Outside In

The gentleman who came to the church to talk to me about becoming our PCC Treasurer seemed singularly ill at ease. The current office-holder is a young accountant who has produced one child during her tenure and I expect would like to add to the collection, so it's time for her to relinquish the role. She's been brilliant: you don't need an accountant as such (though you do need someone for whom numbers on a page stay still rather than dance around as they seem to do for me) but it's a role people in any voluntary organisation seem even more reluctant to take on than the others available.

I could understand: this gentleman had only come to our attention because he'd got to know a congregation member as a fellow dog-walker and let slip that he would like to give something back to the community in a way that uses his abilities (he's already been treasurer of one charity in the past). He is also not a believer. This is all right from my point of view as the skills required are practical rather than spiritual ones as such: it's preferable to source them within your church community, but not necessary, any more than you'd absolutely insist on using a Christian gas engineer. What surprised me was the fact that he felt he had to keep repeating it, contrasting his own situation with that of a religious relative, and I wondered what he was nervous about. Was there some particular experience which had put him off? Nothing like that was mentioned. Rather I got the impression that he felt he might be criticised for his viewpoint (I am not likely to do that with someone who might help us), and this is something I've met before - a feeling that the Church is there to make judgements about people as though it has no experience of functioning in a secular society. Sad if true. I said that in theory I looked after every one of the 11,500 or so souls in Swanvale Halt but that only a tiny proportion of them would ever find their way through the church doors, so I was very much used to interacting with people outside the church community. Given his nervousness, I imagine it was quite bold that he had come through the doors. 

How many such encounters might I have with all the thousands of souls I never have anything to do with, I wonder?