Help, my brain is full!

Well I promised a recipe, so here is a quick and easy rich salad dressing that is great on a warm day when you have settled down for a relaxing meal or light lunch and fancy something with  depth and zing as a dressing. I call it 'tomato and herb dressing".

200ml  Rapeseed oil (olive will do if you haven't got rapeseed oil)
40ml     Red wine vinegar
1tsp       Honey
1-2tbsp Tomato puree
1tsp        Ground mustard seeds (or crunchy "Dijon" mustard)
1/2tsp     Sea Salt
2 tbsp       Tarragon (and/or Thyme or Marjoram) dried or freshly chopped

Mix all up in a jar and serve. If you have had to resort to dried herbs then prepare a bit in advance to give the herbs time to re-hydrate in the mix. If you want a North African twist, Zatar is also good choice for the herb content.

So that is the commercial break, what about this circles thing and church and ministry I have been hedging around for the last two posts.

Something is hatching!

The starting point for this series of posts stems from my experience in remaining in the same position, living in the same community, serving the same church and community, but over time gaining extra responsibilities as well. God is good, folk often say and I have to agree I have been blessed in all the added responsibilities that have come and gone over the last 19 years. However I have observed that while my personal capacity for the technique of ministry has grown with experience and things that used to take ages to prepare now take much less time and effort, my underlying capacity in my relationships, my ability to connect with others has not grown to any where near the same degree.

This really came home to me some seven years ago, not long after my  responsibilities had been expanded through the retirement of my minister "neighbour", growing from two parishes of population 1500 and 230 souls to five parishes with a total population of about 6000. I met someone at a post funeral "do" and realised that they were relating to me with a fair degree of familiarity. I knew that we had met on several occasions over the preceding years and that the last time we met I had remembered their name and family connection. This time it was different. I had undergone the need to pick up on three extra parishes worth of people in the intervening time and had to admit to myself that "I used to know who you were, but now there is not enough room in my brain to hold you in the address book anymore"!

This put me on the alert as to how I was relating to the people of both the new parishes and the old and especially newcomers to the old. It not take too long to map a change in my behaviour and response across the whole patch. This change could be disturbing and caused me to raise questions about myself. Was I loosing my marbles? Had my brain sprung a leak? Was it a sign of becoming middle aged?

Two things came to the rescue, first the mug of good friend, who sadly died a few years ago.  It was a "Far Side" cartoon mug and the cartoon on the mug was of  a college student at his desk in the middle of a class with his hand up to gain the attention of the class tutor. The text read "Please Sir, can I be excused, my brain is full!". The second thing that came to mind was the distant memory from a pastoral mission Summer School at my theological college, Trinity College in Bristol (an excellent place) while training for ministry. It was the circles of intimacy diagram and how it relates to church growth and a healthy community structure. "Bingo!" I had the clue and the tools to work out what I was experiencing and to begin to make sense of it. I also felt a lot better about my ministry as I realised in my heart as well as my head that I need not feel guilty about the changes in the dynamic of my ministry-relationship to the communities.

So what did I find?

Consider the table below. It maps the groups of people that a minister/priest would have contact with in a context similar to my own in relation to the intimacy or depth of contact, comparing the pattern that would have been experienced a generation ago, say the 1960's/70's to today the 2014.

Circle (increasing outwards)        1960's/70/s                                    2014-
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Inner circle (3 or 4)                        Wardens/Deacons                       Minister colleagues
                                                          Lay Preacher/Reader                   (if you have any)

Core team (12-20)                         Church Council                             Wardens/Deacons
                                                          Lay ministers                                Lay Preacher/Readers

Regular Membership                     Regular congregation                  Church Councils
(50-200)                                                                                                    Lay ministers


Personal address book                The local  community                  Regular Congregations
(1000-2000)                                                                             (note the "s", scattered by location)


Whole wide world!                         The whole wide world                   The local communities

Essentially as the role of the leader changes to take on multiple responsibilities each group's circle place is moved outwards, more distant in terms of the depth of engagement and relationship with respect to the team leader.

