Tag: mission

Bored with the Board?

My dearly beloved and I live in an apartment-style condominium. We’ve been here ever since I retired thirteen years ago. The place suits us very well, although we still have stuff in boxes from our downsizing from a house. We bought it with the intention of staying here as long as we possibly could. We hope that any change will be years away, but who knows?

After living here for three years, I had enough questions about the building’s management to seek a seat on the Board of Directors. I spent one year as a Director at Large, one as Vice President, and the last eight years as President. During that time, I developed a solid working relationship with our Property Manager/Building Administrator, and also spent some time educating myself about condominium management and related issues. For most of this time, I found myself enjoying the work, which surprised me. When I was in parish ministry, the issues that I found most tiresome related to property management. And what does a condo board deal with? You guessed it: property management! The difference is that managing a building is the mission of a condo board, but is only tangential to the mission of a parish. Yes, it’s important to maintain a building, but that’s not the parish’s mission — or at least it shouldn’t be!

Life on the board started to get tiresome two or three years ago, when a couple of members started to make the board’s workings more difficult. There’s no point in going into the gory details, but suffice it to say that internal board conflicts meant that we spent more time dealing with them, and less on the actual building issues. Just as building matters seemed “off-mission” to me in the church, inter-personal conflicts seemed off-mission on the condo board.

Skipping past internal matters, I started to find my Board work very stressful. My dearly beloved wanted me to step away from the Board, and I almost did. I should have listened to her! After being re-elected to the Board, and then voted out as President, I found myself in a difficult position, with a new President whose leadership style was much more authoritarian than mine. Could I work with him? I wasn’t sure, but when our Building Administrator resigned, I knew I couldn’t in good conscience serve under those circumstances, and submitted my own resignation.

I don’t regret the time I spent on the board. It had its frustrations, but I leave with my head held high, knowing that I did what I could to help make and keep this place a good place to live. I have some regret about leaving the board, mostly around the events leading up to my decision. But I have no regret at all about not being a board member any more. I was becoming a bit bored with the “same old, same old” nature of much of the work, and increasingly stressed by the conflicts around the board work in the past year or two.

I’m looking forward to being just another resident owner, admittedly one with a history, but who has no reason any more to get stressed out over details of contracts, personal conflicts, and the minutiae of building management.

I had resolved to leave the board permanently no later than age 80. Having just turned 78, I have beaten that deadline by two years, and it feels good.

A Community that Sends

Notes for a sermon preached at Holy Trinity (Strathcona) on August 27, 2017

Texts: Romans 12:1-8; Matthew 16:13-20

Last Sunday, Fr. Chris spoke of the challenge to the Church to “go out.” There is much more that can be said about this, including Archbishop William Temple’s dictum that the “Church is the only society on earth that exists for the benefit of non-members.” One way of stating our mission: We are to go out to be of benefit to the world around us.

Let’s back this up a step or two, and think about who is doing the sending. What kind of group is it that can send its members out in this way? I take my cue from Paul, and his appeal to the church in Rome, part of which we heard in today’s lesson. The lectionary does us a bit of a disservice, by splitting Chapter 12 between two Sundays, but let’s work with what we have been given.

Paul starts out by saying, “I appeal to you therefore…” That last word should alert us to the fact that what comes next is not some sayings plunked into the text in an arbitrary way. It has a context.

The preceding three chapters (9 – 11) deal with what some contemporary scholars consider to be the central issue of Romans, the question of the fate of Israel. Paul agonizes over the problem, lamenting the fact that most Jews have not accepted Jesus as the Messiah. He ultimately refuses to let go of his faith in God’s fidelity to his promises, concluding that in God’s great mercy, salvation would not be denied to the people of Israel. The section closes with an outburst of praise (curiously not in the Lectionary):

O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! ‘For who has known the mind of the Lord?
   Or who has been his counselor?’
 ‘Or who has given a gift to him,
   to receive a gift in return?’
For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory for ever. Amen.

And… therefore…

If God has been gracious to all, our response should then be to strive to live lives that reflect that grace, not merely as individuals, but in a company of the faithful whose corporate life displays God’s grace. Paul uses the image of the body, more concisely than in 1 Corinthians 12, to argue that we are interdependent—needing each other and rejoicing in each person’s unique gifts. Paul enjoins us “not to think of [ourselves] more highly than [we] ought to think,” but to regard ourselves with “sober judgment” as members of the Body of Christ. I might use “humility” here, remembering that that doesn’t mean self-abasement (“worm theology”), but being honest with ourselves, with our brothers and sisters, and with God, about who we are and what are our gifts.

It is easy to miss how counter-cultural is Paul’s concept of Christian community. He wrote:

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God…

The world in which Paul lived was the Roman Empire, one of the most successful regimes in history. This was a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity, enforced by Roman military might. However, the Empire relied on a rigidly structured society, in which everyone knew his or her place, and upward social mobility was almost unheard-of. The subjugated peoples of the Empire could enjoy the benefits of Roman rule so long as they kept to their places. Into this mix, Paul throws a huge measure of egalitarianism. When he calls on followers of Christ to see themselves as no better than they should, it implies that they should regard their companions on the way as their equals, just as Jews and Christians are equal in God’s economy of grace and mercy.

The point of the church, however, is not just to build a community where everyone loves each other. That’s a good thing by itself, of course, but the mission of proclaiming God’s love in the marketplace must be based in a people practicing what they preach. The life of the Christian community is a large part of its message.

Harold Percy, a well-known Canadian writer about mission, has outlined Christian mission in terms of the Kingdom of God. We are called
to proclaim the Kingdom,
to celebrate the Kingdom, and
to model the Kingdom.

When people look at us—a community of people who follow Jesus as the Messiah—they should see a body which strives to behave as if God’s reign is being fulfilled in our midst. Our calling is to be a model of the Kingdom. Of course, models never quite live up to the reality they are pointing to; every church community inevitably falls short of the Glory it is striving to proclaim. But that doesn’t mean we should quit trying!

It grieves me deeply to know that there are people who assert themselves over others by “who they are,” at times invoking the name of our Saviour. We saw some of the symptoms of that in Charlottesville two weeks ago. So-called “identity politics” have no place in God’s Kingdom. White supremacy, racism, anti-Semitism, misogynism, homophobia and their like are evils upon the body politic. When they find their way into Church life, they are toxic to the Gospel we are called to proclaim.

We are followers of Jesus of Nazareth, the one whom Peter confessed to be the Messiah. Jesus came to “draw all people to [himself].” As his Body, we are called to draw all people to him, inviting all to share in the grace, mercy, and unbounded love of the God who cannot let his people go.

God loves ALL his people—and so should we!

Let’s go and show it.