Spirographs and red lentil spaghetti

A great and colourful dish to go with white or brown spaghetti.

Ingredients (to serve four)

75 g of spaghetti per person, or 100g for a lumberjack, long distance cyclist etc.

1 Medium onion (red if yoy can get it)
1 clove of garlic
1 large red pepper
1 400g tin of plum or chopped tomatoes
1/2 a tin of water
100g of red lentils (rinse before use)
A good squeeze of tomato puree
1 tsp of paprika 
A few twists of black pepper

You need a small to medium sized pan with a lid to do cook this.

Warn up oil in the pan and while that is warming chop the onion finely and the garlic too. Soften these in the pan in the usual way. While they are sizzling rinse the lentils and add to the pan. Once the onion is soft add the paprika, black pepper and puree and blend with the onion and lentils. Straight away add the tin of tomatoes and using the same tin half a tin of water. (Hint: if this is from a warm kettle it will speed things up a tad.) 

Bring the mix to a simmer and then turn down to a gentle simmer. Put the lid on. This will take about 45 minutes to cook on the hob, so go and do something else for a bit. Do remember to give it a stir every few minutes though to stop the lentils sticking to the bottom of the pan. (If it looks like it is getting a bit dry you can add a bit more water. It just depends on how absorbent your lentils are.) 

Bring your water to the boil for the spahetti and time it to go on 10 minutes before you plan to serve.  At the end of the time you should have a nice thickened sauce and the lentils should be soft and almost dissolving.

Serve with the spaghetti and a good grating or handful of shaving of hard Italian cheese.

p.s I am staying at Hilfield Friary with the Franciscan community in Dorset at the moment and last night for supper we had a great open topped pie, or flan, which had the above red lentil mix as the pie/flan filling. Topped with the grated cheese and grilled lightly it makes a great dish to serve with a green salad.


Now spirographs. Remember these? A generation of us had great fun and were occupied for many hours making beautiful picture-grams I suppose you would call them, all through the simplicity of gearing and epicyclic geometry.

What have these got to do with church and community life in relation to team members and especially team leaders I hear the "blogosphere" cry out. Well....

Take a look at the diagram below. Lots of overlapping circles and paths of orbit around moving centres, all symmetrical in this case form a regular pattern with rings of density and areas of relative space.

To my mind it reminds me of the group dynamics of a church community within its broader geographic community.

Life, unlike the Spirograph diagram is usually more like a bowl of spaghetti than a geometric pattern. But I hope you can get the idea; a community holds together when its members have overlapping intimate connections of sufficient depth to create a shared spirit, a shared sense of purpose and identity. This is especially true if the members overlap in their sense of and actual experience of connection with the community's leadership.

In a church setting this manifests itself in the knowledge that the leadership "know me and my situation" also that there is a bond of trust and openness grown through shared community experiences, again manifested in a sense of "we understand eachother, we have a shared story".

In singular settings; "one church, one priest/minister, one parish/community" this pattern is easily understood and lived, day by day and week by week. Once "the minister" becomes a team leader and their time is shared out over several centres this mode of being breaks down. 

As I have posted in "help my brain is full", the circle of people with whom the leader has intimate overlap changes. It is no longer focused on the local gathered congregation within a community, but upon the leadership teams of those congregations. The leader's spirograph diagram would look like wheel of whorls, united by an overlapping whorl in the centre or hub. This hub is the circle of intimate pastoral contact made up of that leadership of the local congregations.

This should not surprise us. For at least two or three decades the churches have been addressing the changes in deployment by encouraging and empowering collaborative and shared practice in ministry. Diverse patterns of local leadership, shaped by the work of the Holy Spirit and the encouragement of the church in calling people out for such roles has produced a rich harvest of gifted lay ministry for local churches. This is good. What has not been recongnised is how this impacts on the remaining full time leaders, who are now trying to stand in the shoes of three, four or maybe five or more ministerial leaders who would have been posted to to the same communities only a generation ago.

So what is the impact? (We'll take the bad news first, before looking for positives!)

I would head it under the following areas:

• Loss of clear role in the community
• Sense of dislocation and a lingering guilt at not "doing it right"
• Withdraw from traditional local community; i.e. the minister becomes a seldom seen stranger
• Rebalancing of ministry with a bias away from the creative towards the more administrative and human relationship aspects.