In the 1970's the minister or vicar would generally oversee one church, two at most. They would have a small core of two or three close confidantes with whom thy shared the most sensitive of their thoughts and plans. A fairly close relationship would be had with those with whom who they shared their week by week ministry. This might include home group leaders, pastoral visitors, school head-teachers, youth leaders, a council of ministry etc.. Pastoral contact could be maintained with the entire congregation through the regularity of contact and local knowledge. In time the whole community could become known to some depth, the relationships between people, their connections and contribution to community life.

This maps to the classic pattern that held, certainly in some parts of England where I live, up to the mid-20th century. Indeed readers of English literature can not fully appreciate the literature of Austin, Elliot, Lee or Hardy, to name a few, without an understanding of it.

This pattern has changed dramatically since the 1970's with increasing amalgamation of responsibilities, reduction of resident clergy and the creation of multi-parish ministries. The churches training in for this has responded and adapted placing a great importance upon team working and collaboration. Much of this is very good and liberating, however I would contend that in the UK at least we have not fully thought through or prepared candidates and practitioners in ministry for the role of the one who as "team leader" now tries to fulfill this traditional role in many places at the same time.

Getting back to my experience, it is I admit unusual. Having not moved house for 19 years I still live and minister in the same community I first came to in late 1995. This settled life is not of my own choosing, attempts to "cast my bread on the waters" and lay out my fleece (check the commentary/glossary in your Bibles if you are not sure what I am on about at this point) have resulted in the answer "stay where you are!". As the hymn goes "God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform".

Despite this settled domestic life my ministry, as I shared earlier has expanded greatly. This allows me to describe something that many others who move into an expanding ministry as they change posts and move from place to place might not notice to the same degree. That is, the fact that as they have moved and reestablished a new set of relationships in a more complex context they will naturally establish new networks of similar size and depth of engagement as before, but with a different groups of people.  The contact they have with the different sizes of circles of intimacy in their ministry will have changed.

For example, a single church membership might number, say seventy souls. As the pastor/priest an individual can have a deep and life transforming effect on such a number through their teaching and pastoral care. In a different context, where the congregations, scattered across several communities numbering perhaps over two hundred people they can not have the same level of intimate engagement. The level they were able to provide to the single community is not replicated across the many not due simply to the limits of their personal human psychology, something none of us can escape.

As illustrated, if in this new context of multi-church ministry the teams of leaders in the churches make up the same number of people as those "in the pews" (the congregation) in a previous singular posting. The leaders will receive the same depth of engagement with their spiritual leader as the congregation had in the singular post. The new congregations, far greater in number and separated by geography and individual contexts will not receive the depths of intimate relationship the singular congregation had with the same leader.

There can still be the level of engagement that the singular congregation enjoyed with members of the muti-church congregations on occasion, but the priest/pastor tends to transfer their level of intimate pastoring and nurture to the leadership teams across their expanded patch rather than concentrating it in one worshiping community.

The leader therefore still engages to the same degree and will feel the same pastoral load but if this engagement is unexamined and reflected upon might find themselves feeling something is lacking in their depth of engagement and ministry with regard to the congregations and communities as a whole.

For the leader in this situation that which used to work for them as a pattern of ministry in a more singular setting is felt to not be working across the many. The solution to this can be to try to respond to the felt needs of the many and work harder to replace the function that, in my case in living memory of older community members was taken by 4 or 5 resident full time ministers. However as one wise farmer friend said to me when I took on the extra parishes in my case, "One man can only do one man's work in a day" Failure to take heed of such country wisdom might well result in burn out or disillusionment. If those called to lead scattered faith communities are to remain healthy in body, mind and spirit a more examined and thoughtful approach is needed.

More of that in the next post.......