Dazed and Confused

For some strange reason I haven’t used Led Zeppelin yet on this site. Now don’t go thinking that they are my top group or anything, I like a lot of what they did but some of it I find frankly awful. Obviously that’s not what I am here to write about. The title is a reference to my own state of mind at the moment.

Last weekend we went to a meeting on Saturday about childrens work in the URC. We were led by the new Kiddies Csar who reassured us as to her credentials for the job… “I have been knocking around churches for years doing pilots, youth work etc etc”. It struck me as she was saying it, and as the people round the room echoed her words in their own description of how they happened to be there, that this is probably one of the big problems we have doing childrens work. It’s the same ‘church people’ doing it whether you call them captain, miss, sir, Jenny, Jen, J. We need someone at the top who knows nothing about churches and everything about what children want and need.

The danger of doing it the way we do it (and this isn’t just me picking on someone, I sincerely hope she does a good job and will help in any way I can) is that in the phrase ‘church-based childrens work’ the priority is 1. Church, 2. Work and 3. Children. We put the ‘church’ above everything. I have such a downer on ‘Church’, it saps our energy, our time and our money. I used to equate this feeling with a crisis of faith but I have realised doing BCLC that not only are church, my faith and spirituality not tied together, I am starting to feel like they mutually exclusive.

Name one good thing the church has done for us?………………

Closing Time?

Shucks, what a shame, it turns out we won’t be closing our churches any day soon. Well that is according to Tom Butler the bishop of somewhere. I’m not sure what it is like where Tom lives but it strikes me that we have been closing our churches pretty steadily for the last 40 years. That is both physically and metaphorically. These aren’t places that people go to and must therefore be seen as closed to the vast majority of people. Meanwhile the ones of us that are left go through the motions gathering more and more jobs until we just get so fed up with it that we leg it.

I am going through one of my ‘why do I bother’ moods. I can quite easily justify what we do with the children on a Friday evening and I can see that what we want to do with BCLC is valid and should provide people with a space to exercise their spiritual sides without being confronted by ghosts of their dead relatives. The rest of it though is just a waste of everyone’s time and effort.