Meetings...
i have a meeting tomorrow night that I'm not really looking forward to attending. It's a meeting of the Presbytery for a process that we've been talking about for about a year, precipitated by the fact that we are looking at some congregations' futures and not seeing a very long stretch ahead of them. It's a simple fact that, due to the automobile, urbanization, and the ever-rising costs of operation in our networked and government-mandated world that country churches must either fill a niche or die. It's simply too expensive for many of them to stay open unless they can pay for their upkeep, and since many can't, many have been closing and will continue to close over the next several years.
Thing is, this process that we're discussing is one that, while I see it as valuable, I've never fully bought into. Not because it's not a good process, but because I'm not sure how to apply a lot of its tenets to my congregation. It's one of those things that sounds great in theory but isn't necessarily great in practice. Hopefully something will come of this that we can use and feel proud to have begun or worked through, but we're not there yet.
This meeting tomorrow, however, is going to have a lot of arguing. Arguing over process. Arguing over attitude. One argument is apparently that we didn't begin the process with a clear end-goal in sight - my thoughts on that one is that if we didn't have an end goal in sight, one would be revealed through the process! Sometimes it is better to be in motion than simply sitting still waiting for the right move to occur to you! I'm not sure what some people wanted, except perhaps to be told that the old ways were soon going to be coming back in style so keep doing them while you wait.
Anyway, I'm just not that hyped for it, but I need to be there. Yay, me.
Thing is, this process that we're discussing is one that, while I see it as valuable, I've never fully bought into. Not because it's not a good process, but because I'm not sure how to apply a lot of its tenets to my congregation. It's one of those things that sounds great in theory but isn't necessarily great in practice. Hopefully something will come of this that we can use and feel proud to have begun or worked through, but we're not there yet.
This meeting tomorrow, however, is going to have a lot of arguing. Arguing over process. Arguing over attitude. One argument is apparently that we didn't begin the process with a clear end-goal in sight - my thoughts on that one is that if we didn't have an end goal in sight, one would be revealed through the process! Sometimes it is better to be in motion than simply sitting still waiting for the right move to occur to you! I'm not sure what some people wanted, except perhaps to be told that the old ways were soon going to be coming back in style so keep doing them while you wait.
Anyway, I'm just not that hyped for it, but I need to be there. Yay, me.