Push-Bike Pastoring: Today's By The Way Column for The Medicine Hat News

We recently watched the first series of the BBC's new and excellent production based on GK Chesterton's Father Brown ecclesiastical mystery novels. We borrowed the DVD set from the Medicine Hat Public Library; one of hundreds of television series and movies available for borrowing for no more than the $5 annual library membership fee. What a deal! We figure we'll subscribe to Netflix when we run out of the library DVDs which, so far, doesn't look to happen any time soon. But I digress…

Watching Father Brown pedalling around his impossibly picturesque English village, black cassock flapping in the breeze of his passing, looked pretty good to me. No church growth strategies in those days (early '50s), just looking after his flock and celebrating Mass. Nothing but plain, old fashioned cure of souls.

I felt a bit of a pang about my days as an Anglican parish priest because of Father Brown. I find myself wishing I'd done more of that plain old fashioned push-bike pastoring; more "non-productive" time spent with ordinary folk just hanging out, listening, praying, drinking coffee (or even the occasional scotch), with no real measurable growth in mind, no getting things done; just being present through the mostly unmeasurable, slow, relational, often maddeningly imperceptible, process of folks working out their relationships with Jesus. I wish I had spent more time just pedalling beside them without worrying so much about how fast, or slow, we were going.

Envy is a sin, I know, but it's pretty close to what I felt as I watched Father Brown pedal hither and yon. I envied the fictitious Father and the days when Christianity was part of the warp and woof of everyday life, when priests and pastors were respected (or is that a fiction, too?), when pastoring was not about goals and objectives, in a place where you could pedal between visits, cassock flowing.

Except for the murders, of course. I don't envy Father Brown that. I've only ever had to preside at the funeral of one murder victim. A hard thing. And I had nothing whatsoever to do with the solving of that murder. O, and full disclosure, I should also mention (admit?) that the murder in the first episode takes place in the local Anglican church!

Sigh.

Gene+

Eastertide: Running on Empty and Monotheistic Monotony

Another Easter come and gone. I always felt like it was a long run and  an uphill climb for a parish priest through Lent to Easter. There was some Easter running for Mary Magdalene, Simon Peter and John, too—read some more thoughts on the subject here.  

Then comes the joy and release of the lovely Eastertide easy peddling downhill run to Pentecost and summer. Downhill was good because, once Easter was done, I was often spent and would be running on empty for a few days. Running on empty isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it turns out. Christians have been running on the reality of that empty tomb for over two thousand years—more thoughts on that here. 

Monotheistic Monotony

I read somewhere that monotony could be a problem in clergy life. The same seasons, stories and readings year after year could wear a cleric down. Apart from the occasional worry about coming up with something new and original to say each time the cycle repeated itself, the repetition didn't bother me. When I first came out of seminary I was a little afraid I would have preached all I had to say in about six weeks. Once I realized just how endlessly rich and diverting the Scriptures are, I relaxed and enjoyed the mixture of reprises and new insights whenever they came.  

I came across some wisdom from GK Chesterton on the subject in a piece on the joys of knitting over at Her-meneutics recently: 

Children have abounding vitality… they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. 

But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon.

It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

Lovely. Read the whole article here. 

On the Strangeness of Being Clergy

A phrase from ++Rowan's Anglican Consultative Council Presidential address caused me to smile. He referred to

a favourite phrase of mine from the great Richard Hooker, our common imbecility as Archbishops.

Far be it from me to comment on that from my much humbler station. It reminded me, however, of a couple of descriptions of those of us at my level. For example, Alistair McGrath shares a rather similar description of some nineteenth century pastors as

thin, vapid, affected, driveling little doodles. (Christianity’s Dangerous Idea: the Protestant Revolution—a History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-first (HarperOne, 2007), p369

I fear such doodlery still exists. I catch glimpses of it from the corner of my eye in myself some days.

And then there's the much kinder GK Chesteron,

A clergyman may be apparently as useless as a cat, but he is also as fascinating, for there must be some strange reason for his existence. Orthodoxy (Logos ebook) p289 

There must be some truth in it all. Canon 17 of our erstwhile Diocesan Canons deals with the

Intrusions and the Inhibition of Strange Clergymen

Most of us remain uninhibited as useless, but fascinating, doodles. Some rise to the dizzy heights of ArchEpiscopal imbecility. It puts the idea of being fools for Christ in a whole new light!

Anglicanism is so much fun.