The sermon today got me thinking. The minister was going on about the way that we needed to respect other people and also to serve other people as part of our Christian witness and mission. I agree fully with this, respect and service are part and parcel of good Christian mission. However I want to add a third and that is vulnerability
I am well aware that vulnerability is not the first thing that most people thinking of a mission strategy consider, yet it seems to me essential on two levels.
Firstly the kevlar mailed knight in shinning armour is great for getting you out of difficulties, but you don't actually believe you could become one. That is the rub. The state of postmodernity that the world is in has changed people's questions. It is no longer "Does it work?" but "Will it work for me?" and the super-person or kevlar mailed knight just isn't who they are. They want to see the Christian faith working in a frail person like themselves. The closer you can get to a person, the more they can see where your fault lines match theirs the more they are going to be able to trust your solutions.
Secondly there is the fact that the Kevlar coated knight is actually a pretty poor way to allow the light of of Christ to shine through your life. The power is visible but it is assumed to be the power of the individual whom it is working through not the power of God. The other thing is God, at least the one revealed in the New Testament does not seem to think that the normal trappings of power are good ways to communicate what he is about. Oh he can use them if he wanted too, far too many examples of that in the Old Testament but he seems to not use them in the New Testament. Yes he heals people, but he does this for individuals or small groups, yes he can produce food and drink, but he does this for a crowd for a single meal, not a nation for forty years. Yes he can tell the wind to stop but he does not get it to part the Sea of Galilee. In other words he has gone small scale and low key, an interesting change in approach. He is now using the small, weak and vulnerable to show forth his power. As St Paul says God's power is perfected in weakness.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Reforming church structures to Reform Church finances
It has just occurred that the reason the centre has grown in the URC and the periphery diminished is the way we set our finances. At the moment the finances are a levy which the centre sets on all the local churches. The problem with this is that the centre can see work to do, and then set the levy to pay for it. Once or twice this does not matter.
Under the old Congregational Union, the local churches had far more say over what the levy was and when it was to high simply did not pay it. The centre thus had to decide what best to do with what was given.
So we need to redress the balance of power and put power back into the hands of local churches. One way would be to have a scrutinising body of church treasures to look at the levy. I would suggest that for national each synod would send one church treasurer to a central committee, each appointment lasting five years. In each synod a body of about the same size 12 people should also sit, the rule being for a member that they have to be a church secretary. This would mean a meeting once a year before a synod and it is this body and not the central finance people who should bring the levy.
Such people are a lot better placed than either a full synod or central staff to make these decisions. They can be fully briefed on the central issues but are also well aware of the local church finances as well.
This is not a quick fix, it will not work overnight and it will not bring about immediate cuts. What I expect it to do is over twenty years to consistently reduce the central bureaucracy so that local churches are empowered to carry out their mission or not as they see fit. The only long term way to keep control of expenditure is to put people in control of it who have an interest in keeping it low.
Under the old Congregational Union, the local churches had far more say over what the levy was and when it was to high simply did not pay it. The centre thus had to decide what best to do with what was given.
So we need to redress the balance of power and put power back into the hands of local churches. One way would be to have a scrutinising body of church treasures to look at the levy. I would suggest that for national each synod would send one church treasurer to a central committee, each appointment lasting five years. In each synod a body of about the same size 12 people should also sit, the rule being for a member that they have to be a church secretary. This would mean a meeting once a year before a synod and it is this body and not the central finance people who should bring the levy.
Such people are a lot better placed than either a full synod or central staff to make these decisions. They can be fully briefed on the central issues but are also well aware of the local church finances as well.
This is not a quick fix, it will not work overnight and it will not bring about immediate cuts. What I expect it to do is over twenty years to consistently reduce the central bureaucracy so that local churches are empowered to carry out their mission or not as they see fit. The only long term way to keep control of expenditure is to put people in control of it who have an interest in keeping it low.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Older Generation and the Church
This was a mini rant I was giving to my parents and thought it was perhaps worthy of a blog post.
Lets be clear, there are certain things that I don't want to hear from the older generation. Firstly I don't want to hear them grumbling about the mess the church has got into. Not because the church is not in a mess, but because its a method of seeking to make other people (i.e. the younger people) responsible for getting the church out of the mess. Lets start with facts, the church did not get into this situation overnight, it has taken decades to get into it, and in each preceding decade it would have been easier to rectify than it is now. The people responsible for things in previous decades are now older people. So the grumbling is asking others to get you out of your mess.
