HOW TO SURVIVE BEING A CHURCHWARDEN

 

You may be familiar with the statement that John’s Gospel is different to the other three Gospels. A Gospel like Mark’s is stripped back, punchy and direct – a bit like a news bulletin jumping from one big issue to another. John’s Gospel, by contrast, feels like an intimate chat show, where one person reveals a lot about themselves in conversation with another. There are a series of one to one encounters in John’s Gospel, which move quickly to the last days and hours of Jesus, where he has a lot to say about his identity, his life and his purpose.

 

When people talk a lot, they often end up contradicting themselves without realising it. Two statements of Jesus stand out in John’s Gospel:

 

I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly, he says in 10:10

 

This is followed two chapters later with this:

 

Those who love their life will lose it, and those who hate their life will keep it for eternal life.

 

Is Jesus contradicting himself when he says he wants us to hate our lives while enjoying abundant life? John’s is the only Gospel where Jesus does not specifically say that we should take up our cross and follow him, but these words: those who love their life will lose it, and those who hate their life will keep it for eternal life feel like a re-framing of the invitation to take up our cross. It is less a contradiction, and more of a paradox: holding two apparently contradictory things together in a way that reveals a deeper truth. But let’s take a step back here.

 

If you are a churchwarden, you will have arrived at your role in different ways. Maybe no-one else stepped forward and you felt the obligation; perhaps you were pressurised into it; you might even have been the compromise candidate to hold different factions together. Or maybe you stepped forward because you want to give something back to God or to others, or to both. It might be you see the gifting and the skills you have and know this is a role for you. Or quite simply, you think God invited you into the role. There is nothing wrong with any of these reasons. The Bible is full of characters who didn’t want to do a job but ended up doing it: Moses, Gideon, Jeremiah and Paul to name only a few leading lights. Finding yourself in a role for God is rarely the end point in a linear, logical story. Life is messy, and Church was messy long before Messy Church took off.

 

Whatever led you to the office of churchwarden, behind it is the call of God. You may struggle to recognise that or not to believe it, but when people end up in roles in the Church, they have before them a calling from God. Being a churchwarden is at the heart of God’s plan for each of you right now, and the way forward is not to wish it wasn’t or to pretend you’re not up to it, but to look at this with the eyes of faith, because you can’t overestimate the influence you are exerting in this role.

 

To extend the adjective I just used: messy wardenship is a fact of life. There are issues you can never resolve, there are problem people who won’t go away and who find inventive ways of annoying you. There is conflict that simmers or boils over. There is paperwork, endless paperwork. There are audits and there is safeguarding. And then there is the building – or buildings. While the Church in continental Europe often enjoys taxpayer funding to support its buildings, we have to make our own way even while the rest of the population assumes we get state support. And there is always something that needs seeing to in the building. You also have the duty to represent the views of parishioners to the clergy, and the messenger’s role is often a precarious one. And all these challenges, minus the last one, are intensified during a clergy vacancy, which happens more frequently and for longer than ever before.

 

For you, all these things are ways you are taking up your cross and following Jesus. Our eyes are drawn to the end point of that journey: crucifixion itself. But the immediate experience of carrying a large, unwieldy piece of wood is the sheer weight of doing so, of feeling overburdened, of having to carry on because no-one else is volunteering but they are content to watch the spectacle of you stumbling along. To fulfil a volunteer role for God requires self-denial: you could be doing something else, but you sacrifice that for this. This is, I think, how you ‘hate your life’ in the words Jesus used.

 

But you have also been given life abundantly. You have peace with God because Jesus has reconciled us with the Father. You have renewed relationships with others, no longer being acquaintances but brothers and sisters, according to Jesus. The trust you have in God is a constant source of strength and hope; faith transforms the way we look at and understand the world around us. The world today feels like it is running out of control like a car whose brakes have failed, but God never loses control, and he promises none of us will ever be plucked from his hand. And God wants us to fly tip the anxiety we feel about all this into his lap, because he cares for us. These are all ways in which we find abundant life.

 

It is a mistake to think a churchwarden only deals with the practical and not the spiritual side of things, because the only way the spiritual can be incarnated is through practical action. A churchwarden’s role is deeply spiritual and the more this is believed, the more this will be seen. It helps us to see encouragements, rather than to overlook them or to think that outcomes are just random and have little to do with God. The kingdom of God is always drawing nearer, but as it is a human tendency to dwell on the negatives rather than the positives, to be obsessed with criticism rather than praise, we easily miss how the kingdom is drawing near in our own lives. And when we obsess over the things in front of us, we forget that the kingdom often draws near in the margins, just out of eyeshot, and that we need to loosen an intense focus on the thing that’s preoccupying us to scan that horizon.

 

Those who fulfil roles for God occupy two concentric circles. The inner circle is you, God and the role. The outer circle is you and God, and it is the outer circle that predates and outlives the inner circle. The risk in Christian ministry, is that the outer circle shrinks to the size of the inner circle. This results in us having a relationship with God only through the role we have, and when we step outside that role, we ignore God. Today’s retreat is about that outer circle: you and God, because he cares for your soul.

 

The parable of the prodigal son speaks powerfully into this. We spend a lot of time thinking about the prodigal son, rather like the father did, and it is a source of joy when prodigals return to God, as they do week after week in the UK. But many Christians, and in my experience, lots of church leaders, identify more readily with the older brother. The one who is dutiful, hard-working and reliable, and yet behind this, instead of fulfilment in role, becomes embittered and resentful. All these years I have worked like a slave for you, he says. And yet the Father’s response is: all that is mine is yours. Think about that, when the roof starts to leak again, or the choir is in a mood with the vicar, or the PCC is languishing in the mud of late night AOB. Because I think there is something there for you, personally, in all that God owns, and he owns everything, right?

 

God values your role as churchwarden; it is about presence in the midst of both order and uncertainty; tidiness and mess. You may feel you don’t resolve as much as you like, so let me end with a quote from Woody Allen: eighty percent of success in life is just turning up. And boy, do you turn up.

 

But remember he cherishes his relationship with you more than your role, so much more: I have come that churchwardens may have life, and have it abundantly.