This thought was sparked by a post elsewhere in blogdom and it's not a current issue for me at the moment, so I thought I'd post it now.
If you want to do a very small thing to be kind to your minister, don't give him or her letters to deliver to other people that you could easily put in the post or deliver yourself.
Why?
1) The minister probably has a list of 50 small things like that to do and the longer the list gets, the more stress it creates. Personally speaking, I'm not kidding when I say I'm afraid I'll forget; don't laugh it off because you think 'I'm young'. It's not my age, it's the number of things on the to do list.
2) In many cases, the minister will either have to get in the car specifically to deliver your letter or will have to put it in the post himself. If she does the former, the cost of petrol might very well exceed the cost of the stamp not to mention the cost of CO2 to the environment.
3) Because who thought kindness to your minister could be bought for the price of a 2nd class stamp? Post that letter and give yourself a pat on the back and say 'Well done.'
Showing posts with label ministry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ministry. Show all posts
19 February 2009
28 February 2008
The Minister as Evangelist?
The idea of 'the minister as evangelist' seems to have been floating around cyberspace for awhile. Specifically, the idea that a church (a congregation, a fellowship) is 'successful' when it is winning new converts and 'unsuccessful' when it is not and that the minister's main task - what we employ her/him for - is evangelism.
I have some thoughts on this but I want first to stress that I'm not responding to a real life situation; I'm not being told that I'm a good or bad minister on the basis of my conversion statistics, so no need to email me and give me pastoral care.
First of all, making converts isn't the job of the minister, it's the job of the congregation. Theologies about 'the priesthood of all believers' aside, research shows that people join churches primarily because the congregation strikes them as a place where they can make friends.
When I first started going back to church in my early 30s, this was the big hurdle I had to overcome. How did I overcome it? By the grace of God, I told myself 'Well Pam, you'll probably have to go to church for about two years before people treat you in a friendly way and stop shutting you out.' And that was pretty much my experience. For the first two years, people were wary of getting too close or being too friendly.
I wonder how many people new to church - or coming back to church - would stick it out for two years feeling that people in the congregation didn't particularly care if they were there or not? Not many people, I reckon. Maybe this was a particularly bad experience and maybe I only stuck it out because I expected to do so. But I think it's something to learn.
Also, research shows that one of the biggest reasons people leave congregations is feeling shut out by cliques. That's basically the opposite of staying because they make friends.
Additionally, I do believe that there is a huge cultural barrier to church with many young people not even wanting to go into a church building these days. Try herding the baptismal party into church; I've learnt to start 10 minutes before the service because people unused to church really don't want to enter the building. I don't think most church people appreciate this phobia.
The purveyors of what I call 'The Spiritual Prosperity Gospel' repeat the mantra 'If you preach the Real Gospel (tm), people will flock to your church. ' It doesn't work like that. If the church is short of ministers and it wants more people to serve as ministers, making a realistic job description is a good way forward. Don't expect every minister to be Billy Graham and Mother Teresa rolled into one. Don't expect them to single-handedly defy cultural trends. And don't expect them to singlehandedly 'do' discipleship for the entire congregation.
I have some thoughts on this but I want first to stress that I'm not responding to a real life situation; I'm not being told that I'm a good or bad minister on the basis of my conversion statistics, so no need to email me and give me pastoral care.
First of all, making converts isn't the job of the minister, it's the job of the congregation. Theologies about 'the priesthood of all believers' aside, research shows that people join churches primarily because the congregation strikes them as a place where they can make friends.
When I first started going back to church in my early 30s, this was the big hurdle I had to overcome. How did I overcome it? By the grace of God, I told myself 'Well Pam, you'll probably have to go to church for about two years before people treat you in a friendly way and stop shutting you out.' And that was pretty much my experience. For the first two years, people were wary of getting too close or being too friendly.
I wonder how many people new to church - or coming back to church - would stick it out for two years feeling that people in the congregation didn't particularly care if they were there or not? Not many people, I reckon. Maybe this was a particularly bad experience and maybe I only stuck it out because I expected to do so. But I think it's something to learn.
Also, research shows that one of the biggest reasons people leave congregations is feeling shut out by cliques. That's basically the opposite of staying because they make friends.
