Rob who assists Rick the verger sends me an email saying he wants to leave all his church roles as he is fed up with people (including Rick) questioning what he does: 'it's always the wrong candles etc'. Rick denies all knowledge. We have an ongoing knotty problem with a church property and the legal arrangements surrounding it. Grant the churchwarden is questioning the (minimal) overtime paid to Chloe the bookkeeper. A neighbour is complaining about the sound of the organ coming from the church. I contemplate all these matters and would quite like to chuck the whole thing in and go and do something that has no responsibility attached to it.
Probably the key to managing is a certain sense of detachment. I am the pastor to my church community but I can't manage relationships within it such that everything will always be all right. Ultimately my fundamental role is pointing towards God and restating that all our structures and relationships need to be ordered in reference to him, and the key to that is keeping my own sights fixed on him as well. I will be soaking up conflict and disagreement to a certain extent as to do this is to follow the Lord, but on its own this is not guaranteed to make everything good and happy. That's really what I would like to happen, but I can't make it happen. Can I discern the way forward between defending the weak and recognising that I can't stop every bit of the bad stuff people carry around with them emerging? And that, of course, includes me as well.
I think this sort of thing is always hard in voluntary organisations. In commercial ones people have to knuckle down and put up with it, or they get fired. So they improve if they know deep down that their behaviour is a problem, and they tolerate a bit more if they know that they need to. Or at least the junior one does! And if someone can't stand it and leaves, you save a salary and can hire someone else. And if the company is terrible at solving these things, it often goes bust.
ReplyDeleteYou are quite right. There is some overlap - you do want a certain degree of pastoral skill even in commercial operations or your employees will end up very unhappy - but in general I am very aware I can't just order people to do or not do anything. Sometimes people outside the church seem not to understand this very well!
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