Lost Opportunity?

I went to chapel on Thursday. Not so much because I would have chosen to attend a mid-week service but because I was importuned to play the organ.

There were a couple of really interesting things about the gathering in the tiny room. Only about eighteen attended, out of some 350 people who live in the Village, so it obviously doesn't seem to meet a huge need. And they were seated in a narrow space with a centre aisle and only two chairs on each side.

For most of my ministry I have been railing (if you will excuse the pun) against "railway carriage seating" in churches - rows of pews all facing the same direction. But no church I ever visited illustrated the point more clearly than the village chapel.

Another service I attended recently had the same layout: there was a central aisle and rows of chairs on each side. Certainly, here there were about four or five chairs aside. But the eight rows were deep, also set in the narrow dimension of the room, probably to face the window and the view. But perhaps to make it feel as much like the proper church as possible.

Sadly, this congregation was forced into this room by the draconian decision of the Methodist Church of New Zealand to lock up their lovely old church because it failed to meet the Church's requirements relative to earthquake risk. And no doubt in that church, all the  people could see of each other was the backs of heads.

But when they had to move out of that church into the comfortable and carpeted lounge at the side, what an opportunity was lost!  Here they could have created an entirely different kind of gathering space. Here they could have provided a place for real meeting, real engagement with each other as well as with the worship leaders.

Among all those who have been administering the ruthless programme of turning congregations out of their buildings, who is helping these refugee congregations to see this as an opportunity for a more vital  kind of Sunday experience?

Error Prone Bureaucracy in the Church

Around 6am on April 1^st I responded to a piece in the NZ Herald arguing against the requirement to bring all public buildings in the country to earthquake proof specification. An hour later this article had disappeared from my Herald App News. I guessed it was perhaps an April Fool Stunt.

Not so. Since being away for a few weeks I have now located the actual report, of some 100 or more pages. It argues that the immense expenditure needed to upgrade buildings all round the country is simply not justified by the risk.

Among a host of arguments, report author Ian Harrison at Tailrisk writes that the $3 billion cost of eq-proofing public buildings in Auckland would seem to be likely to save only one eq-death in 4000 years.  But about seven people would die of stress during the strengthening process. Of particular interest to me, he points out that churchgoers are tens of thousands of times more at risk riding a cycle than sitting in a sub eq-standard structure for an hour on Sunday mornings.

Having travelled through much of the country recently, I have seen many old churches which have been closed for strengthening or demolition. I have engaged with a few of the congregations in their agonies over the loss of their loved places of worship. I have seen the divisions that are splitting the membership about whether to repair or replace these buildings. And I have heard of some congregations which have taken the opportunity to just quietly close down altogether.

Of course, we need standards. Without doubt all new churches should be built to a better standard than those which are presently being summarily closed. But I think that the huge cost of strengthening or replacing many of these old structures should be measured against the realistic risk involved.  I believe Tailrisk is suggesting that, so far, Government has done the sums wrongly. I suspect the Methodist Church hasn't done any actual risk calculations at all.

Follical challenge in the small church

      Last night, still in summer shorts, I was lying back in my reclining chair and casually inspecting my knee surgery scars when I noticed that there’s not a decent hair on my legs.

      Now, I was never one of your hairy monsters but I had a serious crop of hair that came and went with the seasons, depending on whether I was wearing shorts or long trousers. The latter ground a lot of hairs off some areas over six months or so. But this is the end of the shorts season and right now my legs would serve as an advertisement for Veet.

    Yep, it’s the cancer medications. The same drugs that are making me weep copiously at the slightest sadness or even a moving passage in the Bible are stealing a very male characteristic from my legs — and other places. I am surprised at how this hair loss has shaken me.

     We think we have coped pretty well with an extra few kgs of weight, my budding breasts, the loss of my sex drive (and we are working on that), a generally teary existence and other anticipated side effects. But suddenly finding my legs were as smooth as a baby’s bottom has unnerved me. It’s a dramatic reminder of the serious things that are going on in my system—especially since a rising PSA suggests that the medications are beginning to lose their battle anyway.

I guess relationships in the small congregation are sometimes disrupted by the smallest and most minor matters. Sometimes we manage the big stuff OK and then let ourselves down on the little things.

Running true?

We were away in the caravan this last weekend and I noticed that the front tyre of our “thirdwheeler” was badly worn on one edge. When I stripped off the cover of the towing assembly there were pieces of flat greasy stuff sticking out of the rotating unit. A thing called a “damper” has been broken up and spat out. Worse, the central pin on which the assembly turns, has become slightly bent.

I guess that pin has been through over twenty years of taking the bumps on some fairly rough roads and I shouldn’t be surprised that it isn’t as straight and true as it once was. But even this very small lean away from “true” has virtually ruined a new tyre. There’s more noise than there should be when we’re towing and the van’s been hard to manoevre by hand.

So tomorrow a local engineer will pull the assembly apart again and straighten the pin. It will have to be heat-treated in a gas torch to enable it to be brutally forced back into square. While the unit is apart we’ll check out other components and make sure everything is working as it should. It’s just something that has to be done after a couple of decades of hard work, especially if some regular greasings have been overlooked.

I suppose churches are much the same. It doesn’t take many things “out of true” to upset the balance of things that should normally run smoothly. Ignoring problems can often make matters worse but dealing with them can occasionally involve some uncomfortable heat and pressure. At the end of the day, every member needs to be “straight and true” for the local congregation to be faithful to its calling.