Secondly I don't want excuses not to engage with the younger generation. One of the things that has happened is a disconnect between the Church and the vast number of younger people. It started before 1970s, as I can remember sitting in school in the late 1970s and finding myself the only person familiar with the Easter story amongst my class mates in high school (I hope it was Easter, it may have been Christmas). They already did not know the grand narratives of the Christian gospel. That gap is partly your making, help us bridge it.
Please don't think you can pass this onto us. What you tried to do then obviously wasn't enough because it did not halt it. This means there are fewer of my generation in church than of yours, in case you had not noticed it. Expecting us to make the effort to connect with those younger and provide a chaplaincy service for you that allows you to stay within your comfort zone ain't fair. I suspect our priorities have to be to get the gospel out to those who are younger than us. So yes things are going to be more uncomfortable for you. Believe it or not, its not half as uncomfortable as it is for us.
Now I am really not interested in blame, blame does not solve anything but I am interested in getting you on board, realising that you have a role to play (your retirement from church is cancelled just as mine from work is).
What is more it means change, its not the church kids we need to connect with or keep. I am sorry but we have consistently failed to find a way to keep them through college, when grants came in in the 1960s we should have started looking for new ways to connect. Chaplaincy is often under funded and does not connect back to the local congregation.
It is the secular 20 to 30 years olds who are just setting up a home in the area. How do we reach them? I don't know, but we have to try experimenting to find a way.
That of course means our resources are directed elsewhere, not to keeping the body of the church functioning as it is, but on trying to develop relationships with people , people who are distinctly different from most of us in their attitudes and ideas. People who are a lot younger and therefore a lot more technologically au fait.
So if you are up for the challenge, welcome to the team, we need all the hands we can get, no matter how weak and full of arthritis they are. If you are not, then I am sorry, but we have more important things to do and at least you can stop grumbling.
Lets be clear, there are certain things that I don't want to hear from the older generation. Firstly I don't want to hear them grumbling about the mess the church has got into. Not because the church is not in a mess, but because its a method of seeking to make other people (i.e. the younger people) responsible for getting the church out of the mess. Lets start with facts, the church did not get into this situation overnight, it has taken decades to get into it, and in each preceding decade it would have been easier to rectify than it is now. The people responsible for things in previous decades are now older people. So the grumbling is asking others to get you out of your mess.
Secondly I don't want excuses not to engage with the younger generation. One of the things that has happened is a disconnect between the Church and the vast number of younger people. It started before 1970s, as I can remember sitting in school in the late 1970s and finding myself the only person familiar with the Easter story amongst my class mates in high school (I hope it was Easter, it may have been Christmas). They already did not know the grand narratives of the Christian gospel. That gap is partly your making, help us bridge it.
Please don't think you can pass this onto us. What you tried to do then obviously wasn't enough because it did not halt it. This means there are fewer of my generation in church than of yours, in case you had not noticed it. Expecting us to make the effort to connect with those younger and provide a chaplaincy service for you that allows you to stay within your comfort zone ain't fair. I suspect our priorities have to be to get the gospel out to those who are younger than us. So yes things are going to be more uncomfortable for you. Believe it or not, its not half as uncomfortable as it is for us.
Now I am really not interested in blame, blame does not solve anything but I am interested in getting you on board, realising that you have a role to play (your retirement from church is cancelled just as mine from work is).
What is more it means change, its not the church kids we need to connect with or keep. I am sorry but we have consistently failed to find a way to keep them through college, when grants came in in the 1960s we should have started looking for new ways to connect. Chaplaincy is often under funded and does not connect back to the local congregation.
It is the secular 20 to 30 years olds who are just setting up a home in the area. How do we reach them? I don't know, but we have to try experimenting to find a way.
That of course means our resources are directed elsewhere, not to keeping the body of the church functioning as it is, but on trying to develop relationships with people , people who are distinctly different from most of us in their attitudes and ideas. People who are a lot younger and therefore a lot more technologically au fait.
So if you are up for the challenge, welcome to the team, we need all the hands we can get, no matter how weak and full of arthritis they are. If you are not, then I am sorry, but we have more important things to do and at least you can stop grumbling.
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