Additionally, I do believe that there is a huge cultural barrier to church with many young people not even wanting to go into a church building these days. Try herding the baptismal party into church; I've learnt to start 10 minutes before the service because people unused to church really don't want to enter the building. I don't think most church people appreciate this phobia.
The purveyors of what I call 'The Spiritual Prosperity Gospel' repeat the mantra 'If you preach the Real Gospel (tm), people will flock to your church. ' It doesn't work like that. If the church is short of ministers and it wants more people to serve as ministers, making a realistic job description is a good way forward. Don't expect every minister to be Billy Graham and Mother Teresa rolled into one. Don't expect them to single-handedly defy cultural trends. And don't expect them to singlehandedly 'do' discipleship for the entire congregation.
11 January 2008
Christian Ministers and Real Life Experience
As someone who is still a new minister, I'm musing today on the concept of the vocation of Christian ministry and 'real life experience'. Somewhere else, there was some comment on whether or not ministers have 'real life experience' and whether or not this was a good or necessary thing.
Up until becoming a minister, my life experience was probably what I'd call 'age appropriate'. I was doing the same things as many people in their late 40s were doing. We married late and didn't have children, so I wasn't seeing them off to university, but we were both working at jobs where we had some years of experience and we were trying to pay off our mortgage, etc., etc.
Now that I'm a minister, I've had a different set of experiences. I've sat with a dead body. I've visited someone a day before their death. I regularly visit nursing homes where it's difficult to communicate with people because of the illnesses they have (either physical or mental incapacity). People show me their surgery scars, their leg-ulcers and tell me about their incontinence. Many people share the hurts of their lives, their worries, their disappointments, their anger and their rage. Somehow, these 'negative' feelings tend to outweigh the 'positive' ones in quantity, but I'd like to think that it's because people feel safe telling me this sort of thing; still, it's not always easy to listen to large quantities of peoples' problems.
My short experience as a minister has made me even more aware of the fagility of human life and the love and grace of God.
I'm genuinely at a loss to believe that what I've experienced so far as a minister is not 'Real Life'. In fact, I suspect it's more 'Real Life' than my previous experience.
Up until becoming a minister, my life experience was probably what I'd call 'age appropriate'. I was doing the same things as many people in their late 40s were doing. We married late and didn't have children, so I wasn't seeing them off to university, but we were both working at jobs where we had some years of experience and we were trying to pay off our mortgage, etc., etc.
Now that I'm a minister, I've had a different set of experiences. I've sat with a dead body. I've visited someone a day before their death. I regularly visit nursing homes where it's difficult to communicate with people because of the illnesses they have (either physical or mental incapacity). People show me their surgery scars, their leg-ulcers and tell me about their incontinence. Many people share the hurts of their lives, their worries, their disappointments, their anger and their rage. Somehow, these 'negative' feelings tend to outweigh the 'positive' ones in quantity, but I'd like to think that it's because people feel safe telling me this sort of thing; still, it's not always easy to listen to large quantities of peoples' problems.
My short experience as a minister has made me even more aware of the fagility of human life and the love and grace of God.
I'm genuinely at a loss to believe that what I've experienced so far as a minister is not 'Real Life'. In fact, I suspect it's more 'Real Life' than my previous experience.
17 September 2007
How to be a (Woman) Minister?
This post has been inspired by a number of different blog posts and articles I've come across recently about 'women ministers' (scare-quotes because 'men ministers' isn't an issue for anyone). Some of these have been positive, others have been negative, others have been seeking opinions. These are my musings and come with the caveat that I'm still very much aware that I'm learning to be a minister.
One of the posts, and one of the articles (from the same 'stable') were asking the question about how women in ministry would change patterns of leadership. This is a complicated question and one I'm not sure I can answer with much certainty. I did comment on the blog post that, from my experience in business, patterns of working in the secular world have already moved to emphasise 'team-work' rather than top-down hierarchy. I don't know if team-work is more 'feminine' or 'female' than hierarchy. Certainly, my male colleagues when I was in business worked as happily in teams as did the women; I really didn't observe what I thought to be much differences between the genders in 'ability to work in a team'.
