Working in a Church.

There is a tipping point in the busyness of church life, where congregations feel they need to start employing a paid staff. When the volume of mail gets too much, or when the extra enterprises associated with the congregation require more than can be handled by a volunteer a few hours a week, then you will seee anadvert for someone to help around the office.

I know a few people who work in congregations.  One has been working in a church for a good few years now.  It's a busy church that has a number of rooms available for hire through the week, plus a catering service, so there's a lot on top of the standard congregational life.  Their paid hours are Monday to Friday, yet they worship with that congregation on a Sunday.  This means that, when something goes wrong, or if there's something that needs stuck in next weeks order of service, they are given a scrap of paper on Sunday morning to deal with through the week.  Yet there's someone else I know that is strict about the mon-Fri 9-5 contracted hours and goes to another congregation to worship. 

My concern for the first person is that they don't have a separation between their church and working lives.  Where do they go to for spiritual direction, when the Minister is also their boss?  Would it be more appropriate if we recruited our staff from outwith our congregations so as to be a bit more fair to our employees?  Should we be advising our employees that worshiping with us on a Sunday isn't a part of their contract, and they may wish to worship elsewhere? 

I'm not sure.  It depends on the person and the congregation.  And it's easy for me to say  here in the Central belt where there's churches all over the place.  What about the Highlands or Lowlands where you can have miles between parishes?  I've no answers, but it's something to be thinking about.

Christ the King Sunday

Christ the King Sunday is the last event in the church year before Advent begins next week.

You know, Advent.  Celebrating the coming of Jesus. 

If you are going to switch on your Christmas lights, some time in Advent is good. 

Having them switched on the Saturday before Christ the King Sunday is liturgically so last year.

It wasn't a shopping centre, it wasn't our neighbours.

It was a church. 

It was a CofS church.in the next parish north from here. 

Please, get real.  It's bad enough that the shops have Christmas spreading backwards from December, I don't want the church to be doing the same.

I'm sure they will be celebrating Easter just as soon as the Creme Eggs hit the shops.

Dumb Animals

Short version.  Guide dog attacked while going to the pub. Source Crewe Chronicle.

The dumb animal in question being the owner of any dog that permits, through action or inaction, an attack on a guide dog.

Having known a number of people with assistance dogs or who have puppy walked, I have seen the benefit that assistance dogs bring to peoples lives.  There's a lot of investment in training a guide dog, but it's more than paid off by the fact that their owners can get out to work, and not have to rely on others.

Someone needs to teach the owners the Woodhouse method, while their dogs sit and watch...

Off topic.

Off topic.  Still awesome.

A Month or So in

So what have I been up to?

Lowry (North) like many of the churches round here on the Atlantic coast has a whole lot going on through the week.  And just like every other church, for every organisation there is usually a meeting to go with them!

After my first funeral the other week, it was followed up by another, although my second wasn't part of placement, and it was a pretty rough experience for all concerned.   I'd like to be done with funerals for this year.

I have had the good things as well.  Remembrance service in the care home was nice, as we were profusely thanked by many of the residents for coming along.  One lady was determined to stand for the National Anthem.  It may have taken her a little time to get up, but there was no way she was sitting for the Queen.

I made a pastoral visit to a lady who got her driving license thanks to WWII and hasn't stopped driving since.  It was really nice to spend time just blethering about her family and life in general, and she makes an exceedingly good cup of tea.  She did admit that she hadn't been baking, and her cakes may also have been "Exceedingly Good"  as well... 

The church has a number of staff, full time and volunteers, so I have spent time getting to know some of them, and hearing what it's like to work for the church in a non-ministerial role.  There is a lot going on based from the church office so it was interesting to hear how the volunteers and the paid staf work together.

All in, it's an interesting placement, and I'm being kept busy.  My only concern is that the OLM handbook states that I am to spend three hours plus a Sunday.  While I am trying to do perhaps more than I should, I still think it would be hard to fit everything into three hours a week. 

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In other news, I am sitting writing this in a cafe.  One of the staff has just had a rant about why it should be against the law to sell things cheaper on the internet. The internet should be more expensive to force people to go to the shops.  I don't think she has embraced the information age.  In fact, I think she is still upset that Mr Ford's motor car has forced the horses from the road...

