Birdsong sounds nice. It washes us in peace, it puts us in touch with creation, it reassures us that God is in his heaven and all is well with the world. Right? Well, no. Not for the first time, humans just don’t get it.

However beautiful it sounds to us, the point of birdsong is not to soothe and calm. Quite the opposite. When a bird sings it warbles a warning. ‘This is my patch. Clear off.’ It’s a territorial thing. Another bird is trespassing and things could get ugly. Hmm.

7-Eleven understands the principle of birdsong. According to the innovations website The Hustle, many 7-Elevens have begun to play music in their stores for the same reasons as birds sing – to drive away unwanted visitors. It seems that Bach and Mozart can deter crime. Really. Bored teenagers with mischief on their minds who used to hang around outside the convenience store, no longer do so because classical music blares out of the shop doorway. The kids are not alright. They leave.

I find this fascinating. Apparently the reason for this is not that classical music is unpleasant on the ear of the average bored teenager, but that it is associated with order, propriety, and classiness. And if those virtues are rattling around your head, then you’re probably not going to want to go shoplifting. Amazing, right?

But there’s more. Some Californian Rite Aids have taken to playing Barry Manilow songs to stop people loitering outside their stores. Face it, who’s going to get up to mischief when they think that Barry Manilow might be watching? And one enterprising city, West Palm Beach, has used the intensely annoying children’s song ‘Baby Shark’ to deter homeless people from sleeping near its waterfront pavilion. (When I read this I had never heard of ‘Baby Shark’ so I found it on YouTube and immediately regretted it. You only have to hear it once for it to become embedded in your brain. It is seriously annoying and I can well understand why people would vacate that pavilion to avoid it.)

It gets me wondering about why people come to church – and why they don’t. Do folks detect a mood, an atmosphere that, like 7-Eleven’s music, makes them feel alienated and unwelcome? I’m not talking about music, as such, but the feeling guests might get from a welcome (or lack of it) a glance, an unspoken code of manners or behavior.

It’s possible to feel so much at home with our cultural expectations that we lose sight of even having them. Fish tend not to notice that they are living in water until they are removed from it. I wonder if some of our incidental noise sounds great to us, like birdsong, but others receive it as a warning to stay away. At this moment in our church life, we are greatly blessed to be welcoming guests and newcomers most weeks. Let’s be sure that we truly connect with them and speak their language of welcome and belonging.