Leader or Manager?

More and more I find myself taken up with people who want to be safe in their own little pool. They don't want to see the congregations grow because that would change things and make the place uncomfortable for them!

They don't want to see new buildings; and to be honest, neither do I unless the need is real and the members have the vision and drive to make it happen, after all the biggest curse I know of us that of a dogcollar building because they wanted it.

The issues, for me at least, are bound up in people who are wanting to be leaders. What this means is that they want to be in charge! I meet few leaders but many (poor) managers and though this sounds like a put down, it isn't meant to be, it is merely a statement of what is. This is due to the fact that we are so very often caught up in the business of running a business where 'doing' and 'being efficient' are the twin gods of success. I meet so many 'cost effective' clergy who present a bank balance approach to Church and it is here that the problem lies.

We are called to be 'effective', that is to be out there making a difference because of the difference that being Christian confers upon us. We are not called to be sustainable but to be fruitful and it is here that the problems of Church are grounded.

I have had some who want to be 'up the front' because that would fulfil their needs and yet, regardless of how fulfilled they never were, the people remained unconvinced by them and the fruit they produced. Oddly though, others who had neither education or wit or experience (life, Christianity and Bible related) have proved themselves to be willing and effective conduits for the Gospel (despite the often sneering opposition).

As June arrives our tiny church is blessed as we celebrate one of ours ordained this month - our gift to the wider Church. We celebrate as others move along the line to discern their calling and vocation, seeking to bless and serve those around them and to look like Jesus, the Christ.

We are looking to touch those members of the community we serve with the Gospel made flesh - the Church that is made of living stones, not self-seeking and process-heavy but seeking to honour and worship God in all that He is and does to, for and through us.

Recently I was asked for goals, objectives and timescales for a place I had seen for minutes and whose people I did not know (but warmed to immediately I met them) and this holds up  a mirror to the problems we have time and time again in the wonderful world of Church. We are a visionary place regulated by God's call and the vision that burns in us - not managers bound by good management techniques and effective processes (and I'm not saying we don't need them - it's all a matter of perspective and balance).

Those who fail to plan might well plan to fail but those who are bound by goals, objectives and timescales are condemned to manage decline and call it sustainability. I don't want to merely exist, I want the Church to triumph and expand. Anyone else ready to storm the gates with me?

Education - A return to the good old days

I see that most excellent of all ministers, Michael Gove, is preaching the old Conservative gospel of stratification by means of our educational processes. Having engaged in one of the most splendid knee-jerk responses to the GCSE re-sit as a panacea to poor teaching standards by proclaiming that things must change he has now turned his attention to the whole subject of examinations.

What this woefully inept and inadequate little chap has done now is to proclaim that we should return to the GCE for the able students and re-introduce CSEs for the 'less able'. This would fit in well with the current practice which sees those who can achieve GCSE grades A to C being pushed in that direction whilst the 'thickies' are led towards 'less academically strenuous' vocational qualifications.

This is a wonderful return to the days when the eleven-plus segregated children into grammar or secondary schools and by doing so assigned the blue or white collar at an early age. In one scholl we were being told we were the future of the nation whilst down the road our friends were being taught the basic skills to respond to the factory hooter as low aspirational drones.

Education is not about the potential for earning, although once again I have heard so called educators describe it as the means by which earnings can be maximised. Surely education is about realising the potential in a child so that they can be the best person possible in terms of skills, understanding and self-expression.

Not all children fared well with the GCE system whereby all the eggs went into one or two exam papers in the4 Summer term. GCSE is a very valid and valuable system and whilst we do need to raise standards (and stop putting out children into education too early as we do now) we need to have a system that continuously monitors and tests our children without the potential for raising grades unfairly (and this is what resits do - see postscript).

Pax

ps. One of our children was put in for a resit of a GCSE exam as part of a class-wide exercise. The teacher had 'forgotten' to teach certain parts of the syllabus and so, to counter this error the whole class was booked in to take the paper again (at the school's cost). Now ours did well and decided not to take the paper but it is this, not a return to GCE/CSE that Gove should be addressing. But then again that would be corrective not political!