Ministry Tips 126-150

Still haven't worked out how many of these there are going to be but they are definitely slowing down:

126. Work out how to have a high theology of people and a low theology of things.
127. 'While there's death there's hope' is sometimes the best you can say.
128. Always accept resignations.
129. For interruptions use GRACES - should I Greet, Receive, Accompany, Confer, Engage or See off? http://stevetilley.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/interruptions.html
130. Send hand-written thank-you postcards to people as often as you can.
131. Occasionally buy people a gift for no reason. 'I remembered you liked this album at my house' sort of thing.
132. Occasionally get people together who all joined the church under the same previous incumbent.
133. Pick a few people you trust (not all those who agree with you). Ask them how they think you are doing every now and again.
133. Apart from your day off have at least one evening a week when you don't work.
134. When someone complains to you about the weather tell them you are in sales not management (Bishop Gene Robinson).
135. If you get in financial difficulties tell your boss / diocese / manager at an early stage.
136. Have something at hand you know will cheer you up when you feel down (depression is different).
137. If you begin by running to the 1st minor pastoral problem you will spend your ministry running to minor pastoral problems.
138. Spending all your time visiting the congregation leaves you much-loved and numbers only changed by birth & death rates.
139. Take a double day off once a month. Other people get weekends. Why not you?
140. If you absolutely have to eat a slug, slice it real thin and add flavour.
141. There is nothing intrinsically evil about fast food, PJ days, box-set binging, beer, rock and roll or a lie-in.
142. Ask members of a new congregation how many straws they are currently carrying and their maximum straw-bearing capacity.
143. Don't tinker with stuff too much once it's good enough (see 12).
144. You will do better after a break for prayer.
145. You will see things differently after a rest/break/sleep.
146. The results are God's business not yours. Sowers sow seed. Then stuff happens.
147. Look for people to work with who have got 'It'. You cannot describe what 'It' is but you will know when it is missing.
148. Look for people to work with who are 'one of us'. You cannot explain what this means but you will know when they are not.
149. Accumulate bitter-enders and second-milers. The only way to do this is to be one.
150. It is not evil to plan things on the back of an old envelope; but don't lose it.

How to run a great church meeting; commandments 19-26

1. The chair needs to have good enough hearing to be able to pick up the nuances of mutters. Or the meeting needs to be very well behaved if the disability is acknowledged.

2. All hesitations about innovative matters which involve spending money should be delivered after a period for a good discussion.

3. Sensitivity about good actions that may one day upset a minority should not be at the forefront of a debate.

4. Enthusiasm for vision and strategy should outweigh that for details.

5. The opinions of a future chair, not yet in the meeting, or known, or identified, should not be taken into account.

6. Break for prayer. It's a church meeting.

7. Take things outside the meeting if they don't need everyone's time.

8. Have no desire to make sure everyone gets that what you are doing personally is important and useful.

Great Questions 5

What's the point of remembering it if you've written it down?
(Alastair King - CPAS 1998 or so)

Nagging

In my last parish we had a little mantra at the end of staff meetings where we used to ask each other awkward questions. 'Have you booked any work appointments for your day off?' That was what one of my clergy colleagues wanted to hear so he had to confess if he had. Mine was, 'Have you done your filing?'

What is it with flipping filing? A long time ago I dispensed with a filing tray or basket because then you throw things in that rather than putting them away properly. It's OK if you have a filing clerk (for eight years of my working life I did) but not otherwise. The best solution to the problem is to put each finished-with piece of paper away in the right place immediately you have finished with it. I know this. By and large I do it.

Then, just before Christmas, I was busy and left a piece of paper on top of the filing cabinet before rushing off to some crucial parish business such as a drinks party, instead of putting it away. Next time I had a piece of paper to put away I put it on top of the other one, rather than away, and a pile commenced which, yesterday took me two hours to file. So annoying. I'm the annoyed one and the person I'm annoyed with is me.

Now, there's an associated admin problem you can help me with. The side bars, links and archives of this blog are out of date. I need to spend some time fixing them. If you leave a comment over the next few weeks do give me a bit of a nag. Many thanks.

Hypocrisy

I was chatting to my fine, young colleague the other day - Robin to my Batman isn't right but I'll keep working on it - and found myself talking gibberish. I know, I know, no change there, but stick with me.

I was explaining how I did things and realised that I was a bit behind in actually doing them. For instance, how to keep records of your public speaking. What did you say, when and to whom? I have an excellent system which works best if every new presentation is immediately recorded. It has served me well for over 30 years but I haven't kept it up-to-date in the last three months. The more I don't, the bigger the job gets.

I was explaining how I like to keep my next four talks in my head. That way I am musing on what to say in four weeks time as well as fine-tuning this week's sermon. I was found out when asked what were the main themes of my talk a week on Sunday. I remembered I hadn't even looked at the title. Oops.

Today, I decided, was the day to get a grip. I will make sure I have my next four presentations in my head. OK, so what are they?

• Tonight's opening Alpha talk on Jesus
• Sunday morning harvest sermon at local free church
• Sunday evening sermon on lust and adultery (that should be a hard one)
• Monday's editorial work on parish profile
• Tuesday's Alpha talk on faith, oh don't worry that's number five

I don't feel so bad now. I have my next four major presentations clear in my head but they are over six days not four weeks.

