Don't they know it's Christmas?

So Angela Tilby has got people muttering about her, and it's not her (when I was at Cambridge) trademark 'must have' raincoat that's being discussed but clergy and the 'day off'. Of course the day off in question this weekend is this Sunday, which is Christmas Day.

She makes a nod to the fact that some will cancel their early Communion so that they can be at home with their families and bemoans this act of 'family-olatry' and points to something quite interesting that is perhaps lost in the noise. She makes the observation: "Family worship, it seems, can tip over quite easily at this time of year into worship of the family."

The problem is, I don't think she's got it all wrong. I know some will point at her and make mention of the fact that she's single (or was when I regularly encountered her) as if that precludes her from having any right to make an assessment or comment of stuff that concerns family. But surely she has family of some sort and regardless of the actual status of the woman, she also has the right to an opinion.

Some years back, whilst servicing my title post we had a fellow Curate who felt that a midnight service and two services on the next morning were too much and so, having complained about workload, family time and 'getting tired' was given a retired cleric to come and do the services for them. Many around me sneered at this whilst I merely despaired of it all and joyfully went about my Christmas daily tasks with joy and excitement.

More recently I knew of another Curate who took the Christmas Eve off so they could spend time with their family! I have to say that I was as appalled at that as I was unsurprised at their actions :-(

Our family has always protected meal times and this was, and remains, the only time that the telephone goes unanswered. The family time around the table and the 'how was your day?" conversations with our four children and us two parents around the table was, and is, important. The problem is that we live in a world where clergy are comfortable reporting the fact that they don't attend a church service when on holiday as they confuse their faith with work and workplace!

Where we are we do the Christmas services, and often do a 'don't be home alone @ Christmas' meal too, making Boxing Day our family Christmas. We don't get to go off visiting family because they're too far away and no sooner would we arrive than we'd need to be back to do midweek Communions, celebrate feasts and holy days and do the occasional offices that crowd in directly after Christmas as the mortuaries are emptied. The 'post' wotsit week off can come when it can and will be used to let us to our visiting then! Simple, innit?

The reality is that Christmas Day is a working day and it is either arrogance or ignorance that causes people to assume that they have a right to veto what is rightly demanded of them in the role they have made theirs. If medical staff decided that they wouldn't work on a Christmas Day because it impinged  upon their family rights the world would be up in arms. Consider the response should ambulance technicians, paramedics and drives all decide that family came before the job; would we sit happily by and applaud this I wonder?

As annoying as it might be to some, I have to say that I think Angela Tilby has got it right, and some of my colleagues need to take a moment to realise that we are not in an office hours work environment where we can decide that the answerphone goes on with the early evening news and is turned off when the BBC Radio Four 'Today' programme is ended! The old chestnut regarding emergencies and the fact that they usually are not an emergency and can therefore waits until the next day - or as a colleague recently said (to nods of affirmation), "If it wasn't an emergency during the day which should it be something I have to get involved with during the night?" Complete and utter tosh!

Our children were between the ages of two and eight when I entered the Anglican ministry - we worked out ways of doing Christmas which fitted into the fact that there were a number of services on the menu. The luxury (not a right) of being able to modify one's work to suit what we want is a privilege many clergy seem to assume is a right - perhaps we need all clergy to go to 'a real job' for a couple of weeks each year so we can make real the demands of commuting and being stuck in an office or a factory and living and working to the clock and the whim of workload, workplace pressures and unsympathetic management.

A comment passed by a much younger cleric indicated that Angela Tilby was reel a 'dinosaur', a relic of a time gone by and totally unrepresentative of 'today's Church'.

Could it be that the reason the Church (at large and the CofE in particular) finds itself beset by so many problems is that we have changed calling into a job and forgotten that first and foremost we are merely laos (God's people) who have the privilege of worshipping God as believers first and foremost  and as ministers of the Gospel by dint of the calling we claim is on us.

Perhaps the homes where 'church' is the job one partner does whilst the other has little or nothing to do with it - and I know clergy homes where the non-ordained partner refuses to answer the 'work' phone - could this be part of the problem?

Or perhaps reducing services to maintain a perceived proper personal quality of life at the expense of the preaching of the Gospel; applauded as 'looking after their family' whilst ignoring the fact that the family of God and the needs of those who are far off are neglected by those of a similar mind and vilifying Tilby because her views are not yours.

