Churchy - Living the Storm

 Living the storm!

I’m not sure if I’m a week late or a day early. I started my blog writing last week but life has been very full on.  So:

Just this (last) week I had my first night with the Sea Cadets and I was invited to consider Sea Sunday with the young folk.  The text for Sea Sunday is the story of Jesus sleeping in the storm whilst the disciples desperately try to stay afloat.  Finally they crack and wake Jesus with perhaps the most honest rebuke that comes from them.  ‘Don’t you care that we are about to drown?’  You know that it must have been bad because no disciple would willingly speak to a rabbi like that.  To  top it off they are experienced fishermen… 

Of course for the young folk we explored how Jesus is always with us and we don’t have to face our storms alone.  The next day I had a meeting with my Mission and Care team where I have the dubious honour of being the Convener.  Part of me wishes I could sleep in the boat whilst the storm rages around me.  However, more than that I want to shake Jesus awake and ask him if he doesn’t care that his Church is drowning? Desperately, along with so many I am bailing the water out, and wondering what next? The winds are buffeting us about and the horizon is lost. The waves are overwhelming and crashing through the boats, relentless it seems.  

What puzzles me though is whether the church is still, even 10+ years later trying to empty the water out of the boat? Have we got so used to the storm that we have forgotten to wake Jesus at the end of the boat? Indeed for some the storm is exciting and allows us some modicum of power.  Are we more focussed on managing the storm, trying to harness the wind and the waves, believing we are using the power of them for our benefit?  We control others through this by making them constantly live in fear of dying - otherwise known as ‘managing decline’.  We share those statistics and invite those left to keep using buckets?

What if we don’t want to ask Jesus to still the storm because we are not ready to deal with the consequences? The men were terrified when Jesus calmed the storm and asked ‘who is this man?’  The power God holds should terrifying us yet that shouldn’t stop us from accessing it.  Nevertheless I have yet to witness a storm without casualties.  In the story, often overlooked, is the fact that other boats followed.  They were in the storm too and who knows what happened to them.  We can surmise it wasn’t anymore pleasant for them.  

We are afraid to face the reality of the storm.  There will be damage and loss, broken boats and even loss and grief.  The church of God is not without God and his people are safe in his hands.  Perhaps we need to accept the fact that faith is meant to get harder - scripture points us towards it constantly.  

I wonder what it means to live after the storm…?  Storms can change landscapes. Our landscape has changed but if all we focus on is surviving the storm we can’t explore.  New parishes will appear, team work and sharing of resources, developing forms of ministry that use our resources to their fullest extent, and dare I say it far more public ways of sharing the good news.  The landscape of communication has changed enormously and the opportunities endless.  Yet what cannot be beaten, proven in a pandemic, is the personal interactions.  

Jesus calmed the environment and then challenged his people’s faith.  Let’s put the storm and ourselves in his hands, even it is terrifying, and let God work with us, through us and for us.  And that might only happen when we stop worrying about saving our boats (church) and start looking around us for God in the storm.  

Put down the buckets and look for God. You might just find a whole new perspective. 

Have a great week! 

Love Sarah 

You can find more at East Kilbride Moncreiff - all the usual channels! 

Ministry: Measuring in Sundays.

 Told you weekly might be a push but I’m back only one day late! 

Certainly the world is getting busier and I have just spent the last 30minutes looking at my diary trying to plan the rest of the year out.  Not in minuscule detail because who can do that? After a pandemic we are all a little reluctant to plan too far ahead.  I wonder if the pandemic has made us even more risk averse.  For sure our family holiday has been planned for UK theme parks rather than airport travel.  Not that we don’t want to go abroad but we decided to risk queues of a different kind instead.  

