Last night's church meeting left me feeling fed up (if you read the last post you'll know that).  Not because people want a church building of their own, but because they say it is the first priority for us.  And on the same day, I'd spent a couple of hours with one of our less affluent folk who feels she has no worth because she doesn't have what she perceived everyone else (except me!) having.

I wish I'd had the guts to say, 'If you think a church building is so important, how about you all sell your houses, buy something that meets your needs not your wants, and give the proceeds to the church for the purposes of building.'  Farewell to conservatories, spare bedrooms occupied for an odd weekend now and then, no more whirlpool baths, double garages filled with clutter, etc., etc.  Instead they could buy small terraced houses... Even as I wish I'd said it, I hear the responses 'oh, but I need a nice spare room in case the family come to stay...', 'oh but I work hard, I need my comfort....'  (Think Habbakuk, Amos and panelled houses)

I wish I'd had the guts to ask if us having a church building is really a higher priority than addressing issues of suffering, injustice and intolerance.  Whether, even if they sold their houses, the proceeds might not be better employed in an AIDS project or an irrigation scheme in some drought afflicted nation.

I wish I'd had the guts to ask the person who inivted me to her 'big birthday' party which charity she'd like me to donate to rather than buying her a present - but I still haven't got over the look of shock on people's faces here when I told them that's what I'd asked people to do at my 40th.

I wish I'd had the guts to ask if they really thought that people would actually come to a church building in order to join in some crazy ritual we call worship

I guess I wish I'd had the guts to be a bit prophetic.

On Sunday I will preach on Romans 10:14 'How can call if they don't believe, how can they believe if they haven't heard, how can they hear if no one tells them, how can they tell unless they are sent.'  It seems to me the Bible says a lot more about 'go' than 'come' (notwithstanding a couple of bits of Jesus in the gospels).  I intend to talk about mission as service, as friendship and as proclamation - all of which are done 'out there' not 'in here.'

There, spleen vented somewhat - which is as well I'm due for a blood pressure check in an hour!

Last week we had a visit from a senior minister to share with us an idea that would allow us to own property suitable for our needs and release capital for mission and ministry.  It was an innovative idea where by we'd have a 'presence' combining an element of accommodation suitable for a minister (one with a family even) in part of a building and small rooms suitable for offices, drop in meetings etc.  Everyone thought it was great...

Last night as part of another Special Meeting, I asked them to share further thoughts and we were back to 'our first priority is a permanent worship place for us', alongside other ideas guaranteed to make a minister feel insecure.

So, why is it that when Mr Outside Minister comes along they all say "yes that's great" and when I ask them their views they "no, that's not a good idea"?  It feels as if we are doing yet another circuit of the same bit of desert and recalling Egyptian cucumbers.

If the honest desire of this group of people is to own a new worship centre, then I can help them work towards that.  My concern is that in twenty year's time there'll be another redundant building because we live with the cloud cuckoo land idea that if we have a building people will come in to it on a Sunday for worhsip as we've always done it.

Perhaps I'm a faithless pastor, but until we get mission higher on the list than buildings, I feel this fellowship is on a one way street to demise.

There, now that's honest to the point of risky!

Next week I am the guest speaker at the 70th (I think) anniversary of one of the local women's meetings.  I had to give them the reading today - and settled on Psalm 71.  When I rang it through, the woman's husband, a retired minister, answered and agreed to take a message.  When I said the reading was Pslam 71, his reply was, "What?  All of it?" Granted, compared to Psalm 23 it is quite long but it isn't Psalm 119 or one of the bashing heads against rocks ones either.

Why is it that we want our Bible reading to be so short?  Why do we settle for a few feel good verses?

Psalm 71 is a great hymn for third agers, it has lots of honesty and struggle as well as certain hope in a faithful God.

I will enjoy playing with it - all of it - and hope that it speaks to these folk as they remember the past and look ahead to the future.

We never got the talk on 'rightly handling the word of truth' as the speaker felt led to concentrate on other aspects of what he had prepared.  This is a shame, because I'd like to have known how he understood this term given some of what he said.  It all started so well, affirming the need for ongoing study and reflection on the part of preachers - but only so long as they read the right stuff, it seems.  After denouncing liberalism and feminism as 'dangerous' he pronounced vegetarianism as demonic based on his reading of 1 Timothy 4:1 - 3.  You need a KJV to be able to reach this conclusion - although I reckon you could argue that it is actually unmarried vegetarians who would demon-inspired.

What utter twaddle!  The Greek word means (in contemporary parlance) 'foodstuffs' - which the KJV translates as 'meat' because 'meat' meant food in those days.  What saddens me almost as much as this dangerous mishandling of scripture is that the same speaker was happy to throw in Greek words willy nilly when they suited his purposes.  Given that elsewhere in the Bible, we are called to respect other people's views on what they can and cannot eat (e.g. Paul on food offered to idols) and that many have argued that the pre-fall people were vegetarian, taking one English translation of one verse as a basis for denouncing a whole group of people seems contrary to his (correct) statement that we need to see the bigger picture of scripture.

It is really easy to criticise someone else, and I know I have been as guilty as any of dodgey exegesis and partial (in every sense) preaching.  I just hope I have the commonsense not to make pronouncements that are so easily knocked down.

The speaker obviously had a deep love of the letters to Timothy - something I share (perhaps surprisingly as a female of the species!); I just wish some of the encouragements that Paul gives to young preachers/ministers/evangelists could have been drawn out to balance the warnings.

A couple of weeks ago the loo at Dibley manse began to leak - not a pleasant experience, but after four days we finally got a plumber who fixed it.  The carpet (who in their right mind puts carpet in bathrooms?) was not exactly pleasant by this time, so the good people agreed to pay for it to be replaced with vinyl, and that I could redecorate the room (which was last done for my predecessor's predecessor).  The ceiling in said room was papered and in several places the paper was hanging down rather unattractively.  Before I opted to rip it off (which took under 2 minutes) I checked with the person who last decorated the room why he had papered it - evidently to hide some staining where the damp "used" to come in; the ceiling itself was, he assured me, sound.  Well, sound in so far as it didn't cave in on top of me, but it looks like a map of a drought parched river, with great cracks and an uneven surface, to say nothing of patches of copydex, superglue and goodness knows what where someone had tried to stick the paper back up.  The corner where the 'damp used to come in' was palpably wet...  Another call to the property team, I'll be so popular, I don't think!

But isn't it a parable of church life?  Or even personal discipleship?  The 'papering over the cracks' metaphor is widely used in many walks of life, and I guess Jesus' comment about whitewashed tombs is, in some ways, broadly similar.  I also wonder how much patching up we do with the wrong kind of glue, how much we cover up stains without dealing with what causes them, how easily our carefully constructed facades could be ripped down?

I have the paint etc all lined up to refresh this room, but first it needs the rot to be addressed.  All this takes time and is costly.  The quick fix is simply to re-paper the ceiling, and leave the problem for someone else to discover, something I concede may be the option we go for - I wonder how often we fall into the same trap in dicipleship and mission?  Building on sand or rock?

Tomorrow's plans to do some painting have now gone out of the window, but hopefully in the longer term it will prove worth the wait...