Remembrance Sunday

First draft of a remembrance Sunday sermon.  Feel free to use if you have reached that point where you have run out of week.  Errors, omissions and typos are all mine and are included complimentary.

In monastic life, alongside the central church, you would always find a bakery and a brewhouse.  Because the water was not guaranteed to be pure, the monks would have a brewhouse which would brew ale with an alcohol content just strong enough to keep the water bacteria free.  In Dunfermline, at the Abbot House, they are recreating a medieval brewery, just like the one that would have been nearby when the abbey was a working community.  

When Mrs Gerbil and I visited, the brewer told us that the process  is temperature critical and you need to get the liquid up to exactly 70 degrees centigrade.  In the absence of thermometers, the way you would tell the liquid had got to that temperature is by looking at the surface.  When the cauldron  hit seventy degrees, the surface would go mirror smooth and you could see your face in it.  Everything looks calm on top, yet things are still quite hot underneath, an awful lot closer to boiling than ordinary room temperature.

How often does conflict look like that?  You may think that things are peaceful on the surface, but underneath, the unresolved hatred on both sides means that it won’t take much for things to reach boiling point.  

The global landscape has been shaped by conflict, past and present.  Tensions leading to the first world war had been brewing for at least a century before, with a network of treaties and alliances all serving to try to prevent war while at the same time allowing them to increase their military capabilities.  It only took a small act, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, for the whole house of cards to come tumbling down, and the deadly conflict to erupt.

And even with the ending of hostilities, the treaty of Versailles didn’t really sort anything out in Europe, and World War 2 was inevitable.  The effects of the wars can still be seen today on the maps of Europe, in the shape of Germany, and the divisions in the former Yugoslavia.

In the British isles, we have had our own share of conflict.  Between 1969 and 2010, the troubles in Northern Ireland lead to at least 3,500 deaths, and each death had a mother, or a father or a child that was bereaved, asking why.

One such parent, Colin Parry set up the Tim Parry – Johnathan Ball Foundation for Peace in Warrington, where Tim and Johnathan were killed in an IRA bomb attack.  Colin did something perhaps unthinkable to victims of terror, he invited Martin McGuinness, the Northern Irish Deputy First Minister, and former IRA member to speak to the foundation.  Colin Parry has said that he does not forgive McGuinness, and is aware that his decision has drawn severe criticism, But he has said that “this is absolutely what you need to do if you are leading a peace foundation which proclaims the importance of talking rather than fighting.” 

In his speech to the foundation, Martin McGuinnes had this to say...

“Conflict resolution is about much more than ending conflict. The conflict is over, but the work of conflict resolution must continue.  If we approach conflict resolution on the same basis that we approached ending the conflict then I firmly believe acknowledgements about the past can become a powerful dynamic which will move us again to new places that many believe are beyond us.”

We can see that, just like the heating pot in the brewery, we cannot just look at the calm reflective surface, we need to be aware of what is going on underneath.  

The Isaiah reading this morning is a familiar one this time of year, beating swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks.  Is this idealistic  Does it actually have any real world merit?

The war in Mozambique, the only country in the world that has a machine gun on its flag,  raged between 1977 to 1992.  As one way of finding ways of reconciliation between communities, The right Reverend Bishop Dinis Sengulane arranged the collection of 600,000 weapons, exchanging guns for books, bicycles, and sewing machines.  One village exchanged enough guns they bought a tractor.  Not a plough, but close enough.  There was a genuine fear that the guns would have been shipped to another part of Africa and they would have fueled a conflict elsewhere.  

 There are millions of weapons circulating Africa from the colonial days, Belgian, French, Russian, even British army rifles, all still deadly.  In a project that brought together artists from all sides of the divide, some of the guns were turned into art, Two examples, a tree of life, and a throne, both recently on display in the British Museum.   

The artworks are the visible part of swords into ploughshares, but perhaps more importantly, swords are not just physical weapons, but a willingness to seek conflict rather than reconciliation.  It’s not enough to calm the water by taking away the guns, you have to change hearts from swords to plowshares as well.  Through his work supported by Christian Aid, Bishop Sengulane continues to seek to do this.  