There is the vaguest hintette of a filing pile appearing which I will deal with at once. Thank you for your help.

Paper

Found myself commenting on another blog about how to manage paper and thought readers might like to know the St system, which is pretty effective if you follow it carefully.

Anyone wishing to change their attitude to paper should follow the four Ds of:

Do it (urgent and important paper which should be actioned then filed)

Diary it (non-urgent yet important paper which should be filed until actioned)

Delegate it (urgent yet non-important paper which should be given to someone else to action)

Dump it (non-urgent and non-important paper which should be put in the recycling bin once paper clips, staples and bits of plastic have been removed).

Easy.

Slugs

If you absolutely gotta eat a slug how would you do it? Whole and down in one? Yukk. You'd taste it and the memory would stay for ever. It may well ruin your eating life for all time. How about accompanied by other things you like? Slug and chips anybody, or slug and pesto? If you've not tasted slug before (and lets face it even blackbirds leave them on the side of the plate so those critters can't be that tasty) how do you know the taste won't overwhelm the finest of flavours? You don't. You would never wanna taste pesto again. It's so, well, green.

Here's the deal. If you absolutely gotta (I'll avoid segueing into Samuel L. Jackson's speech on the merits of the AK47 in Jackie Brown, it may upset some readers) eat that sucker then you want it in less than bite-sized chunks. Thin sliced? No thinner. One molecule at a time would be about right.

So what are your slugs? Hey, it was a metaphor all along, you can relax. What jobs are facing you that are so tasteless, so ugly, so damn sluglike that you haven't been able to face them? Carve 'em up friends.

Can't face the filing tray? Put away every piece of paper that needs filing from now on, as it needs doing, avoiding the filing tray and every time you do so put one other piece away from the tray. Bite sized chunks see.

'Plan parish weekend.' Too big to start? Car-headlight job and you the rabbit? Break it down. Make your list longer and the jobs smaller. 'Phone conference centre and book, or confirm booking.' You could do that today. It's only a molecule thick.

Now my trouble, at the moment, is that I didn't eat enough slug in August and so it is providing rather more of my diet than I'm comfortable with. So take this advice from a real failure. Chop up that slug and do it now. And mind your fingers in the dicer.

Meetings, Bloody Meetings

Excuse my language but that was the title of an excellent John Cleese training film made in the 1970s and remade in 1994. It looked at the skills required to make the most of meetings, not the alternative to real work but a genuine, if used well, way to achieve more.

For those who wonder what their clergy do all day, in addition to my regular duties, I have been to four meetings this week.

• Deanery Chapter (25 people: 2 hours) on funeral ministry.
• Deanery Synod (45 people: 2.5 hours) on the Diocesan Structure Review.
• Local Ministry Group Ministers' lunch (5 people: 2 hours) on local organisation.
• Churches Together (20 people: 2 hours although I ducked out early to get to meet with a few people about something else) on about a million different things.

That's 212.5 working hours used in meetings. Although some useful work was done and some decisions made, none of them felt satisfactory. The result of that is feeling (feelings mind, not necessarily reliable) that the time could have been used better, and thus, in a busy week, slightly stressed.

I love meetings when you walk out with the feeling that time has been saved not lost. The one hour meeting I had at the end of the last one, with three other people, saved me three one-to-ones doing briefing, encouraged me to keep going with a task that I had lost a bit of faith in and sent me to bed feeling better than any night this week.

If any chairs of meetings have not seen the film I commend it.

Filing

As an exercise in accountability to each other my previous staff team had 'awkward' questions to ask each other. Are you taking your time off? Are you sticking to your hours? In my case the awkward question was, 'Have you done your filing?' Anticipating that the question might come up in staff meetings was enough to make sure I did it.

Anyway it is easier to put each piece of paper away in the right place immediately, once finished with. It is always then retrievable from the right place without having to search through a filing pile first. I used to teach this stuff to hard-presed ministers; embarrassing that I never learned it myself.

I'm hoping that blogging this (as a displacement exercise from filing) will be a sufficient nudge to send me scuttling like a rat to the pile of papers in the corner of the study and putting them away once I've finished. Maybes. Or it could end up a long post.

I am not struggling with time pressure at the moment, although I have plenty to do, but Wednesdays seem to be doing me in. Tomorrow was busy already before the doctor decided that the cyst operation had to happen then. Just now a phone call from an important pastoral contact, who I had promised to make time for this week, invited me over for tea on, you guessed it, Wednesday. Wednesdays I seem to spend picking up papers in meetings and notes of encounters and then dropping them all in a pile at the end of the day. Tuesdays are spent anticipating the demands of Wednesday; Thursdays are spent recovering from it and (not) filing it.

Tomorrow is a plethora of Ds - doctors, dentists, district church lunch, death (the pastoral visit is post-funeral) and Deanery Synod.

In my soon-to-be-filled filing cabinet you will find the Deanery Synod papers between Council Tax and Deviancy. Best not to ask.

Of course this is all a matter of being in a new place and getting the hang of the first few weeks. I wouldn't have it any other way and wouldn't want to be anyone else. Scuttling time.