: “Come and join us… Religion or no religion, everybody’s welcome.”

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Fifty years on, the bridge is still open. If you would like to cross it, as a member, a family or a volunteer, you can contact Fr Frank at frank.daly@dioceseofnottingham.uk.

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You can find photos of the day here: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjD5e9M