work less, volunteer more

I want to make a difference. But I spend most of my hours and energy at work, behind a desk, in front of a keyboard, in jobs where I doubt my boss would even notice if I wasn't there. While there are jobs that are needed to make communities function well, nurses, teachers, plumbers, I've personally never had one of those jobs.

And then the jobs that do appeal, that strike me as an effective opportunity to really make an impact for good, well they also strike alot of other people that way too and there are no shortage of applicants, making them rather difficult jobs to get. And the thing is that gets me, is that if I got one of those jobs, well I'd just be doing a job that they could easily get someone else, probably equally if not more talented, to do in my absence, because, well there are alot of other people stuck in cubicles wishing their jobs made a difference too.

So what's a girl to do? How do I really make an impact? How can I rearrange the pieces on the chess board?

Well, as of last week when I handed in my temporary job - my new game plan is work less, volunteer more. Budget pared back, I have worked out we can live fine and pay our mortgage on about 20 hours of work a week. I've got 10 worked out, and hopefully a few ideas for the other 10. So now I am a free agent to volunteer at will, where I see I can make the most difference.

So project number one - a social enterprise initiative. Having never run a business before this is all going to be one huge learning curve. Idea - create employment for disadvantaged women through starting a sustainable handmade home/giftware business. Fingers crossed.

I've also enrolled in the refugee volunteer program and am thinking about getting involved with a christian budgeting service. I think that finding ways to fill my free 20 hours will be a very easy task indeed.

Getting to this stage hasn't been easy though. It's taken me a long time to give up on the idea that I've had ingrained in me that I would have a successful corporate career, and somehow it would come to me through the course of that, how to brilliantly transfer those skills to make an impact. This has very much been the safe, expected road (I did spend six years studying for it after all) - the road where I can see the path mapped out (albeit not the rather important transferring of skills part), where I know the terrain, I know my identity. I can answer in one word at the dinner party, when asked what I do. It's the path of much less risk.

It's also hard to let go of the idea that I should be earning five days a week - everything I reasonably can. We have a mortgage to pay after all. That idea feels very deeply ingrained in me, with a guilty hold that I'm somehow cheating my husband not to.

But the well mapped out career path didn't work for me. It didn't fit my strengths, my values, who I was. I don't want to spend twenty years running myself ragged, working on a career I don't care about, earning far more money than I should be spending, and getting nowhere towards my goal of wanting to make a difference.

This new way, well I'm not quite sure what it's going to look like. It's full of risk. I have no idea whether my business will succeed or achieve what it's supposed to. Money will be a lot tighter. People will probably look at me pityingly, as if I couldnt' get a real job, and ask me repeatedly, forgetting the answer each time, why it is I'm not using my law degree. And I have absolutely no idea what to tell people when they ask me what I do at dinner parties.
But at least I feel that for the first time I'm moving in the right direction.

boldness

goethe
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

I first saw this saying on a quotable card in a little bookshop in San Fransisco. The truth of it hit me in an inescapable, niggling, unsettling way. The times I fail, are mainly because I don't try, or I try, but I give up too easily. How many grand schemes and ideas are shot down in my head before they get a chance to come to life? How few risks do I take, conscious of the pressing concerns of appearances, or fear of failure, or because I'm tired, too busy, too distracted to pay attention? How easily do I sacrifice potential ideas and schemes and initiatives, without thought to regret, to the potential?

I'm so conflicted. I want to live large. I want to live a life that counts. That connects, that tries, that dares to be brilliant, and out of the ordinary. But I'm a melancholic with thin skin. I worry my ideas will fall flat, won't work, that I'll look silly. I worry I'll over commit myself and burn out in spectacular fashion. It all seems too hard, too much, too many details I can't work out, too many things against me. And I have a deathly fear of failure.

How do I resolve this conflict, this conflict that tears within me?

There really is only one way forward, only one way that I'll ever be at peace with myself when I'm 80. And that way quite simply has to be to choose boldness over fear.

How exactly that's done, remains to be seen.

good fences make good neighbours

Ok so it's time to get a bit more practical.

I like people, but I also like my space. I'm a strong supporter of civility, you know, good fences make good neighbours (Robert Frost's brilliant 'Mending Wall' poem). I don't really know my neighbours, I just do the nod, or, if I get really stuck, engage in a little small talk. I get nervous about the idea of pulling down walls, of going past the 'neighbour' phase - it's safe, you're not stuck if the woman in the house behind you turns out to be emotionally needy and clingy, or the man in the house in front a little weird but delighted that you're now best friends. If you see my point.

But I've also been getting this vibe from God that I can't be serious about living him out, if I'm not prepared to get a little messy with my neighbours. So, I've decided to make brownie - and this week take brownie to all of my neighbours and introduce myself (yes, I've never even spoken to some...) and invite one set over for coffee.

Watch this space.

Marketing an Easy Faith

Mic Duncan at a recent dinner concluded on his given topic about the future of the Church, that the future lies not in recruiting new believers, but in evangelising its own.

At the risk of being terribly harsh and hypocritical, I agree that New Zealand churches really are full of ‘half believers’; of those that have prayed the prayer, made it in the door, but, well to be frank, very little else. Nothing that looks like the vibrant reality of the life Christ was a proponent of. Churches instead are often preoccupied with numbers; numbers of bums on pews, giving numbers, new believer numbers, numbers through programs. And many Christians seem to think that praying the prayer and making it in the door and through a program or two is enough. Yes we know that faith without works is dead, but works are hard to quantify. Apathy, disconnection, disobedience, what do they really look like? Sure it’s easy enough to impeach a minister for having an affair, sex is easy enough to slot into the disobedience, lack of integrity, just plain wrong categories, but a lack of interest in God, failure to care for those around you, secret pride, apathy about justice – it’s often hard to tell. Faith without works often still looks like faith through the limited lens of Sunday services.