We hear that “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”  I would argue that to devote your life to peace, to spend your every waking hour uniting communities, breaking down barriers and softening hearts that have been hardened through years of warfare, that is the same thing.  That is showing great love for your friends.  And who are our friends, and who are our neighbours?  I’m going to  leave you to answer that yourselves.   

I will close today with some words from Archbishop Desmond Tutu: “You can only be human in a human society. If you live with hate and revenge, you dehumanise not only yourself but your community. You must forgive to make your community whole.”

Blessed are the peacemakers.  So pray for them, support them, wherever they are.  Help make them stronger.  Then you too will be doing your bit, beating swords into ploughshares, one gun and one heart at a time.

R.I.P

Let us take a moment to remember the internet legend that is George Thornton.  George was the man that had the inspired idea to remove a dead whale from a beach with the use of twenty cases of dynamite.  Story here.

And if you have never seen the news report, where have you been.


George, may you rest in peace.  And may the whale rest in pieces. 

Life/Lives Balance

Yesterday's post was a right ray of fracking sunshine, wasn't it?  So first of all, thanks to JohnO and Nik for their wise advice which appears in the comments to that post.

Thanks are also due to the family from yesterdays service who emailed my supervisor with her thanks for the service and said:

"I would also please like you to thank [spot] ( oh I hope I have gotten his name right ) for his contribution to the service...I have no doubt he will make a wonderful Minister too." 

It was a nice lift to find this in my mailbox when I got up this morning.

I think my problem yesterday was that I wrote this post when I was in a pretty dark place.   What you read was the outpouring caused by a mix of ministry work and real life.  Rather than thinking about funerals, I should have went and worked on the bike, or played spot the appendage on snapshot Serengeti, or done something secular, and possibly even sacrilegious.  In fact I did try.  Yesterday afternoon I spent time in a brewery where, according to Session records, the former minister of one of the churches I have spoken in actually banned the brewers from stirring their beer on the sabbath. 

So I need to be caring, then be able to find my own space and care for myself.

Funeral

I'm not really wanting to blog right now.  If the truth be known, I'm not really enjoying myself right now, for any number of reasons.  Placement is fine.  My supervisor is friendly, supportive, willing to push my boundaries, and has a pretty good knowledge of what is going on in his congregation, presbytery, denomination and the wider world.  The congregation is a reasonably normal CofS crowd, with the expected mix of characters that you will find in any gathering of a few hundred adults. 

But there's still a few things bothering me.  Ministry now seems a long way off, and there seems to be a frightening amount of work to do before I get there.  Reading the OLM training manual hasn't made it any easier as there is a lot in there.  Then there is the paperwork, covenants to be agreed and goals to be set. Goals are a problem.  In general, if you set a goal and don't achieve it, then that is a failure, but if you have a range of experience, but these don't relate to your goals, then can you still have success. what about just trying to have experience,knowing that everything ultimately is useful?

This week I was asked to take part in a funeral.  right from the outset I was to have a speaking part on the day, and i was initially offered the tribute.  I have never attempted to write a funeral tribute before, and only ever been present on one occasion when one was being created.  It was eventually agreed that I would deliver a couple of readings and prayers during the service, and I would write the tribute. 

The funeral was a parish funeral for someone who had a family that lived all over the country.  It wasn't going to be a very big gathering at the crematorium.  When Stephen and I visited the lady, I was grateful that her son had written some notes to become a tribute.  All I had to do was convert the comprehensive notes into a format suitable for spoken delivery. The prayers actually included part of the order for baptism, about being born again into newness of life. 

So for the past week I have been shitting myself.  There are so many ways I could have got it wrong, and only a couple of ways to get things right.  When I do a sermon, I can usually rely n there being a caring congregation that will laugh at the mistakes, and support me. I was a complete stranger to everyone in the room.  Despite having Stephen doing most of the service, because he is the one that actually looks like a minister, I just couldn't get over the nerves.  I know I gave a clear delivery, and the transition between the two of us went fine, I just couldn't get comfortable, and even after coming home, the tension just would not go away.

I really don't want to do any more funerals.  I'm supposed to be bringing God's comfort to the family and friends of the deceased, yet it doesn't feel like I've done that.  I suppose, like anything else, it might get better with practice, it's just that I'd rather not get the practice.