a blog by howard jameson @ gatheringgrace.org

A breathtaking winter morning for a walk

It is a truly beautiful morning. It is almost (but not quite) nice to have the dog with me.

It is also good to be slowly waking up again and have the old ideas hamster trundling around in my head.

Come on Bournemouth!

Christmas is now a couple of sleeps ago so a lovely cold day to catch some soccer.

Come on you Reds!

Nativities: all done for another year...

We've shifted shepherds and kings several times today. This evening was very special, though.

Silent Night sung with dimmed lights and stars circling the roof, courtesy of a mirrorball. Every Church should have one. Beautiful.

Nativities: one down, two to go

Much hilarity at the first of our three...

Vicar approaches girl dressed as Mary and asks "Who were the first to arrive at the stable? Your costume is a bit of a clue". Pause for a moment's thought...

"The donkey?", she replied.

But then during the story itself our poor Youthworker was narrating...

"...and so Mary and Joseph set off for Bethlehem... Joseph, wait for Mary!", he was half was down the aisle by this point...

The Kitchen and the Kingdom of God

The Kitchen, for me at least, is a place where I find the Kingdom of God. Jesus seems to have thought similarly, with parables of yeast and several parties.

I've just spent an hour or two trying a new recipe which I am thinking of using for a big meal in one of the villages in February, so one strand of the Kingdom of God is certainly found in the preparation of an act of service. I'm not sure if a Vegetable Biryani (from scratch of course) will be quite right, but this trial run will at least let us sample the flavour when everybody gets back for lunch in a few minutes.

Another strand is the doing of something simple. My head has been refining things to say at midnight and Christmas morning; looking at what I might have said a couple of years ago and seeing those bits which no longer hit the mark (were people really that worked up about the Gospel of Thomas that I had to refer to it at Midnight Communion?), and there's this whole matter of trying to judge exactly what people are thinking and experiencing in the Great Recession of 2008 - is it just a lot of brave faces?

But there is also the cherry on the knickerbocker glory - the delight of using the beauty and complexity of the abundance of creation to make something that tastes...just right.

Apologies for my cookery joke on Sunday morning - the Incarnation is nothing at all to do with a brand of evaporated milk (groan), but the Word made flesh somehow gives the making of something like a veggie curry a place of honour in the important things of life....

Christmas time is coming...

...the turkey's getting fat.
Please put a penny in the old man's hat
If you haven't got a penny, a ha'penny will do
If you haven't got a ha'penny, your window's coming through!

Ah, the joys of carol singing...

We have already sung quite a few, and some more still to go. Last night was our third and biggest Carol Service - its always a thrill to see the Church full for this, and a sense of enjoyment with lots of "Christmas starts today" comments.

This is the third year we have been trying to make the service more meaningful. As it stands in Promise of His Glory the Nine Lessons and Carols Service is wordy and a bit long-winded, with some really good readings from the Prophets to pad it out which nobody understands the significance of, which is why we added something like the Innkeeper's Lament, which worked pretty well I thought. The two readers did really well, and there were a chuckle or two at bits of it. I think when I first set off down this route I was aiming to connect with a latent Christian spirituality that I believe is still with a lot of people of my generation, and so an emphasis on things like hope amidst the difficulties of the world is really important to me, but I think it is also important to engage with the imaginations of the congregation too, which repetition of the same general texts tends to prevent...we know what's coming.

We have clearly placed making our Carol Service into the Village Carol Service as an opportunity to invite friends and neighbours and so one of the central planks of our mission; trying to be hospitable to peoples' aspirations to make sense of the world within a safe environment. I also really enjoyed seeing the throng milling around in the Hall afterwards for Mulled Wine and a Mince Pie, and not just the normal Church-folk. What I enjoyed was seeing the musicians and others who regularly do a lot NOT doing the serving and tidying, but others doing it instead. Ok, broadly still the usual suspects, but still multiple groups doing the various pieces of work needed in order to make something special.

In my earlier attempt to try to unravel being a Deacon without getting mired in the detail I wonder if I could add that there is something Diaconal about creating opportunities for others to experience the joy of service in a combined sense of being part of mission and the Kingdom? After all, if I don't do that who else will?

Being a Priest and being a manager: the deacon and detail

More from the book...

"Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency" (Tom DeMarco)

I have been reading. DeMarco highlights two laws of Bad Management. The first is that

If something isn't working, do more of it.

By this he is referring to the style of leadership which is not responsive to the actual observed results. Sometimes things don't work because we haven't put enough effort into them, but most of the time it is because the idea is not the right time, or is simply dumb, and the expending of more energy into trying to make the idea work will simply not achieve anything like the desired result. The wise person, therefore, is the one able to identify this and revise the idea accordingly.

