Mac the knife

LOVE IT!


Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

thank you cartoon church

D'oh

What's that thing called when you can't do anything right?

letter to Ross Williams

Facebook Inbox: "To :
rwilliams@globalpersonals.co.uk

Dear Ross,

I wondered if you knew that your companies (White Label Dating and Global Personals) are providing support to maritalaffair.co.uk which exists to encourage people to cheat on their partners? I really admire the work you have done in setting up some brilliant dating websites that bring people together and heard in the recent interview that ‘Your business is Love’. Maritalaffair.co.uk doesn’t seem to fit very well with your core business.

I am working to try and stop maritalaffair.co.uk being allowed to advertise publicly in the UK. I am part of a growing campaign to achieve this. We have contacted media groups, MPs and the local council where the advert is and plan to continue acting until we get these billboards removed.

I am writing to you as I believe your reputation is put at risk by being involved in this website.

We are asking you to commit publicly that White Label Dating and Global Personals will have nothing further to do with maritalaffair.co.uk. Can I ask you to clarify this by Wednesday 26th January 5pm. Please do this by posting a message on our Facebook page (‘Stop marital affair .co.uk advertising publicly in the UK’).

Thank you for your help – we hope you can help resolve this as quickly as possible. It seems so odd for you to be involved in such a horrible website."

Come fly with me ...

Ok I admit it, Facebook has seriously dented my blogging energies and time - it's only been sermons really recently, sorry. That's been messed up further by the fact that they are now written on a pc with no internet access.

This blog began (and starting a sentence with those words does not imply I am going to stop blogging!) as a reflective tool for my clergy leadership programme notes. If I'm honest it was also a means of getting things off my chest with my own moderation system in place - a little easier on the blood pressure than some discussion forums can be!

I could have done with my leadership programme notes (and Ruth's Arrow folder) in my back pocket a fair few times recently. This has been our fourth Christmas in the benefice - as many as we've ever had in a parish. It (along with some unfortunate and as yet not completely resolved conflicts) got me thinking back to when I was a curate.

I used to get frustrated that my boss wouldn't always want to go with the great new ideas I was coming up with (OK not just me others too). Now I know that it was because he knew he would get it in the neck from the elements of the congregation who make it their business to keep the church the same as it has always been. As curates together on what was then known daintily as potty training we would wonder what it was that turned keen trendy curates into cautious, stressed out vicars. Now I realise it isn't just a matter of the passing of the years, it's to do with where the buck stops. With a curate, it rarely stops at your desk, as incumbent it always does (even if in practice it doesn't, as with youth work)

What this is coming from inside me I guess is the paradox of collaborative ministry; shared leadership, WOOHOO, everyone loves it, but when things get difficult, it's "What are you going to do about it, you're the vicar ...". This works the other way too - much as I love collaborating, there are times when I feel like knocking heads together and shouting "I'm in charge here!" Not sure I'd ever actually say that though as there are elements who would like me to because they think the vicar should do everything! D'oh!
I understand authority in priestly leadership to be conferred by God via the bishop. It doesn't have to be earned. In the same way, respect for that authority, which some might say needs to be earned, I feel ought also to be a given. Not that the vicar is always right or deserves all the perks he or she can get in terms of freebies and the like, but that congregations and communities ought to remember that their vicar was prayerfully chosen and appointed to serve them; he/she is not a volunteer, neither in the sense of doing this for free (with every respect to NSMs out there) nor in the sense of just stepping forward out of guilt or an excess of free time.

When this understanding collides with other understandings of leadership, that's when you can get the kind of plane crash that Sam was talking about.