Working with our hands

[Stercus Tauri]

It's quite possible that this article (nearly a year old - I'm a slow reader):

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html

is completely irrelevant to most people here, as a lot of us deal with organisations and matters spiritual, apart from our other work, which is often virtual, leaving no lasting mark. Maybe it's just plain irrelevant. Yet... as my own career goes from bump to bump on its square wheels, and I can take more time to use my hands, as well as the few remaining brain cells, it resonated strongly with me. I'd be interested to hear if it has any impact at all on anyone else. 

[wally]

Thank you, Stercus. I was beginning to think that Grumpy was the last bastion of the chosen few who thought of building a church in an old-fashioned way, with one person at a time. This fellow makes a perfect sense after a 7 hour drive back and forth in snow storms to a meeting of the Church Doctrine Commttee.

(aside: Barry will be happy knowing that finally a statement and and a study paper on supersessionism are ready for the upcoming Assembly.)

I've been wondering out loud why all these modern methods of church growth left many successful (numerically) and excellence demanding (high quality of passion and worship activities) churches still leaving the vast majority of Canadians untouched or disinterested. All the roars about high tech worship equipments enhancing worship experience did much to stir debates within congregations desperate for new blood, but often amounted little to add numbers to the total number of church attenders in Canada. That is, we have done much of re-arranging Christians.

The nitty-gritty of dirty works of running a congregation is also devalued in our system as more and more theologs are taught to delegate these unsavory tasks to others so that they, upon graduation, take posts as pastors to address high minded spiritual matters. Mechanic types are replaced by CEO types. They are encouraged to bring in outside experts to fix menial relational problems. It is so passe to think that a local minister would actually go out on a street to meet a person to invite her into a worship when congregation has only few on Sunday morning.

I've been wondering how to re-introduce elbow grease into day to day work of a small congregation seeing her pastor/minister (who most of the time happens to be a newly graduated theolog) not as CEO types but as a mechanic with no experience being thrusted into a small village. In this sense, the article makes a perfect sense to me.

[Stercus Tauri]

A thoughtful response, Wally. At the risk of being kicked by WW's horse, I can say I've experienced just about every kind of worship under the sun, but there's nothing I've ever seen that is as good as a strong, small rural congregation with an energetic minister. The congregation and minister feed each other and it can become a powerhouse. I know it doesn't always happen, but when it does; the effect on worship is wonderful. We can be a lot of magic wand wavers who try to lead others with words and high tech conjuring tricks rather than with our own dirty hands.

Rather than thinking that "mechanic types are replaced by CEO types", I think the author meant that the CEO types can, if they want, release the inner mechanic (or artist or baker or stonemason and so on) who can work with their hands and make something. Perhaps it doesn't always work. So far as I know, Jesus never took time out from preaching and healing to spend a few hours back at the carpenter's bench - he was too busy and never in one place long enough. But at least he had that knowledge and understood artisans and their values. But then, I know more than one minister who should be locked up rather than be allowed to own a toolbox. However, the theory has certainly worked for me, and I get enormous satisfaction from shaping and assembling small bits of metal that will not be monuments to me, but will be something I can look on with satisfaction, just as much as published work. Perhaps more so, because there are fewer critics. That could lead into another discussion... How often do we intentionally try to raise monuments to ourselves with our work, and should we? That can be ministry or metal bending or biblical exegesis or mission or motor bike repairs or anything else we throw ourselves into.

[Worship Warrior]

The Royal Steed would never kick you for this post. A small rural congregation with an energetic minister is exactly my point: it is an organization that works together in a common cause, and I suspect this most often happens when the energetic minister is actually the driving force. In a business model he/she would have studied the community and developed an approach that would resonate to the perceived needs of that community, and guess what, that would be an equally energetic, vibrant Jesus.

But the same can happen in an urban church as well if the minister(s) understand that their work must be relevant and credible in the community.

Our denomination stresses knowledge and graduates some very intelligent people, but it does very little to prepare them for the real life experience of a congregation. That's why I wonder if second career clergy have a much more solid understanding of that world outside seminary. Historically, ministers would have higher education than members of the congregation, and their minds would have been less questioned. That's no longer the case, and that's why so many reject the mediocrity that many pastors try to pass off on a Sunday morning.

A recent Barna study showed that young people today still have an attachment to faith as we had back in the 60s and 70s, and perhaps that tells us that religious memory isn't as dead as we sometimes think, but the evidence today suggests the younger generations don't equate that to attending church, and that's a huge point that we don't seem to grasp.

I thought the NYT article was excellent, and appropriate. I have many academic friends, some of whom simply wish to push the boundaries to contemplate the infinitive, and many of these people pass their time completely oblivious to the real world. This author has taken a different road and has found meaning and interface with more normal people. We all need to do more of that. Dirty hands, bricks, and fixing drains are what real folk are about. I know some congregations have fix it teams to help in the community, but in general many are hard pushed to fix the boiler in winter.

If we showed more understanding of the real plight of the modern world, and if we preached an authentic Gospel of Hope and Reconciliation many churches could become living examples of what it really means to be Christian.

[Evangeline]

Good points, WW.

[mack]

Good article. Thanks Stercus. It made me think of this one in The New Republic

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/washington-diarist-the-new-proles

What they have in common is a notion of "knowledge worker" as the new proletariat both in terms of low pay and the dehumanizing and alienating effect of the work. Leon Weiseltier bemoans the fact that the internet makes it impossible for would-be writers to make a living at their craft. Meanwhile the academy and the "knowledge industry" has become a mass production factory which doesn't involve anything that should actually be considered "thinking". 

Some wonderful lines:

Yet my M.A. obscures a more real stupidification of the work I secured with that credential, and a wage to match. When I first got the degree, I felt as if I had been inducted to a certain order of society. But despite the beautiful ties I wore, it turned out to be a more proletarian existence than I had known as an electrician.

For me, at least, there is more real thinking going on in the bike shop than there was in the think tank.

Real thinking involves attending with love to the object under consideration....

Good diagnosis requires attentiveness to the machine, almost a conversation with it, rather than assertiveness, as in the position papers produced on K Street.... to be a good mechanic you have to be constantly open to the possibility that you may be mistaken. This is a virtue that is at once cognitive and moral. It seems to develop because the mechanic, if he is the sort who goes on to become good at it, internalizes the healthy functioning of the motorcycle as an object of passionate concern.

So who learns to think like that around a university these days?

The moral seems to be that

a)if you want to be a writer, you better get a day job. St. Paul's trade of tent making sounds like a sensible choice. (In the 18th century, weavers who worked hand looms combined that with a fair bit of reading, writing of political tracts and general xxxx-disturbing). 

b)if you want to learn how to actually think you might do well to try motorcycle maintenance...which reminds me of a book with a title along those lines written back in the 70's.

[Ewen Steele]

Thank you for sharing this NYT article.

Matthew Crawford has shared an acquired wisdom.

If one didn't learn something, or identify with some aspect of this article...

What role is one playing?