Living my life in weeks actually makes the year feel very short, especially when I want to squeeze in study leave.  I don’t want to miss too many Sundays because that is the central gathering point of the Church.  It is how ministers think and is how the structure of the Church is held together.  If I close my Church building on a Sunday morning without due notice I must inform the Presbytery Office within 3 weeks.  Or if we are doing joint services we must advertise as much as possible.  Even who leads worship is protected and if it isn’t someone on the list of approved leaders again tell the presbytery (or don’t!).  There are 52 Sundays in the year and I am ‘allowed’ 6 Sundays off with the associated weeks, and then one additional Sunday only which this year will be my marathon for Church funds.  (Notice how I slipped that in!)

So far I have had two weeks off, two weeks off in the summer and one week provisionally planned, which due to Christmas Day being a Sunday will be the second week of advent.  Throw in Covid scare and covid real and I have been off two Sundays sick. 

So is Sunday the central element of the Church?  It is how we measure ministers holidays - not by number of days but by number of Sundays.  What about the discipleship group that meets on Tuesdays?  What about the meet and greet at the Cafe drop in?  Has the prioritisation of Sunday morning worship contributed significantly to the decline of the Church?  Has measuring the health of a congregation by the size its congregation that meets on a Sunday morning rather than its place in the life of the community hidden the reality?  For many churches they spend a fortune on insurance and property upkeep on a building open once a week for worship and maybe at other times for funerals or weddings. Others are incredibly active but small congregations.  One of favourite placements on training was the smallest and arguably least wealthy but boy did they pray and work. 

But Sarah - worship is so important I hear you say.  The gathering of God’s people is fundamental to the life and witness of all.  And absolutely.  I am the last person to disagree with that.  But how many have we excluded from worship, from engaging with the God who neither sleeps nor slumbers?  If we believe that time is a construct, that God is beyond time and eternal, and that on the 7th Day he rested - surely what matters is we have a 7th day…whether it is Monday or Wednesday or Sunday.  Online worship provision has gone some way towards meeting that need but there must be more.  Yet if I said we were permanently moving our main worship slot from 10:30am on a Sunday morning to Friday at 5pm…for example.  How many gave a wee intake of breath? I know for many a Catholic community, they love it! 

Immediately we come up with a list of reasons why we can’t.  And yet someone else went ‘yes please’.  I won’t be stopping Sunday morning at 10:30am any time soon. The Presbytery Office wouldn’t be ready to received almost weekly letters informing them. ;)

But we need to look a more wholesome picture of congregational life.  We can’t simply measure by Sunday attendance nor can we assume in a culture that is 24/7 that providing one diet of worship or even a midweek is enough.  And surely where there are multiple congregations we don’t all need to provide worship in the same time window?  

We are exploring the 5 marks of mission in our congregation and they are being used as markers across Mission Planning but we all know that underpinning our concept of healthy congregations will be statistics and budgets not ethos, effort and energy.  As a minister my primary meeting with the congregation and community cannot just be the one hour on a Sunday morning.  After all faith is a whole life experience not a Sunday only event (I hope). 

Perhaps the question we need to ask is - when you remove Sunday from your ministry week, what does your church life look like for the wonderful ordinary folks of the congregation and the community? And when you look at your parish what does their week look like?   Even gyms have gone 24/7 after all.  

Now to write Sunday service….😇💞

God bless you!  Love Sarah

 

Age is a number not a status. Exploring age in the Church of Scotland

 This week’s reflection is all about age and how it impacts on the life of the Church of Scotland strategy.  Obviously just a ponder but how often do we make age a factor - either a disability or a status symbol? Do we need to be more open about it for age is a marker not a destination.  

The Age Game in the Church of Scotland

Tomorrow is my birthday and I will be officially old in terms of ministry. Perhaps not as old as I feel although definitely older than I think I am! A good few years ago I was on a group called the "Under 45s" and it was well in the future for me and we were trying to find ways to encourage more into the ministries of the Church.  The group was certainly creative and imaginative, and at times pushed to be more radical by members yet curtailed by the General Assembly (the mythical version I talk about in the previous post).  We looked at incubators, designed an apprenticeship scheme and even a volunteering scheme.  Not everything worked as well as it might and the Church certainly attempted to find ways to keep costs down.  Like many projects, ideas went somewhere but even today we have no idea of how successful they were.  We assume failure yet preach a message of seeds planted and I live in hope that those who did benefit from our schemes have been blessed in their callings.  

