Church visits - St James x2

It was great to be part of the morning services at St James' Pakenham on the Sunday before last. (It would have been great to have been able to stick around for their evening service too as there were a number of people being confirmed and received - basically, standing up to say they want to follow Jesus and have chosen this church to do that.) I was really encouraged by the bravery and boldness of the congregations I visited. People there told me that some years ago, they had been meeting in a nice old stone church building, however, when they faced the (excellent) problem of being too full, they agreed to say goodbye to their spiritual home and move to a new, bigger facility. This sort of thing can be quite a big deal for lots of people. While the new building is really great, it no doubt has a strikingly different aesthetic to the last one.

To be honest, in my conversations it sounded like it had been a bit of a hard slog getting resettled. But still, the overall mood was positive and future facing. There was real enthusiasm around the new minister and his wife who are a great couple that I think could do a lot to positively shape the church. So again, good on this church for taking a step into something new and looking forward to what God might do next.

It turns out that there's actually a good number of well-led Anglican churches out in that part of Melbourne now - Berwick, Pearcedale-Langwarren, Officer, others... ? If the congregations in those have the same boldness as the Pakenham mob, this could be a really exciting part of the Diocese to watch in the years ahead.

Yesterday I went to another St James' - Melbourne's old cathedral. This has a somewhat different story: their building was slated for demolition years and years ago (early 1900s??) but ended up being preserved and, after having been relocated to a new site brick-by-brick, these days has a newly growing congregation. Here, unlike Pakenham, the old aesthetic has been retained for a group of people who like a more traditional style of church. But like Pakenham, the recent growth has again been, under God's providence, largely due to the young minister who's been really well-matched to the congregation. I'm reminded again of the importance of putting square pegs in square holes.

Now, where's another St James' I can check out?

Coat of arms hung in the sanctuary at St James' Old Cathedral.

It's the diocesan arms impaled with arms that seem to have some

connection to the English monarchy. Anyone?

The Voices of the People

For the first time in seven years, I'm not a member of the Melbourne Synod and so won't be attending the meetings that start tonight.

However, it turns out that I do have something else to do. I'm going to be introducing and briefly interviewing Billy Bragg during his in-store appearance at Readings Bookstore in St Kilda. As a pretty hard-core BB fan for more than twenty years, this is a great honour for me.

So, if you're not a member of Melbourne Synod and are looking for something to do at 2pm this Saturday (Oct 20th), come on down. It's free, but you must book.

I can't guarantee that it will be better than an afternoon at Synod...

But just maybe...

Old Skool Discipleship

How often do we think about the Church Catechism? It's a brief outline of the Apostles' Creed, the Ten Commandments and the Lord's Prayer that's been in every Book of Common Prayer since 1549 (largely unchanged although the bit on the sacraments was added in 1604).

So what?

Well, the catechism contains what Anglicans believe are the essentials of the faith (cf. the 39 Articles which have a different function altogether). To reinforce this, lots of Anglican churches actually have the Creed, Commandments and Lord's Prayer up on 'commandment boards' at the front of the building to make starkly plain what it is that we believe about God, how we want to live in light of those beliefs and the way we can call on God to help us in that. This triplet was so important to the Church of England that, according to Prof. Ian Green who's written the book on catechisms, there were something like 500,000 copies of the catechism printed between the 1540s and 1640s, making it by far the most printed text of the time. Everyone was expected to know the catechism off by heart as a summary of their faith.

So now, here's the question. How many Anglicans nowadays can rattle off the Apostles' Creed, Ten Commandments and Lord's Prayer without looking them up? I'm not suggesting that this is the test of a 'true' Christian and I'm well aware that we're living in a different time, with different ways of learning, etc, etc. However, if we can't recite these things and demonstrate some basic understanding of their right meaning, I do wonder whether we've been learning other equally valuable things instead or if we've just abandoned the idea of a clearly structured, educative discipleship. I guess it probably depends a lot on which particular Anglican church you go to.

