a blog by howard jameson @ gatheringgrace.org

Praying for patience!

With several vacancies arising in local significant Churches there is a sense that there is a once in a generation opportunity to restructure the whole Deanery. Inevitably this means change, which is never a popular topic in Church circles. A meeting tonight for representatives of Churches from across the area will now have to discuss a little more detail in a document which has been batting around for a while, but previously has been easy to ignore when given some distant future time scale - sadly the moment is now upon us.

So I am praying for patience because it is in these situations that issues and needs are discussed with Clergy present, but at which Clergy are frequently overlooked in all this - as if somehow changing boundaries or responsibilities doesn't effect us in any way.

There is a bit of a buzz caused by a Times article concerning a Parish in Canterbury Diocese who are being asked to pay £40K+ for a part-time House for Duty Priest. The question is asked

How can a part-timer possibly do newsletters, chair two boards of school governors, do house visits and everything else required for four busy parishes?

which invites the reciprocal statement

if that's what your Priest is thought of as being asked to do then no wonder we are all in the pickle we seem to be in.

My prayer for patience is about 12 hours too late as I was button-holed by a retired senior Clergyman last night who bewailed the state of things. I wanted to tell him not to blame my generation for this, but possibly to look closer to home...

Fresh Expressions and Pioneering Ministry...and Traditional Church too

It does feel as if Society and Ministry have changed quite dramatically in the very brief time since my time at college. As if everybody would still be talking about The Matrix and Losing My Religion...

I thought Mission-Shaped Church was a breath of fresh air, even if it was an incomplete work in lots of ways, and is only just catching up with expressing itself in language that others within the Church of England can relate.

A slightly frustrating debate at Synod yesterday, because there seems to be something about Fresh Expressions that causes some people to be quite happy to expose their ignorance. We got a bit stuck on whether if Exhibit A is a Fresh Expression of Church, does that make Exhibit B a Stale Expression of Church, and then (without even considering whether something that a group of people do on a Sunday morning is even a Vague Expression of Church - come on if Church is the people then there has to be something defining about who they are or what they do!) non-Fresh Expressions of Church became Mature Expressions of Church.

We then got side-tracked onto the issue of money (Fresh Expressions always cost money, whereas you could have been mistaken for thinking that Traditional Church came for free) and enculturation (an Expression of Church in, say, a Cafe is de facto sold out to contemporary culture, whereas an Expression of Church that is, for all intents and purposes, identical to attending a classical concert isn't) - "we are incarnate, they are enculturated".

These bugbears were more than made up for by the preceding three presentations - 

the Children and Family worker in Devizes

the Missional Community growing in Poole Town Centre

the Project in Weymouth that is always portrayed as being about Street Pastors, but (as Tony showed) is a lot more

Lots in these that struck real chords with me about what I need to spend more time doing. Mission, community and being outside Church - but also lots about what Church should be like. I particularly liked the phrase about Church needing to find itself as the place where people can come and be themselves.

Several comments focussed on the difficulty in additional workload required by Fresh Expressions of Church, but I think there has to be a response to this that Traditional Church will happily consume 110% of all available resources given it, so we need to be honest about priorities. There will never be space to add something like this on.

I think it was Bishop Graham Cray who then said that he envisaged the majority of Fresh Expressions of Church to be Lay led, but I think unless (in Anglican contexts) Clergy get involved in at least the start - permission, boundaries, priorities, theological reflection and so forth, then (in Anglican contexts at least) it ain't going to happen.

Surprised by thanks

I was caught out this morning - big time.

We had a secret plan to thank two couples who have been hugely involved in the Redecoration - rightly so. On cue I handed out flowers and a bottle of bubbly and people applauded (which in itself was wonderful to see) - but then I turned round and they'd got some flowers for me too.

I had already confessed that if it had been down to me then the Redecoration project would be represented by an 18" pile of incomplete paperwork on my desk and not a lick of paint in sight - it simply wouldn't have happened. I had intended to say that I saw my part as simply being like the boys tennis coach on holiday, lobbing up a few balls to see which ones get hit - so I had lobbed up some ideas and it was Redecoration which got hit.

So thank you those who worked hard, and also to those who appreciated what I did as leadership.

Well that's that then...

We are in the process of reopening one of our Church buildings after 10 weeks of redecoration, rewiring and general repair work. I've been posting stuff on the Benefice blog here.

It looks really lovely and clean and fresh and, even, loved. Its only when you do something like this that you realise how depressing it looked before. Did I say it looks lovely?

Well that's that then...

...er, no. This work needed doing (fabric stuff) and it came to symbolise a greater work of repairing the Church that was needed (here's what I said over 15 months ago), and that is something that is on-going and on-going etc.

Last night we prayed and read the Bible in Church - stories from Chronicles and repairing the Temple, and words of Jesus about seeking first the Kingdom of God, and it was strangely and quietly moving to lead. In one sense very understated (no wild exuberance) but simultaneously a big step (perhaps it was our Neil Armstrong moment). Tonight we will quietly and gently share bread and wine together.

I like the idea that we have only started, but I also really like the idea that we have made a step and that we can, just for a moment, pause...and then see where God is going next.

