A Right Carry On

 

A few nights ago my training supervisor and I met to discuss, among other things, what I might give up in order to make room for my studies. The college guidance suggests I 'put down the PCC', which has its appeal.

The PCC survived the discussion, but there were other tasks which it was a 'no brainer' to stop. They included managing the sound during services, and helping clean the church room.

It didn't last, for the very next day I was in conversation with our churchwarden and she mentioned that one of our Lavalier microphones was dead and I was drawn into what we should do. Likewise, at the end of our meeting I realised that we'd met towards the end of the day in the week when we usually - you guessed it - clean the church room, and I apologised to her about missing it before beginning to suggest alternative days.

My training supervisor grinned and said something to the effect of 'welcome to ministry', where being swept up in other people's calls on your time comes with the territory.

If being on the PCC readily survived the cull of duties, it is because although it does call too much upon my time - even without my studies - it is nevertheless a place wherein I feel able to work out my calling (to help others themselves called to ministry). Sometimes, that happens in the wielding of a mop, too.

Yet awhile, I can see it is going to be a struggle for me to keep an eye on where I'm heading, and not allow myself to be drawn towards other people's demands. Servant ministry is important to me, but not at the cost that no-one gets where they're supposed to be: living in the Kingdom.

La la la not listening la la la ...

Evidently, Abraham Lincoln was wont to write 'hot letters'; missives in which he would vent his spleen on paper and then stash the result away 'unseen and unsent'. There's probably a person-centred therapy term for that, but anyway it matches what I was doing at silly-o-clock this morning when I couldn't sleep.

What kept me tossing and turning was that now that I have returned to theological studies, in search of licensing in Reader Ministry, I find the stubborn streak in me 'chuntering on' about how I'm being forced to do a weekend's residential on the rural context for ministry. Given that my new diocese is largely rural, the requirement seems sound enough, except that ...

... I moved to this diocese from another even more deeply rural, and I'm training at my theological alma mater, so I suspect I know exactly which benefice I'll be bussed off to to experience a few hours of what passes for rural life in the college's view.

Tossing and turning, I rehearsed all the knowledge and experience I have gained in a ministry that has been entirely rural since I've been a country dweller for over 25 years. The litany went something like:

• milking cows on Christmas morning
• receiving gifts of trout and pheasant from parishioners
• keeping a communion service going until the celebrant could make the ten miles from his previous church
• keeping an axe in the boot for those times when fallen trees stopped me driving ten miles to my next church
• etc

All this I threw at my keyboard for an hour or so before going back to bed, where I slept the sleep of the just.

Almost.

On waking, I turned to my latest reading matter (beyond Reader training), which happens to be John Kiser's The Monks of Tibhirine, and I came upon the following passage.

‘In [Bernardo’s] dream, one monk was throttling another and saying, ‘Fool, you’re wasting your time in the Muslim world—go where you are needed and can grow. You’re a deadweight to the Order.’ … Christian recounted Bernardo’s response when he awoke from the dream he had had during his visit to Tibhirine. “You are here so your Cistercian way of life can be enriched by what you gain from the local culture. This process of inculturation does not happen without anxiety over losing one’s own monastic identity. To avoid being overcome by this fear, the community must deepen and strengthen its own monastic culture.” [Kiser:2003]

Whatever my anger (for which read ‘fear’) at repetition of the Rural Context weekend, I haven’t stopped learning. Perhaps, just perhaps, I will develop my townie inculturation of living in and ministering among (I almost said ‘to’!) those who are often themselves, as newcomers, fighting the opportunities for enrichment that moving to the countryside brings.

… Besides, it will be good to know I can leave the retired colonels back in Wiltshire’s plains and downs when I return to the Mendip-hugging orchards where the Welsh come to retire ... both of which are perhaps the sort of preconceptions about my fellow country bums that I could do with expunging by dint of some repeat training.

Giving with the one hand ...

 

In a former parish I found there was a tacit agreement that anyone doing verger duties would let their fees go to the church. It struck me as wrong that anyone should make assumptions about the financial situation of other people. Also, I argued at the time, would it not benefit the church rather more if people claimed their verger fees but then donated them back, duly gift-aided where possible?

Then I had an image of Jesus overturning the table of the money-changers.

People commonly believe that Mark 11:15-18 is heavily down on churches being used as market places, and look somewhat guiltily at a book stall behind the font as a sign of the evil god Mammon's presence. But the main thrust of this passage and its synoptic equivalents seems to say more about the church determining that Mosaic law on sacrificial offerings could only be met by purchasing ritually pure animals from the church itself, and then setting the exchange rates to be levied so as to avoid unclean coinage going into church coffers. Yet, and yet, Jesus in his well-known 'Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's' comment (Mark 12:17), had the church's cards well and truly marked by showing how easily his detractors were able to produce a 'forbidden' Roman coin in the temple precincts.

If we offer our two copper coins (Mark 12:42) in a gift-aid envelope, what we're actually doing is saying 'I want some of the tax I have paid on my income to go to this or that charity, up to the whole of my tax payments'. Which is to say, into this or that charity rather than the NHS, social housing, education, etc.

The gift-aid scheme was lobbied for not by average church-goers, RNLI supporters and so on but by rich companies and individuals seeking to game a host of tax-avoidance schemes. If we use gift-aid in our regular giving, I have the uneasy feeling that we are complicit in such schemes. We can scarcely complain about wholesale avoidance of income and corporate tax if we whittle away what's left.