Nowadays we are desperately looking for the under 40s and extremely concerned about the 45% of ministers potentially retiring over the next 5 years.  I have closer to 20 years but would be it be wrong to have a back up plan? The under 40s is about the sustainability of the Church and the over 60s is about the sustainability of ministry. Figures given at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland made for worrying news, especially at the number who have left in the past year or so. 

Can you see patterns yet? We don't face a new problem. It can be made to look like it and we can massage numbers and change titles, monikers and even people. We can try to silence the past by pushing forward.  We can seek our ‘miracle’. Yet we have done that so many times before.  What I see is that too many of us think we hold all the answers, yes, including me.  And if our solution is different to the current solution instead of working collaboratively we work competitively.  We spoke years ago of developing a consensus system - something we see more and more locally but perhaps not yet at regional or national.  Maybe because we all want to be that ‘miracle’.   

However hard we try though we can't change the reality of now. For sure, we cannot live in the past and I know my first charge put up with a lot.  Lessons learnt and things I would do over with the experience I have now. But I will never regret those years and much I learnt and received I carry with me now.  Therefore, like it or not, the past forms our foundations. A new minister in a charge will always have to learn about what went before. The hurts and the joys, the milestones and the traditions.

None of us operate in a vacuum. Perhaps if we were to truly value our past, even our recent past we might find we are well resourced with creativity, vision and that there are passionate people out there And can we please stop and consider whether we place more value on numerical age than experiential age?  And before you dismiss that statement really stop and think. How many young elders?  How many youth groups include grandparent aged people, which is a really good age to have involved? Don’t forget the partnership between the National Youth Assembly and the Guild.  Is it cynical of me to say the Guild continues but the NYA with us in spirit so to speak…

There are a good number of ministers under 50, even 55 who have clocked up more years than those over that age in ministry. There are those who have experience in multiple fields within our institution from previous careers if in ministry or in our sessions and congregations and there are those who might not be churchy at all but have much to give and want to give.  A church children’s group of mine was saved by parents who never came to worship! 

And for the record the most insightful folks in our midst are often still in school. Out the mouth of babes and all that.  There are lots of young people in our congregations who despite their numerical age have lived full lives. They have experienced the joys and trauma of life. They know judgment and rejection, achievement and hard work.

Over the years we have closed more doors to participation than we have opened new ones. We invest in something for 5 minutes and then call it a failure. We are worse than toddlers for our attention span! Remember children's forums or Child Friendly Church. Many of our National Youth Assembly folks would have come from that foundation. Yet as soon as the budgets squeeze we siphon off the young then moan we don’t have any.  Where is the investment?

We are a Church that demands quick fixes and bails when we don't get them. We fall into the

trap again and again of personal projects, accepting them on the charisma of its proponent rather than its merit.  And yes sometimes that has worked but more often than not when we hit the drudgery, the wading through the mire we lose impetus. The excitement of a fresh start lost in the hard grind. Our finishing line too far ahead, the results not fast enough.

Whatever we put in place to "safeguard" the future of the Church of Scotland, please can we stick at it! I don't want to be writing in another 5 years that we gave up on another plan and are starting again. And please, please, can we not be so focussed on numerical age, but invest across the generations?  For as someone in the middle between the 40s and 60s, I want to contribute to the solution rather than be part of the problem. 

As the song says "I count whether I am 9 or 90!"  At the General Assembly we heard a baby cry and many of us empathised. May their little voice be a timely reminder we are not the future, we are the present and that little voice is also church now. 

So before I am marked obsolete because I am 46, or praying for retirement at 64(!) let’s make sure we all count.  And then we might sound less desperate and more welcoming for all. 

Happy Birthday!