I suspect that some people might read this and think "I don't know those things, but I learn the Bible each week". Well, that would be a great thing. But before we just move on from there, it's good to remember that the Ten Commandments and Lord's Prayer actually come from the Bible anyway and that the 16th century church also had the ideal of reading the entire Old Testament once a year, the New Testament three times and all the Psalms each month, so they weren't using the catechism as some light-weight alternative to Bible reading.

Just as I'd been thinking about this, a friend sent me this link to an iPad ap for a modern day catechism. I was wondering how we could revive old skool catechesis. Someone beat me to it!

Paying for It

In the past, my wife and I have served together as part of a team in church leadership which we felt worked pretty well at lots of levels. Because of that, we're looking to do the same in the future. However, as we've spoken about this with others, one of the issues that's been raised is the fact that most churches can't afford to put on two new staff members at the same time. Now, from our perspective, we've never been that fussed about this as we can happily get by on one income. But we have taken some pause to think more generally about the positives and negatives of working in a church for more hours than the paycheques cover. Here's a bit of a summary.

It's bad to work more hours than you're paid for because

• As Paul reminds us, "The [church] labourer deserves to be paid" (1 Tim 5:17-18, cf. Matt 10:10). This teaching recognises that working in a church is a 'real' job (and one that can require more training, can demand more hours, can have greater responsibility and can draw on a broader set of skills than many other jobs) and as such, it ought to be properly remunerated.

• Paying workers properly protects (somewhat) against their being taken for granted by those in the church.

• If a churchworker is paid for less hours than they actually work and then they move on to another ministry, the church may not be set up to pay replacement staff for enough hours to cover all that the former staffer was doing. That could mean some ministries struggle, falter or even end.

But some reasons that it's good to work more than you're paid are

• Church work should never, never be done for money. Church workers should primarily serve out of love for Jesus, his people and his mission, not remuneration. Traditionally, ministers were paid a 'stipend' rather than a salary. That is, they received an allowance sufficient for them to live on while they gave up their potential earning time to serve in the church. So the focus wasn't on dollars per hour, but on providing the basic needs for those set aside to do vocational church work. (This is a key idea in the Old Testament system of tithes too - eleven tribes gave ten percent to support the one tribe who served them in the Temple and who therefore couldn't work in the fields to raise crops and livestock for themselves.)

• It helps sustain a healthy culture of volunteerism which is critical if a church is to be fully functional in its mission and service. In churches I've worked at in the past, unpaid volunteers have been hugely important to the life and health of the community. If church members develop the attitude that they shouldn't offer themselves in free service because there are 'paid people' to do the work, then the church is in a bad state.

• Any money saved can be diverted to other good uses - helping the poor, special mission projects, supporting other churches - the possibilities are endless.

• A minister who gets paid less than they might has a great opportunity to champion simpler living to the church which ought to be marked by sacrificial generosity and selflessness.

• At least in Australia, the full remuneration package for Anglican ministers is very generous. I know of several ministers with a bunch of kids who have gotten by on a single Melbourne Diocese salary. I don't know of any who are struggling to put food on the table.

So perhaps the best situation is one where a congregation feels really committed to ensuring that those who serve (in whatever capacity) are adequately provided for, but at the same time, those who serve are equally as keen to lead the way in giving their time sacrificially and not always requiring all the payments they could claim.

Practically, this could mean that the local church pays its workers the full amount, but then those workers choose to return anything above what they need to live on back to the church coffers - or perhaps to another worthy cause. Or, the church could pay an old-fashioned stipend (like some missionary organisations still do today) and then they could set the remainder aside for other purposes. They could even create a fund to cover any gap that may arise when the 'underpaid' minister moves on.

There's nothing final in all this - just a few thoughts I've been kicking around. But however things are done, one thing I'm convinced of is that it mustn't be unusual for people in church to freely serve for free.