Church and The Value of Time

I have been thinking about, and talking about the whole 'giving' thing. It is something that I have to take seriously as a Vicar, as a broke church is a fairly closed one. 

When we talk about 'giving' in church life, we are more often than not talking about dosh / wonga / cash. Entire campaigns are planned and orchestrated so that we may pursue the Mighty Dollar, at times (in my opinion) with a sense that God is a coin-operated fairground ride. In other words, you pop your coin in the slot and God will whir into action like a celestial automaton. 

This said, bankruptcy is a sure blanket to mission - just so you know that I can be balanced!

The goal, often, is to secure financial resource. In doing this, I believe very strongly that we massively de-value a resource that we already have - the time and talents of our people. 

If we think about church life, in many cases we have the wheezy cleric somewhere there, surrounded by a panoply of willing volunteers. Stewardship drives often centre around paying the bills, central to which (in the Church of England) is Parish Share / Common Fund. It is in many ways our mortgage payment. It is the means that we pay people like me and house people like me, so I have to defend it! But I cannot, do not and should not run a church alone.

Taking but one example in a church where I used to be, there was a lady who helped do the flowers. She was a qualified woman and could (and did) demand hourly rates in three figures. She worked hard and then then spent four or five hours a months doing floral displays for the glory of the worship. Her efforts may have been recognised once in a while with a passing thanks, before she returned to the world of work to be paid hundreds of pounds an hour for her time. In actual terms, the 'value' she brings to the parish could be (and should be) valued in thousands of pounds per months. If she stopped doing the flowers but gave an extra twenty a month, we would regard it as a win. 

I use this example to illustrate a point, that in church life we de-value or undervalue the time given to us. If I priced up the time given freely in my present community, and were caused to buy it in, it would generate a bill of hundreds of thousands of pounds per year. 

When someone commits to giving us a hundred pounds a months, we celebrate and we play fanfares. When someone offers to mow the church lawn twice a month, it might generate a grateful grunt. Some church communities are hard-pressed for cash. I would argue that the value of the gift of time that they count on daily makes them rich beyond measure, but that when we don't see or smell the cash, we forget its value. We could usefully learn from the commercial world that appreciates skills and values them. We could usefully learn that lesson. 

Do Be Do Be Do Be Do

I come from a fairly ordinary background, one where I was raised and nurtured within a Christian context. I go under the label of 'Cradle Christian'. This means that I have, frankly, been robbed of that moment where I gave my life to Jesus. It was though, kinda, given before I was born (cf Ps 139). Anyhoo ...

When people stand up and start to talk energetically about 'mission', I notice several things.

1. That person seems always to be a man in his fifties with considerable alopecia, round rimmed spectacles, a broad smiley face with very straight white teeth and a strange taste in clerical shirts. 

2. I start to follow the Reggie Perrin line of imagining a scene unfold before me - but this scene is one where imps  chase butterflies with nets, like dementers on a spring morning. The sound of birdsong is overplayed by a less attractive soundtrack that seems to me to be a litany of "Gotcha Gotcha".

3. Lots of verbs, matched by equal numbers of gesticular actions. 

4. Me glazing over, having passed through a state of mild temper. 

I have a heart for mission. I love Christ, and I love the church. I love the community of Christ, and I love the community of the church. I want people to choose Christ as the way the truth and the life. That is where my heart is. But I have always become annoyed in lectures about mission, and I am trying to understand why. 

The main issue for me, I think, is contained in point 3 above. Mission in the classical evangelical sense seems to be an almost all consuming 'Do' thing. It requires plans, actions, models, pasta, chasing, testimony giving, and a whole array of other pieces of 'doing' (except when it involves sacraments, but that is for another post). Mission seems to be a very busy thing to do, very tiring - if these paradigms of mission are regarded as correct. 

Priests are called to 'Be'. As someone said to me today, priests are mission in the person (or words that effect), or put another way - by just 'being', they represent a viable model of mission in themselves. I do not disregard the other mission models, of course. I of all people have much to learn from them, but when they come across to me, a professional Christian, as ecclesial stalking - then I wonder if tweaks are needed. Think of a candle. A candle, by its very nature, is a creature of 'being'. It can 'do' very little except 'be' itself. Yet it casts it light on all who see it, its warmth and hope to. A candle is not designed or built to set other candles alight around it. 

Of course, a candle cannot meet Christ's mandate to go in the world, but I wonder if the mission movements today overlook passivity and stillness, inertia and 'being' to their peril. When I read about the many millions of people who have attended this course or that and then notice that church attendance figures are largely static, I wonder where the missing link in the chain is. I don't have an answer, but I just wonder if it is not to be found in 'being' (and letting God have a part to play, not just us .... ?)

The Blogger's Art

This thing that we do, that we call 'Blog' is something of a slippery fish. It seems to defy definition, although some authorities are seizing the salmon and applying some typologies into the art.

This interests me, because I find myself affected by the blogs of others now that I am something of a practitioner in my own right. Clearly, I am more interested in Christian blogs and will one day write a dissertation on these and other such phenomena as Twitter and the like. In the evangelistic sense, there must be an effect in these things. I have yet to formulate a view in any serious way, but part of my formulation yielded the vehicle of the spiritual me - Flight Diaries. I think I am finding that the various facets of a personality cannot always comfortably sit alongside one another meaningfully. 

Anyway, I am going to plonk down the things I have noticed about them, and in terms of things I have heard said by the mad ol' eejits who regularly read Us! 

1. They do have specific characteristics. 

 - Some really are the sordid fruit of the 'Mimi' - that is to say, a narcissism, a vanity. Perhaps they all are - this one certainly shows signs and is in treatment as we speak. Some go so far that their frequency increases when reader numbers do - there is something narcotic about it all too.

 - Subtle plagiarism exists in the art, brothers and sisters. The Blog is very often simply a re-distribution device for the ideas of others - and this isn't wholly wrong. After all, newspapers make a living at it.

2. Blogs I like

 - I love blogs that take something original, in all that that can mean. I love daft blogs, but I also love blogs that attend purely to The Other and wrestle with the inaccessibility of it all. I am sensing that the best and most popular blogs are novels, not newspapers - first edition not re-print. Sermon blogs are such things, ironic blogs, tongue-in-cheekers - they all work from originality.

 - I love blogs that attend to a specialism - one such blog is that of my friend who has a love for and expertise in church art etc. He tells me things I don't know about the sort of buildings I love. 

3. Blogs that I don't like

 - Ones that attend to the 'I' too much.

 - Monochrome blogs (unless written as a specialism) - I like blogs that are like good magazines - different things for different days. If a magazine only wrote about women's giblets and Katie Price I doubt I'd be interested for long (for example)

 - 'A day in my family's life' blogs - though I recognise that such things are probably only for the family concerned.

As an evangelistic tool, I see bloggies becoming more and more valuable. The tripe that I expound here is read far more than my tripe that I expound from the pulpit. It tickles me to observe that more people follow this earwash than use my Parish website, and that does ok in its own right - but what an opportunity for a Christian with a mission-focussed heart. I believe, increasingly, that with anything like this, those who are not blessed with a skill for it should withdraw - as not everyone is called or gifted to be a preacher, for example. I have yet to establish finally my place in that scale, but you already know my thoughts on that. So, the Blog as part of the great Missio Dei - it is an idea that has to have legs, or else they are simply the work of a damaged psychology!

I will revisit this again - as today I have waffled!