Blessings

Sarah 

The General Assembly - a fine fickle beauty?

 Another day and another question arrives to make my brain ponder… it does help I am on holiday…😉 

Is it the powers that be that are unwilling or unable to change?

 

There is much in this question and doubtful if I could do it justice here. It is a great question often asked and for sure let me admit my own complicity in perpetuating its underlying premise. 

You see on the one hand powers that be have power because we give them power. And yet on the other hand, in Presbyterian style, they believe we hold the power. How often it is said that the General Assembly can help or hinder yet many commissioners feel powerless with most decisions already made? It is a catch 22 of our own making. And one we seem unable to unlock despite good intentions. 

My mother says of me that if there is an easy way or a hard way to do something I will choose the hard way! I get the same result, I just didn’t make it easy! Perhaps a way to understand the problem is the conversation over hybrid meetings. The counter motion was raised about reviewing how successful/useful the hybrid element of holding the GA was and to bring the review to the GA2023. Regardless of the outcome of the review the 2023 GA should be in-person only. The mover of this motion was trying to be helpful and indeed his counter motion opened the floor up to feedback very well. All of us have an opinion on the hybrid setup whether we get it or not. 

Nevertheless it is a perfect example of how we hamstring ourselves. The review had to come to the next GA and it must be in-person only with future years possibly hybrid should the review suggest it. Why? Why do 600+ people need to sign off on the review? Can such a review be done, a short paper made available to the interested tech geeks (eg posted on the GA 2022 follow up webpage when such a thing appears) and a decision made without it needing to return to the GA floor first? 

Therefore, the powers that be is more often than not a mythical creature known as the General Assembly, a fine fickle beauty whose mood is elusive and outcomes often pedantic, occasionally joyous, and perhaps exploited by those with inside knowledge. 

And that meandering tour of power leads me to change and indeed our ability to change or not.  We adapt but rarely do we change. It is far easier to adapt because that requires only incremental change.  Change happens but in small ways; a day less, the use of videos, even the use of zoom and hub were adaptations not change. 

Currently some of the most influential voices in the change happening in the church will not be responsible for its outcomes, even its success or failure. They will have retired (or have already) whilst others try to navigate their vision and its consequences which if we are honest is also a repeated cycle. Again a power imbalance and a hereditary issue long in the making. Each generation wants its opportunity to leave its mark or legacy reflected in many institutions and congregations. And let’s not forget we are not the only membership driven institution to be struggling in this era. 

For change to happen arguably we need to listen to the voices of those who will pioneer, who will hear God’s voice calling them to another place and be willing to up sticks and go. The ones who will have to live with the change, lead the change, and guide institution into a new era should be the ones who carry the most influence now. 

Yet most of them are silenced for they are neither seen nor heard.  As was repeatedly stated our inability to change our working practices or structures excludes them.  Nor will they self select because they don’t see themselves reflected in the key decision making groups. Whether we like to admit it or not we will repeatedly put a grey haired white male in the hot seat of authority, and easily justify the choice. To be fair many of them are lovely and indeed talented faith filled people. But kind of like a kidnap victim gets Stockholm syndrome, those who stray too close to the epicentre of an institution - well let’s just say they become embedded within it. Plus it is hard the push something over from the centre. Much easier from the edges…so do we really want to put the pioneers of change in the centre? Hmm…

Truly for power to be asserted and change to happen we need to embrace the generational characteristics of now and tomorrow. 

What if we had more faith in the ‘other’ and saw the strength in collaborating and sharing decision making? What if we did pick a 40-something over a 60-something? What if instead of national committees/forums holding the floor of the GA, the presbyteries presented the work of the wider church and the General Assembly was a place of power sharing and resource management! 

We, me, hold the power and we choose how to use it. Maybe the real change will happen when we take the power back and  are resourced not controlled by the centre. There must be a reason why Jesus said ‘take nothing except that which you wear’. 

Until then we will adapt but not change, survive but not thrive.