Imagine the impact of the Church if its members lived up to the call of Christ. Or even just tried really.

As I write this I think about a recent Canvas article talking about the rebranding of Christianity and the marketing machine that is so many mega churches. The article talked about the lengths some New Zealand churches are going to, to ‘recruit’ churchgoers, creating marketing machines, with celebrity bands, sound engineers and full time designers, slick dance and production, online media and big name speakers. I can’t help but wonder about a correlation between the ‘half believers’ in pews and the marketing hype of modern Christianity.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the marketing per se I have a problem with. I love Godmarks billboards (you know, the black and white “I don’t mind if you yell at me, at least we’re talking” types), I do – I often sit in traffic and start talking honestly to God after seeing one of their billboards. And I have numerous friends who have come to faith through a mega church marketing ploy, who never would have darkened the door of a small, quieter community church.

I do have a problem with the marketing selling the church and the people, but not Christ, with hype that doesn’t seem to end and the core of the gospel take over as the focus. I have a problem with marketing that glosses over the core bits of Christianity like sacrifice and obedience and instead promotes prosperity and happiness. And I have a problem with marketing that doesn’t deal with the hard questions of life, like the mother diagnosed with terminal cancer, or someone who just lost their job with a mortgage and five kids to support.

I know churches don’t intend to market to the exclusion of any of the above. I attended a marketing mega church for five years. And all of the staff would be horrified to think that they may be doing so to the exclusion of the things above - they intend to present the gospel, to connect, to be real. But they also seek to market the gospel, to make it fun, more palatable, to make it exciting. And in that tension I think it’s hard to not push out key elements of the gospel that don’t gel with the marketing direction.

The Canvas writer asks “But even if churches attract new flocks, what will happen if the PR power runs out?”. And it does, it loses its power over people eventually, for some earlier than others. Of my friends who came to faith in the mega churches, all of them left when the road got bumpy or the façade didn’t seem real or they failed to connect. Their new glossy faiths didn’t equip them to deal with crisis. For some it was months, others years. Some went to smaller less flashy churches, others left altogether.

Yes in the mega church they could connect in small groups or different programs with people who could answer their questions, but the problem is that big, loud, uber marketed churches aren’t usually conducive to environments to connect in, and a continuous stream of positive messages often deters people from asking questions and opening up about honest struggles. It’s hard to market Christianity and at the same time preach on the theologically difficult and emotive subject of the problem of pain. I respected what the leaders of my mega church were doing, but in the end I had to conclude that the marketing and the hype distracted me from (and the Church from having the energy to focus on) really growing in what it meant to be a follower of Christ in day to day reality.

At my mega church, as long as I attended three services a week, a small group and was on ushering every month, I was doing great. No matter that I had no time for non-Christian friends or hobbies or time alone. Numbers and programs and attendance became the hallmarks of how I was doing as a Christian, because it’s just too hard to monitor it another way in a Church that size. And consequently I was never really challenged to leave that place of ‘half believership’, to delve deep into what it means to follow Christ.

And while most churches don’t (or maybe more accurately, can’t) go to such lengths, how many spend inordinate numbers of volunteer hours on producing slick worship shows and building bigger and better buildings and the altar call gets tinted to focus on a Christ that will meet all your expectations and more? I know that most churches I’ve attended have ‘marketed’ in that sense – but are we really looking at what the cost is for these marketing campaigns, what we are excluding and what sort of foundation we create for the people who respond and those already in our pews?

church wanted

I am currently unattached. Not in a relationship. Single.

I refer not to my relationship status, but my church status. I am currently without church.

I'm surprised to find that it bothers me. I'm not really super pro church, ironically given that my husband is embarking on pastoral leadership training this year with my full support. I should clarify - I'm pro the concept of church, in the biblical, original fresh sense. Not so much the organism that has evolved out of the Bible and languishes today in our cities.

For travel reasons I've been without church for quite awhile, as we cycle toured around the world. And it didn't really bother me. For sermons and music its hard to pass up the quality I can download on my ipod. For community, I had my emails, skype and of course my husband.

In many ways the attendance of church can be an event not to be missed, missed as in regretting not going that is. It can be a place of stale ideas, false community, pasted on smiles - nothing resembling or even whispering of promises of, the abundance of joy Christ promised.

But yet at the same time I think a more accurate comment would be to say that I miss church. Even when attending these lifeless buildings, I miss church.

I miss community, real community, the gritty type that calls you and asks you out on a friday night, the type that knows when you're down, that listens and shares their life with you. Community that comes in all shapes and sizes, the type you would never probably associate with in your average world. And in a world where it is too easy to network and keep in touch with friends, the concept of community seems to have been diluted to some once a month coffee catch up.

I miss rubbing shoulders with people who really are connecting with God. Or who aren't, but are open about that, and their desire (or lack of at that time) to connect. Who really want to know God and be known. To be humbled by the stories of others passion and hunger for God, is the best medicine for my apathy, or pride if I was being honest, which I might as well be.

I miss creative spaces where you are opened up to thoughts and ideas and worship spaces you had never thought of before. Of sermons with ideas that cut to the quick, that challenge, annoy, make you ponder the real meat of life.

A good church can root you. Can be your community, your carer. It can be what keeps you on track, focused on spiritual matters in a world where everything else is so much more pressing. It can be your mentor, your accountability. It can be your resource center, your reference point. It can be your place where you find purpose in service. It can be a creative place where you encounter God and your own creativity.

And so the unenviable search for the right church must begin. And begin with a sense of hope, of new and good things, and of the guiding hand of God.