Three Things Thursday (late edition)

1) Napster continues to rock. Not the old potentially illegal version, but the new version. I pay ten bucks a month and can listen to almost any music I want as I work. This week I discovered Hank Williams (the first), the new Enya album, some great hymns, more music than I can remember. Right now giving Buckcherry a spin.

2) Yesterday I unloaded and stacked a quarter cord of split hardwood by myself. That's more than it sounds like and my back is a bit sore, but at least I got some exercise as I sit here without rain or snow and wait for the rain and maybe snow that's supposed to come tonight. Where is spring? Melt, snow, melt. My yard is still utterly buried; I can't even see our four foot retaining wall; it's all a slope.

3) As I learn what it really means to be senior warden in a 'shared ministry' parish, the job is getting much harder. I really didn't know what I was doing (and wasn't doing) last year, but while I've just begun my second year 'on the job' I'm seeing how challenging it really is to step into a new denomination, nearly a new faith, and attempt to run a parish more than a century old (with some parishoners who've been here about half the length of the building). My priest is, for me, frustratingly hands off. Sure he works hard, but he really expects the people in the parish to run the parish, to build it, to craft its vision if it has one. He does the priestly things, we do the rest. This is shared ministry. I'm used to the typical overworked evangelical pastor with a cadre of overworked staff who put on amazing programs every week. My church is 100 percent old school, and it's different. As I said, the job is harder, bigger, than I thought, and I feel very, very inadequate. Very insecure. Also overworked considering how much else is going on in my life. I've been able to talk with two wonderful people who have been around the parish for a long time lately and they've been most supportive. Otherwise I'd be gnawing on the chair leg right now, nay, even slinking like the lady in "yellow wall paper." Or almost.

Love to all

Comments

Sandalstraps said…
To your comments about your shared ministry parish, this is a very interesting problem. I've always idealized lay involvement in ministry, particularly when I was (very briefly) on the staff-clergy side of the isle. I've thought that the more involved that laity is in the ministry, the more they take ownership of that ministry, and the better off their spiritual lives are. A pastor-friend of mine often says that he feels like the God pro, the hired hand at the country club/church who is paid to give some easy lessons to people who don't want to be challenged or put to work.

But evidently you can er on the other side, too. It is one thing to never challenge your parrish to do their share of the work. It is another thing to burn them out by making them do all the work. As in all things, balance is the key.

Nice post.
4:46 PM
Tenax said…
Sandalstraps,

thanks for posting; your comments at BW3 have been impressive.

Yes, I know you're right. Often pastors/ministers do more than they should. The God pro is a good term. All too often the God pro works with spiritually passive parishoners. Apparently the last priest here was concerned about his authority at every step; the current priest goes to the other end of the spectrum, though not completely off the end. He's not a vision kind of guy. Or if he is, he's very quiet about it.

But most of all, I think what's really going on is that I'm being forced to grow. And as skeptical as I am of everything, including spiritual warfare, I think I may be in it. If not that, at least I'm realizing how much work ministry of all kinds really is, and how few there are than can or are willing to do it. Overall, this experience is good for me, or will be, I believe.

Doesn't mean I won't complain from time to time as I sort through my own stress.

But yes, balance! The key.

Troy
6:19 PM
Sandalstraps said…
Whether "spiritual warfare" is a literal reality or just a metaphor, it points to a very real experience. You can remain agnostic about the literal existence of good and evil spirits while still acknowledging that your are in some kind of very real fight against an entrenched evil in your church. That evil may be a perfectly natural one, but it still poisons everything.

It is very difficult to fight against the culture of a church. The best pastor I ever worked with never did. He simply and graciously took his beating, and in doing so slowly changed the hearts and minds of that congregation. He did believe in literal spiritual warfare, and said that his first year in that church caused him to no longer doubt the existence of evil spirits. But he wouldn't fight evil with evil. He simply loved his enemies until they had no choice but to love him back.

I say that because when he first arrived at that church they would have though that he had no vision. That's because he realized that he had to get the heart of the church to change before he could cast a vision for it. Perhaps your priest is doing something similar, allowing the laity to become involved in the ministry of the church as a way of spiritually guiding them to the place where they need to be for his vision to take root.

Or, maybe he's just not a vision person.
5:29 PM
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