What does seem to be the case, though, is that many people who voice negative views about women in ministry - at least in blogs and internet discussion groups - often seem to express a vision of ministry that seems to assume that the role of the minister is to be the congregation's 'Commanding Officer' or 'CEO' and that his main roles are: 1) to shape congregants with his teaching and preaching into good soldiers for Christ and 2) to branch aggressively into new 'markets' and activities with his Spirit-inspired Lone Ranger Vision Thing.
My impression is that many of the men who are voicing these opinions are relatively young, often in their twenties or early thirties. How experienced are they with leading groups of people? 'Even' in business - where employees are paid to do what 'bosses' tell them - it can be difficult to lead people, especially if one does not attend properly to the 'softer' issues. Within a voluntary organisation the 'soft' issues are everything because people don't have to be there if they don't want to; even more than in a job, people can and do vote with their feet.
The above is one issue. The other issue is that preaching and 'CEO strategizing' are very small parts of the 'job specification' of a Christian minister. Visiting people, listening to people, just 'being there' for people is a very big part of the job. I think that historically, women have valued listening to people and just being there for others more than men have done; there might be something 'genetic' in this, but I'm convinced that men can do these 'listening jobs' just as well as women do if they value them.
Action is also important and men have probably been historically better at this than women. But, I think the 'action' of a Christian disciple should be oriented toward helping other people. The 'helping' might be at an individual level and it might be at a strategic level (e.g. campaigning for trade justice), but I don't think it should ever be directed at building up a church simply for the sake of being 'a successful minister.' Too often, the vision of 'successful ministry' that we seem to work with is the vision of 'growing congregations'.
I suspect that the Gospel is too subversive to ever be popular with the masses; it really does ask us to 'become like little children'. But it doesn't just ask us to 'become like little children' in order to be saved; it asks us to recognise our total dependancy on God every moment of our lives. Including the belief that honouring God's commandments will bear fruit even if they don't meet our own criteria for 'success'.
One of the posts, and one of the articles (from the same 'stable') were asking the question about how women in ministry would change patterns of leadership. This is a complicated question and one I'm not sure I can answer with much certainty. I did comment on the blog post that, from my experience in business, patterns of working in the secular world have already moved to emphasise 'team-work' rather than top-down hierarchy. I don't know if team-work is more 'feminine' or 'female' than hierarchy. Certainly, my male colleagues when I was in business worked as happily in teams as did the women; I really didn't observe what I thought to be much differences between the genders in 'ability to work in a team'.
What does seem to be the case, though, is that many people who voice negative views about women in ministry - at least in blogs and internet discussion groups - often seem to express a vision of ministry that seems to assume that the role of the minister is to be the congregation's 'Commanding Officer' or 'CEO' and that his main roles are: 1) to shape congregants with his teaching and preaching into good soldiers for Christ and 2) to branch aggressively into new 'markets' and activities with his Spirit-inspired Lone Ranger Vision Thing.
My impression is that many of the men who are voicing these opinions are relatively young, often in their twenties or early thirties. How experienced are they with leading groups of people? 'Even' in business - where employees are paid to do what 'bosses' tell them - it can be difficult to lead people, especially if one does not attend properly to the 'softer' issues. Within a voluntary organisation the 'soft' issues are everything because people don't have to be there if they don't want to; even more than in a job, people can and do vote with their feet.
The above is one issue. The other issue is that preaching and 'CEO strategizing' are very small parts of the 'job specification' of a Christian minister. Visiting people, listening to people, just 'being there' for people is a very big part of the job. I think that historically, women have valued listening to people and just being there for others more than men have done; there might be something 'genetic' in this, but I'm convinced that men can do these 'listening jobs' just as well as women do if they value them.
Action is also important and men have probably been historically better at this than women. But, I think the 'action' of a Christian disciple should be oriented toward helping other people. The 'helping' might be at an individual level and it might be at a strategic level (e.g. campaigning for trade justice), but I don't think it should ever be directed at building up a church simply for the sake of being 'a successful minister.' Too often, the vision of 'successful ministry' that we seem to work with is the vision of 'growing congregations'.
I suspect that the Gospel is too subversive to ever be popular with the masses; it really does ask us to 'become like little children'. But it doesn't just ask us to 'become like little children' in order to be saved; it asks us to recognise our total dependancy on God every moment of our lives. Including the belief that honouring God's commandments will bear fruit even if they don't meet our own criteria for 'success'.
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