GTD - Getting Things Done (Gruesome, Tiresome, Depressing?)

I have found some of the GTD Ninja stuff really helpful in keeping disciplined about staying on top of the lists of things I have to do, and adding the stream of new items that crop up.

Before the summer break I completed quite a bit of stuff and rescheduled everything else into September, so I was guilt-free for August, but arrived back in September with, what felt like, a mountain to climb. (This is not the fault of David Allen's excellent book and techniques, but of the amount of cluttery actions I need to take). It was not good.

There have been moments since the start of September when I have wanted to ditch the whole list and declare myself GTD-bankrupt ("can't do it, won't do it"), and so I have held deliberately lightly to my discipline (there's no point being disciplined if it is just grinding me down - that's legalism at its worst).

I worked until quite late last night and think I have pretty much caught up - FINALLY.

No doubt something will sneak up and bite me in the bum - but that is to be expected with this sort of work as a Professional Ecclesiastical Plate Spinner, but I prepare for half term break knowing I've done as much as I could reasonably have done (even planned Sunday 25th and January rota - whoop whoop).

The Cloud: a sigh of relief

When we did the seminar at the Clergy Conference one of the developments in the world of computing that seemed to create most interest was "the cloud" (that is the storage of data on somebody else's hard drives, so things like having your email and documents at Google, or in my case also having other files at Apple).

The last couple of days my iMac hasn't wanted to boot up in the morning, although eventually it would. Monday, however, no such luck. Initially I breathed a sigh of relief as I am about to have a good chunk of time off, but then it dawned on me that so much information is on my computer that if it at the repairers for a week I may well be up the swanny.

Thanks to "the cloud", however, my calendars and contact information is all stored at Apple and therefore is replicated on my iPhone, so that's two significant areas covered, and I can get by using my phone for email and my to do lists.

One Apple feature I also rely on (but didn't realise how much until this week) is Time Machine which backs up my files whenever they change. This is on a separate hard drive, so is independent of my main computer. So I have been able to set up an old Mac Mini to do any bits and pieces I need to do - I can pull files as and when I need them off the hard drive and then save them to "the cloud" so that when the iMac is back I can access them as easily from there.

Operating as an independent and isolated worker as far as IT is concerned can be quite nerve racking, but using "the cloud" seems to give some degree of reassurance. It is not without its problems (various reports at the moment of hacking into Twitter because people use the same passwords for all their stuff, for example) but every little helps.

Baptisms: fits and starts

I assume I am not alone in wrestling with the best way of fitting Baptisms into the normal pattern of services. I find they tend to come in a flurry (as at the moment) and then periods with none on the horizon.

Where I was before we did late morning Baptisms after the main Sunday service on one set day each month, and maybe had up to four families in Church. This suited to majority of the congregation, but felt like a production line after-thought.

Here we try our best to shoe-horn everybody in on a main Sunday morning, but Church has priorities of its own (Harvests, Remembrance day and so forth when we are already trying to do something else really important) or has a pattern that is less "friendly" than we might have hoped (you know an un-Churched family is going to ask for a Sunday when we do Book of Common Prayer).

I don't have enough regular Baptisms to block them together for joint preparation, and yet I have too many to easily fit them in on Sundays that only suit "us". I don't mind doing the occasional Baptism out of hours when the family does not have a direct connection with us geographically, but I don't want local families to be messed about when they are precisely the people we are investing as much time as we possibly can in.

Bored of complicated things. Want simple answers.

A grateful heart?

I can't remember whether I have linked directly to this before, but I have a posterous site running; the idea of which is for me to upload snaps I take - mostly from my phone as I go along.

The theme of the photos is simply an attempt to express gratitude for whatever it is I am snapping at that moment.

Thank you.

A frustrating day with the money men...

I need to be able to bank cheques payable to me which are fees for various things I do (weddings and so forth), and then at the end of each quarter I do a resolution and divide this income between the various Churches I work in and the Diocese where the money goes into the pot towards all the Clergy stipends. Now each quarter the amount of money varies, but last quarter I had to write cheques in the region of £1500, which can muck up the cashflow in your personal account if you aren't concentrating.

How hard can it be (as I thought and as they say on Top Gear) to open a separate Bank Account which I can control by Internet Banking to do this?

Extremely complicated, as it turns out.

No, I am not going to pay my monthly income into it.

No, I don't want an overdraft facility.

No, I don't want a credit card either.

I just want a paying in book for a Bank with a local branch, and Internet access so that I can send the money out every three months.

Clergy Residential seminar

Thanks to those who turned up for the seminar - it was good to air the material (hope it was a helpful as many of you said) and thanks for chats afterwards. Sorry I was unable to do one-on-ones and try to help setting up things like Google Calendars and syncing with Outlook, and other such questions.

As I've finished with it for the time being this is the pdf version of the booklet I handed out, so also the one or two who said they couldn't make it can download it...

Seminar booklet

UPDATE: The above version is designed to print out as a booklet from a pdf reader.

This is a version which is a series of A5 pages which will be easier to read in a pdf reader, but won't print out the same.

A5 Seminar pages