Cheap Words

It happens, sometimes, that a theme starts to nag. When a theme starts to nag it becomes the one thing that everyone in the world world seems to be talking about, the topic at hand in our daily Bible readings, and the haunting lullaby of our dreams. 

Well, I am having one of those. 

No, it isn't a revelation or epiphany of any great weight or import, so you may relax. I have not, I don't think, been given the answer to life, the universe and everything. That remains the number 42 and the Alpha Course (which now owns the Bible, I see).

Words, kids; words. 

I have thinking about words. This came from a passing comment from a luminary theologian who lives on the manor when I asked him for some material for something I am planning. He said that he didn't but a friend of his is likely to have what I sought "in a draw drawer". Oh, said I, that's great; he can email it over (the geezer lived in the land of Mandela and Table Mountain). No, David, these are words on a page, in a large file - properly and literally "in a draw". 

And so the nagging started - words; words; words. Words, those things that explode light onto our world. 

In my life, things are ordered on a device of the digital age. I type and I bluster for many hours a week (often for your edification, people, so listen up) typing and writing. The fact is, I am probably too fond of the sound of my own keyboard. What I write is either published in date order, or filed in the perplexity of files and sub-folders that are established on this here device and every thing has its place. I delete nothing and I file everything. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of words. 

It struck me that I probably wouldn't write half as much if I was at the mercy of the pen, quill or stylus. Actually, my handwriting had degraded to that of a doctor and is, therefore, illegible. Why? Because I never, ever, ever, write. I type. Or I write in capitals. The thing is, I hate writing as an literal pastime. My forearm aches, I am left-handed so smudge each syllable off of the page as I write it, I make an appalling mess because my spelling is atrocious (you will have noted that already, regular digesters of this offal) - and so in the days when I had to write, I just didn't unless I had to. The age of the Amstrad word processor, the home computer and then latterly the blog has given me lease of writing life that would have remained suppressed otherwise. Now I love writing, but only when it is to the chaotic drumbeat of a keyboard. 

Once, monks toiled over parchments and then theologians sat in studies scribbling on to pads of paper. That all took far longer, each words crafted and prayed over. Every scintilla of every iota of every little bit of word was deliberate for Tippex wasn't invented, let alone the delete-button. This leaves one question, the question of my nag:

Are words cheaper because they can be mass-produced?

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. 

That Which Costs Nothing Has No Value

 Lord Jeremy Clarkson of Chipping Norton was writing about such things as photographs and the like in his book “How Hard Can it Be” (2006), and reflected on the advent of digital photography and how value-less our photographs seem to have become. I must sympathise with his prophetic words, in this regard and in others that I too have commented upon. In a recent post, I spoke of the way we spend so little time on things that demand so little time (see the post here). He muses on the times when we would go on holiday with our one roll of 24 exposure camera film, carefully pay the dividend for them to be developed and posted back, then to be enjoyed and filed in an album. Nowadays, he continues, we shoot thousands of images, keep them all and rarely look at them a second time (and, he continues, bore the rest of the world by putting them on Facebook before abandoning them for an eternity).

He assigns a simple cause: “And without a cost it has no value”. Now, even a cynic like me would have to draw a line. Some things in life are free and become of exceptional value. I was sat with some lovely clergy this morning talking about baptism (or ‘christening’, if you thought there was a difference) and having only read Lord Clarkson last night, pondered on why it is that so many people present little Johnny or Janine for a dunking only for them to vanish like the snow in summer afterwards. In fact, the invisibility cloak of baptism and confirmation was once the meat of a opening joke in one of my boss’s sermon – and he is right in so many cases. Perhaps a christening is one of those ‘must do’ things, like the conferring of an amulet to prolong life and health, I don’t know. The thing is, churches do not (quite rightly) charge for baptisms, and neither do we demand a cost in other things such as behaviour.  Easy come, easy go?

There is probably something of this in every stewardship campaign too. It is funny how the collecting plate has an amplifying effect on our cash. I remember a man once explain how ‘small’ a fiver was in a supermarket when we pop in for a bottle of wine, and how ‘big’ it becomes when being dangled over a collecting plate. I remember preaching on a number of occasions on the biblical phrase ‘where your treasure is your heart is also’, and I wonder how much motivation towards the church in question would ascend if its life and needs became a substantial call on the spare cash (rather than the present time when many use the collecting plate as an opportunity to rid themselves of brass pocket-wrecking shrapnel). There has to be a direct correlation between cost and worth. Indeed, in the former life, I would note that when certain things became too cheap, they would stop selling, believe it or not.

This not a post with an answer, but I ponder this a lot. Church feels at times like a disposable habit, demanding less per hour than a cheap cinema but offering so much more than the latest CGI.