Conflict of Interest

The Swanvale Halt Mothers’ Union branch is celebrating its 125^th anniversary this year, but is not in a flourishing state, finding it hard to maintain its meetings and fill its committee. The Branch holds a couple of meetings through the month. About 18 months ago they agreed to adopt the midweek mass after their Prayer Group meeting as their ‘corporate communion’, and get together for coffee afterwards, with the hope that that gathering might grow into a bigger one to which a speaker might come every now and again. That hasn’t happened, so the members present have some tea and biscuits in the church hall and then go home within the hour.

Now a local theatre group wants to make a long-term booking on one afternoon a week that would bring the church £3000 per year in hiring fees. One week per month that potential booking would clash with the MU - who could move to the back of the church itself to have tea (as we used to do in Goremead, where there was no church hall), but don’t want to. ‘If we have to move this meeting we’ll be made to move the other one’, the committee says.

Dispassionately viewed there is no contest between income of great value to an organisation which finds it hard to pay its way on the one hand, and on the other half-a-dozen elderly ladies drinking tea in one place rather than another a few yards away. But the venerable MU feels raw and demoralised in Swanvale Halt, and even if it mainly functions now as a support group for its members rather than the crusading network it was intended to be, that’s a function that is at the centre of what the Church is called to be. Were I the chief executive of a company I’d have no compunction (or very little) about simply telling them to do what was in the best interests of the organisation as a whole – but I’m not, am I?