Quick, pass the paracetamol! or The Joys and struggles of Church leadership
Church ‘life’ as we used to know it all but stopped, for most of us, in March 2020. Services still continue online, as do events such as Alpha courses and small group meetings. Leaders found have found ways to ‘keep going’ but what use are we making of this ‘pause’ to assess and evaluate ‘what church is’, how our leadership operates and what church might look like in the future?
Questions like the ones above are not easy to ask and can be even more challenging to answer! Depending on denomination and background, how services are organised can be more or less constrained by external structures which are well outside the control of the local congregation. Add to those external factors the expectations of cultural inheritance and the result is ‘assumptions preclude creative questioning’!
The bible uses the metaphor of a ‘body’ for the church. It is seen as an organism with each part contributing to the well-being of all the other parts. If this should be so, what about ‘check-ups’?
Medical check-ups, if my recent Google search for ‘routine tests’ is anything to go by, should be a regular part of life. Often however, despite knowing that prevention is better than cure, many of us don’t have the tests that are available to us even if, as in the UK, they are free of charge. So, what about spiritual ‘check-ups’ both for churches and leaders? What is the danger that they, like the proverbial visit to the dentist, are avoided until the pain is too great to ‘put it off any longer’?
Over the last few years, I have watched a number of churches, from various denominations, engage in self-destructive behaviour most of which, I believe, could have been avoided if relatively straight forward spiritual health checks had been in place and implemented with grace, oneness and good will.
Dealing with issues early is essential but, simply taking paracetamol or ibuprofen is not going to be sufficient if the source of the headache is a brain tumour! I am sorry if that sounds over dramatic but in some cases that I have witnessed recently, there has been what amounts to cancer in the life of a church. But even if the disease is not as serious, are the spiritual equivalents of thermometers and blood pressure monitors available and do we use them?
So, The Message Works Trust is conducting an initial online survey. The aim of the simple survey (see the link below) is to help understand how, church leaders and local congregations approach the issue of ‘spiritual health checks’.
Spiritual health check survey https://forms.gle/PZffNLtKmeire8Yn7