LOSS OF CLEAR ROLE

I have covered this in some depth already, but to recall; simply by not being deeply rooted in one community, but present, in theory at least, for one or two days a week here and there spread over many communities means that as minister/priest you does not get to know the community or be as well known as would be the case in a singular setting. This creates a distance between minister and community, a distance of understanding and shared community narrative. The role as a community leader is lost in that the leader is not in a position to speak for or speak to the community with the authority of their accumulated knowledge of the community and its people. The leader does not have the same depth and virtue of intimate connection with the community through a shared life and comes more as an outsider, rather than as one who can to speak out as one who is of them, if not from them.

SENSE OF DISLOCATION

For the leader of multi-church/community settings the work load is no lighter than for one community. However the pastoral instinct welling up within practitioners, learned and shaped during initial ministerial training or by memories of experience of life as it was when they were younger leaves a strong imprint. Clergy "know" what it means to be a proper, traditional parish/congregational based minister and have feeling of the connection they believe they should have with those in their care. When they find themselves providing pastoral care for a collection of leadership teams in several churches that equates to the weight of care they used to have for a singular context and feel they should still be giving to each of the congregations members a sense of inadequacy, guilt and failure can stalk around their mind and heart. This sense is further felt in relation to the wider local communities, who have an expectation that the now part time minister is still belong to them in terms of being first call for community roles.

When it is not possible to fulfil communities expectations and the minister has to decline being in charge of organising five village fetes or chairing three alms-house committees or being an active leading school governor at four church schools within their benefice great hurt, puzzlement and a sense of rejection is felt by the local community. The minister/priest themselves may well feel bewildered at squaring their inability to fulfil all the roles and expectations of the communities upon them that were fulfilled by their predecessors over generations.

They might be able to reflect on the situation and come to terms with the limits placed upon them due to their time and energy. However even if they are able to come to terms themselves with having to say "No" many more times than in a singular setting, there will still be a greater distance of intimacy between them and the community organsisations/partners who's invitations to serve have had to be declined.

WITHDRAWAL FROM WIDER COMMUNITY

An ivevitable result of being the leader/minister in multi-community settings where in the past there were many such leader/ministers is, as illustrated above, is withdraw by the team leader of the church from involvement in the local community. As I have written earlier "One wo/man can only do one wo/man's work in a day". The time and energy that is available in a singular setting for community engagement is reallocated to sustaining in the first instance, the life of the congregations in a multi-church setting. Any availability of the leader for wider community engagement beyond that of occasional pastoral offices (hatch, match and "despatch" as we call them in the trade!) will have to be chosen with care and targeted if it is to be fair to all the communities under their care. It can boil down to choosing which fete or Remembrance parade, which school sports day or Nativity play, Village parish assembly or senior citizens lunch to attend. It can take great mental juggling to prioritise the personal pleas and at times psychological manipulation to decide on the complexity of targeting which to attend for best pastoral contact and visible community presence or which major community projects to partner.

I think you can see, it is not easy to full the shoes of the ghosts of community life past when the priest/minister was present, if not the leading hand in organising community events and projects. The loss of this connection deserves serious thought. For the nominal or non committed members of the community such events are the connection, however tenuous with the church as a beating heart and hub of community life; a well supplying the glue and social capital that makes a community, function as a community. 

The withdrawal from such traditional roles leaves the churches out of the loop of community life. The community will continue, but if this absence can not be addressed, it will be a different place without the incarnate recognisable visible living presence of the church of God. Sure the building in which God's people meet will still be present in the community and be valued highly as a focus of community identity. However, where once the recognised spiritual leadership of the community's voice was strong and steering, present and pastoring, it is in danger,with the exception of those in the intimate circles of the leader's care, of becoming being an almost forgotten echo of a former golden age that has passed away in a manner similar to that of the veterans of conflicts and ages past.

REBALANCING OF MINISTRY

Time for diagram!

Here is the Haybox theologian's map of ministerial capacity. It is based on the fact that no matter how well trained or organised someone is their ministry will always contain certain elements or dimensions that are common to the human elements of the role to which they are called and sent. They will also have a personal limit to how much of their capacity they can give to their role over the long term, which is represented by the outer circle.

I have distilled the areas, represented by the touching circles within the capacity of the individual, from my own experience into three areas of gifting and capability. I would hope these would be found within the capacity of anybody called and recognised as having a public community office in the churches. Being three there are Trinitarian echoes of the ordering, creativity and pastoral nature of God, as understood in the Christian tradition.