His second law is a bit business-speak, but goes like this

Put yourself in as your own utility infielder

by which he means that a bad manager will recognise there are gaps in the structure that he or she is supposed to be managing, and so will complete that task themselves. On the surface this looks like it resolves the problem, but in actual fact what happens is that the manager is no longer managing effectively because the proportion of their time available to do the important things in management (training, thinking, encouraging, getting alongside, understanding problems and so forth) has been diminished - and its not just "time" its also the amount of energy available to do the work as well. It is this area with which I most regularly come a-cropper. We are brought up in the Church to remain committed to our Diaconal calling. What this means, for the uninitiated, is that when we are first ordained we are made into Deacons (echoing Acts 7) and we remain so for, generally, a year before we are ordained Priest. However, we are constantly reminded that we need to consider ourselves Deacons for the duration; servants and those willing to roll their sleeves up and do the dishes or stack the chairs. But these types of activities are inevitably "detail" in the planning of an event, and "detail" is dangerous because it is so easy to then fall into the trap of micro-managing, or to become a regular in that role which is part of the structure that the Priest is supposed to be leading or directing.

I recognise in myself a desire not to overburden the few who already do a huge amount whilst also not wanting to arm-twist anybody who is reluctant for good reason, so doing the small stuff is often the simplest way of making sure it happens, even at the cost of my overall "performance" in the important stuff. Certainly when time pressure is at its greatest then the things that get delayed are those that are the biggest and which there is the highest emotional cost of implementing - and almost by definition these tend to be those large areas of change which will make some in the congregations least comfortable - and yet these are often the changes which are most vital in order to create Churches which are genuinely missional and also have the communal integrity about them that visitors and newcomers respond to.

I first tried to think this through by amending my idea of the Diaconate as being having "a servant heart" which sounds great, but many of the worst self-seeking politicians we have seen over the years use exactly this type of vocabulary to camouflage the ambition behind the post in question, and this I find rather disquieting. A servant heart can only be true if, at least from time to time, servant action is done as a result.

I am still incredibly fond of my training Incumbent, but there are times when, in a very different environment, I have to unlearn some of the values he instilled in me. For example this very evening there is a concert in one of my Churches. My training makes me feel guilty about not being there to welcome and then to be behind the scenes, chatting over a glass of wine at the interval or operating the microphones. However we also have a family invite to some friends of a son and are going there instead. We missed their Bonfire Party because of work and so I need to pay them back a bit.

Happy weekends and sinister inventions

In many ways this weekend is one of my favourites. I find the run-up to Christmas can be a bit all consuming, and everybody wants you to be cheerful and enjoy a mulled wine. But this weekend it all changes. This morning is the rehearsal for tomorrow's Nativity and then we will have some people decorate the tree and others will share coffee and cake - the mood changes into a sense at least of communal preparation. I'm sure if we spent more time in communal preparation that would increase further our sense of communal enjoyment in the doing of the thing for which we prepare.

Tomorrow is our main Carol Service, the one for which we have already invested quite a bit in terms of planning and music and liturgy, so slightly nervous in anticipation. The Innkeeper's Lament has been rehearsed, unseen by me, so I hope it works.

Last night was the second of my major Carol Services and I came across something so sinister and devious that it almost defied comprehension. We wanted to slowly build up the light in the Church, especially after the reading from Genesis of God's promise to Abraham. We might light a few more candles and then turn on the lights on the Christmas tree. But here, along with my taper and matches, I was handed the remote control for the tree lights. Who has such a warped sense of priority that they think something like that needs to be invented?

Making life more manageable (part ii)

I ought to add that as I was working late last night to finish orders of service for the weekend and, allowing for my previous experience of late night proof-reading, that I am going to treat myself to a guilt free approach to any typos spotted by me or anybody else. On that basis I am really looking forward to my last two Carol Services of the season, and my prayer is that people will have invited their friends and neighbours to really raise the rafters!

Making life more manageable...

I often think of my first proper Boss in Engineering, Mike - what a star.

He it was whose father kept talking about the film Alligator Dundee. He also coined the phrase

the nail that sticks up, gets hit

a motto that has stayed with me, and inspired my repeated choices of operating in border territory (I have two other Diocese adjoining my Benefice).

But his biggest gift was the need, from time to time, of getting a big piece of paper and

mapping it all out

This is what I did yesterday with a sheet of A3 and have now ticked off some of the biggest items off it. Fantastic! He used to do this assisted by either a cigar or a stinky Gauloises back in the days of smoky offices. Having said that it has reminded me of a classic Mike moment. We also had Eric in the office. Eric was an old fashioned English Communist, and would go off like a cruise missile at the mention of anything remotely political. The trick was to pick up your papers and make such a remark just as you were setting off for the relative safety of the other building. This I did; Eric put his glasses down and promptly started a table banging response aimed at nobody and everybody. I was half way along the corridor when Mike caught up with me.

"You started him off", he said, "so you come back and finish it".

When we got back to the office Eric had carried on ranting even though there was nobody else in the room to listen to him.