There has to be a balance (says the bloke who forgets to take days off) and being Anglican there has to be a via media - but the problem is that too many clergy are servicing themselves and the demands that they have created with regard to family rather than the rightly-discharged presbyteral ministry.

Feel free to disagree - but here I stand with Angela Tilby and her unpopular views. It's always good to realise that we often grow more by engaging with people with whom we might disagree than those who say and think no differently from us: May God help,us all to dialogue and discover God's words above the noise we all to often create.

Pax

ps. The only Office hours clergy should be keeping are the daily office hours :-)

pps. At the end of the day we need to dialogue, step back and think - we all make our own decisions and want to be right, but the execution of this right on our part does not confer 'wrongness' on the other person,

What's the 'best' bit of the job?

It's amazing how many people ask me that question during the week, and when they do there are normally a few assumptions made along with the asking - so how's about we have a quick consideration of what they think might be true concerning me and my ministry:

The most common assumption this time of the year is, with Christmas just around the corner, that I'm coming up to my 'busy' time. In fact this is a smoke and mirrors moment because I always feel that the run up to Christmas is perhaps one of my quietest. Since people assume I'm busy, they leave me alone and so I'm left with the highly visible carol concerts, Christingles, school plays and the like  which in turn confirm my busyness. I'm never any more busy during the Christmas run in and what is before me is always, generally speaking, fun.

The most common assumption all year round is that weddings must be the 'best' bit and funerals (which is where the topic is often raised) must be the worst, or at least saddest, and therefore probably the 'worst' bit! Here, perhaps surprisingly for the many who present me with the, "I bet weddings are the best bit of the job, aren't they?" I have to say that that title would go to the funerals I conduct. This generally results in a bit of a shock and the question, "Really?"

One of the most amazing opportunities I have is that of making the experience of someone about to be in the same physical space with a loved one for the last time as positive and enjoyable (a word people often look shocked at) as it can be. If I can bring the person to life in anecdote and confirm the positives and demonstrate how the negatives we're part of the journey and therefore part of the person (without diminishing the person  making things a curse) and do all this with the opportunity for them to laugh, smile and remember the deceased - and in so doing create a service the deceased would enjoy being at (because they are, aren't they?)- then I've done it right.

Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy weddings, but they are a different animal and the connections made (regardless of how hard you work at them) are not the same as those made at a funeral.

The most common 'funny' assumption is that old chestnut which states hat we clergy only work one day a week, and that's Sunday. Of course, being a bit of a fundamentalist fanatic (a label I won after telling a churchwarden in a place I was visiting that he needed to be modelling Christ for the congaregatiin and the community of which he was a pillar) I have to tell them lthat, because of the fourth commandment, I never work on Sunday! Now that's an invitation to an interesting conversation for sure!

And I don't work on a Sunday - I worship - just as I have done on a Sunday for as long as I have realised my salvation lies in Jesus, the Christ, and called myself a Christian. Oddly, some of those I meet (including clergy) seem to think that being a cleric is a job and that when they have a Sunday off this means they don't have to go to church* - church on Sunday is not a workplace to be set free from, to see it as that is to forget that underneath it all we are all laos (The people of God) and reduce calling to nothing more than yet another job, albeit a job of a very different kind.

Perhaps that's why some of those I meet tell me of how they operate Office hours, answerphones going on outside of them, and how the Vicarage is their home and not a place that people should be visiting coming to engage with them.  Meanwhile I long for the days when the daily routine was walking (or in some other way covering) the patch and engaging with the people of the parish.

Ministry is about relationship and relationships are about people and underpinning, and overarching, that is the reconciled life in God the Father. enabled by the Holy Spirit, won for us by Jesus, the Christ.

So the real answer is all of it, all of the time - yes even at 2:30 in the morning when one of those in the patch who is mentally ill is having a crisis, because we stand with them as Christ stands with us - and who knows, they might just be an angel ;-)

So Lord, Thank You for today, the opportunities, the blessings and the challenges, keep them coming.

* I love holidays amd the opportunity to go worship somewhere different and, best bit for me, be on the  receiving end of a blessing.