These three hallmarks recognise that ministry is expressed through being or demonstrating;

• A creative spark in being a catalyst for and/or provider of experiences that create space for God in the lives of others.
• Being an agent of health and healing in human relationships.
• Having a sufficiency of the gift of "administration" in organising themselves and "stuff" so that people, location and processes aid and support the creative and human-relationships threads.

I am not suggesting that everyone called to ministry in the church will have these gifts in equal measure; as St Paul expressed, some are called to be evangelists, some preachers, others.... However if any Ministry is to be Christlike in its concern for others and connection to a Christian community with a degree of intimacy that reflects the life of the early church congregation all three will need to be recognised in that person's nature.

An evangelist for example might well be strong in the areas of creativity and in human relationships, a pastor within the areas of administration and human relationships, a liturgist strong in creativity and administration. Get the picture? All in ministry will have a varied mix of these giftings according to God's grace. Where the church struggles is that it tends to label and commission all as "ministers" or "priests" or "vicars". This is OK and fine in a singular setting where particular gifts and strengths can allow "round pegs to be placed in round holes", i.e. the needs of a church matched to the gifts of an individual minister.

In multi church/parish settings each community will have different needs. A browse through many job advertisements for new ministers with the profiles of the needs of the communities will often read as a cut and paste job between two or more lists of what is being sought. A use for that redaction criticism glossed over during biblical studies training!

What is seldom recognised is that the person who comes to fill the role will, by virtue of the social dynamics that come from attending to multiple settings, whatever their individual gifting will have to expend much of their capacity and energy in ensuring the processes that underpin church ministry run smoothly, listening to and pastoring the leadership teams and being the "fire engine" who sorts out all the emergencies and misunderstandings between people that are part of community life. Often not stated these functions will take up a large part of the leaders time and energy.

The “map” of how their capacity for ministry is expended will be distorted away from their natural gifting to a point of balance between the demands of the context and their particular passion of faith. Looking something like this...

                                           

This shift in how a pastor's physical, psychological and spiritual capacity is expended in their ministry if it is not acknowledged and understood by the individual minister and those in their care can become a source of frustration, misunderstanding and lead to a breakdown of trust between a "priest and the people".

I can vouch for this effect in that the ministerial loading of my role, gift and joy that it is, has certainly not reduced over the last 19 years. What has changed is the balance of the load. Becoming leader of five active parish churches has multiplied the pastoral problems to be resolved and administration to be managed. It has also given me the blessing of many leadership teams, who all need support. I do not have a bigger brain, more hours in the day than I used to have and my gifts of empathy have not expanded five fold either. The result is that my energies are focused more on the administration and pastoral care aspects of ministry to the detriment of the creative side beyond that which is encompassed within normal patterns of ministry,e.g. preaching and flexing worship to go with the flow of the occasion.

Ideas for new expressions of community life and outreach might well come to mind, but the time and energy to see them through to fruition are often squashed by the day to day activities which need to be attended to.

I have been very blessed in that having lived in my original two parishes for almost ten years before expanding my parish pastoral care to others also that I can "trade" on my knowlwdge of the original villages, which I know well. I can also see that I will never know the other communities in their broad sense as well. I am also aware the over the last eight years I have begun to loose touch with the wider community of my original parishes. this is to be expected as my natural capacity for intimacy and contact with others is transferred from the singular setting to pastoring the leadership and congregations across the many.

Thank God for the great team of local volunteer ministers within our benefice/district, earthed in the local communities, who "live and move and have their being" within each local community. Their witness, often not fully understood is a living link between the church and the community.

By now you are probably thinking "what a misery" this guy is. However what I wished to communicate is the fact of my experience and call for honesty in how the leaders of the church are trained and how congregations and communities can be best prepared for the new patterns that are emerging.

We can not live by the patterns of the immediate past; but I believe if we dig deep within our Christian heritage we will find, within that rich treasure-box, the resources to reform the churches for the 21st Century. Reform it's sense of community identity and leadership roles such that they give rise to positive cycles of engagement within congregations and the communities from which they are drawn.

Key in this is for the churches to recognise the call of those with oversight of many flocks as being a particular gift requiring distinctive training and resourcing for both leaders, those who share their ministry and the congregations/communities to who are top be in their care.

In my next “chapter” I will outline further thoughts on where this might lead...