Struggling to decide about church
Sep. 12th, 2004 08:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pegkerrMy church is in trouble.
There has been some problems there for a long time that I have not completely understood. A woman that the girls were very close to, whom they had adopted as sort of a honorary grandma, the parish nurse, got into some sort of power struggle with the pastor and quit the church. We have had a turnover of the entire church staff in the past year: youth director, worship director, education director, church secretary. Membership has been dropping and so the budget was cut, including the pastor's salary by 40%, and the pastor announced his resignation two weeks later. I talked with him and with some other people, and learned that there had been (among other things) a power struggle between our long term worship director (who had been at the church for 37 years) and the pastor, because the worship director didn't want change. After he retired, he still kept interfering with what was going on, through people who were still loyal to him. The girls don't like the education/youth director. She's a kindergarten teacher with an extremely syrupy personality--think of Dolores Umbridge, without the malevolence--and she treats children as if they are much younger than they are ("I don't need to be gluing cotton balls on lambs" as Delia puts it). The position of council president, vice president and secretary are vacant.
Now, in another blow, I have just learned that the man who ran the Forum, which is the adult education I really liked, is leaving the church.
So what do I do? We have a new interim pastor starting soon, and we'll be searching for a new one. The new choir director is good, and the new organist is absolutely terrific. I've heard speculations that the education/youth director may not stay, because her internship was somehow tied to the identity of the pastor, the one who has left.
I want the girls to be in a strong church by the time they are ready for confirmation. This one is more conservative than I like, and I'm not sure it is going to survive. But it is our church. The girls were baptized here, and there are people here I still love to see. Isn't it part of our responsibility as members to help turn things around? Shouldn't we be acting as members of the body of Christ, trying to heal the body, rather than consumer/shoppers who reason, "This isn't meeting my needs, so I'm outta here"? What is my responsibility? What should I do?
There has been some problems there for a long time that I have not completely understood. A woman that the girls were very close to, whom they had adopted as sort of a honorary grandma, the parish nurse, got into some sort of power struggle with the pastor and quit the church. We have had a turnover of the entire church staff in the past year: youth director, worship director, education director, church secretary. Membership has been dropping and so the budget was cut, including the pastor's salary by 40%, and the pastor announced his resignation two weeks later. I talked with him and with some other people, and learned that there had been (among other things) a power struggle between our long term worship director (who had been at the church for 37 years) and the pastor, because the worship director didn't want change. After he retired, he still kept interfering with what was going on, through people who were still loyal to him. The girls don't like the education/youth director. She's a kindergarten teacher with an extremely syrupy personality--think of Dolores Umbridge, without the malevolence--and she treats children as if they are much younger than they are ("I don't need to be gluing cotton balls on lambs" as Delia puts it). The position of council president, vice president and secretary are vacant.
Now, in another blow, I have just learned that the man who ran the Forum, which is the adult education I really liked, is leaving the church.
So what do I do? We have a new interim pastor starting soon, and we'll be searching for a new one. The new choir director is good, and the new organist is absolutely terrific. I've heard speculations that the education/youth director may not stay, because her internship was somehow tied to the identity of the pastor, the one who has left.
I want the girls to be in a strong church by the time they are ready for confirmation. This one is more conservative than I like, and I'm not sure it is going to survive. But it is our church. The girls were baptized here, and there are people here I still love to see. Isn't it part of our responsibility as members to help turn things around? Shouldn't we be acting as members of the body of Christ, trying to heal the body, rather than consumer/shoppers who reason, "This isn't meeting my needs, so I'm outta here"? What is my responsibility? What should I do?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-13 12:54 am (UTC)I'm not a Christian, but I'm going to have a guess at this anyway. The church I sing at had its gospel reading yesterday on the missing coin. It seems to me that the woman searching for the coin - she was searching for the *coin*, not a particular wallet she wanted to keep it in. And it didn't say anywhere that she had to keep all her coins in one place, just that she didn't want to lose it somewhere irretrievable. Same with the sheep - it doesn't say if he corralled them all together, just that he wanted them all to be safe. And the parable doesn't show the shepherd being greatly concerned about pasture his sheep are grazing on, just the sheep. If he had ninety-nine safe and one missing, he'd search high and low until he found that hundredth sheep, and then he'd rejoice.
I mean, I might be wrong, but it seems to me that Christ must love every single person in your church very much, and want you to love each of them as you love yourself, but that's not the same thing as insisting they stay in the same group.
Or I might be out of my depth. Is there an uninvolved priest you could ask?