2. Churches should have less paid staff

This is a continuation of a couple of previous posts.  The first is here.

I think that churches seek to have too many paid staff.  I fear that we're turning ministry into a professional venture and that we're pushing the layman out of the ministry of the word.  I don't understand the reasoning for our model of ministry and I think it's unbiblical.

I don't understand why we should pay people to tell others about Jesus.  I don't understand why we're
professionalising being a Christian.  I do understand that we need ministers who are paid.  But we have to understand that we don't pay them to do a job.  We pay them so that they don't have to have a job.  We seek out men who are leaders in the church community and we pay them so that theyhave time for the local church that they wouldn't have otherwise.  These men should be leading a team of other men who do work so that together the church is administered, the gospel is preached and the community is looked after.  I don't really see why, in your average small church, we should have more than one paid minister. I don't see why themain ministry of that minister has to be preaching.  This idea has some basis in the Bible, but that doen't make it biblical.  If you have capable lay preachers then let them preach.  If a minister's a talented preacher then by all means prach every week, but if not then do what you're good at and let others do what they're good at.  I've seen too many great ministers who are wondeful at looking after and encouraging Christians struggle each week to preach to think that this works.

I think that too many ministers and assistant ministers and youth ministers and children's workers only really serve to professionalise something that is all of our responsibility.  They create in groups and out groups. 

I don't like the idea that the leadership of the church is the responsibility of a few and that there is so much opportunity for pew sitting from church members. 

I think that the sharing of the gospel is everyone's responsibility.  I hear ministers and church leaders lament that their parishioners aren't telling people about Jesus, but they're not sharing the responsibility of teaching within the Christian community with their parishioners. 

I think we should have a hard look at the way we do church.  I think that we talk big about spurring one another on, encouraging one another and sharing the load, but then we hire men and women to do what we should all be sharing together.

There's a place for paid ministry.  But do we really need so many?

1. It's the Leaders' Fault

This is a continuation of a post I recently made here.

In it I expressed my dissatisfaction with church.  Not my own local church, but our experience of church as a whole across Australian evangelicalism.  Then I suggested a range of statements that I said I'd expand on.  The first is that the leaders of the church are responsible for its state and it's their responsibility to turn it around.

The first thing worth noting is that leader doesn't equal minister.  Whilst the minister is a leader in the local church he is not the only one, and so shouldn't shoulder all of the responsibility.  The minister has to be willing to relinquish authority and control of certain things and others need to be willing to take it up.  I think that a minister who doesn't allow others to lead presumes too much about his authority.

I hear from people in churches all the time that '20% of the people do 80% of the work'.  This really annoys me.  It annoys me because the people saying it always think they are the 20% of the poor, overworked Christians.  My first response is that being faithful to Jesus is hard work.  Get over it.  My second response is:  If you don't like it then do something about it.  It annoys me the most when I hear ministers say this as though it's a fact of life and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

I think that there are loads of Christians sitting in pews who are keen to do something, but never do.  It's not always their own fault.  Sometimes they are people whose gifts and talents are just underutilised in the chuch.  How many churches have you seen where the tradesmen who come along are mobilised and used to do good work in the community to get to know and help the lost?  Or are they just called upon to fix something in the church when it needs doing?  There is a big difference between these two things and the worth that they have.  Are we helping people to use their gifts in real, gospel ministries or are we relegating people to the back lines and support roles so that they are really only left to feel worthless in the mission of the church except to support the keen beans who are good at speaking, academics and teaching kids?

In the interests of keeping this post short, here's what I think without much qualification.  If you agree or disagree, please post a comment as to why.

1. Everyone should have the opportunity to participate in front line, gospel ministries in the church.  Jesus entrusted the gospel to us all, it's not up to the leaders of the church to pick up who's worthy to engage the lost with the word.  Take the opportunity to let people have a go and teach as they go.  No one's perfect, but good training and a little trust and faih that God will do what He said He will (build his church) goes a long way.  Don't let the guys who mow the lawn think that they are not welcome to speak the Word in your church community.  Jesus let some fishermen with crazy ideas take the lead in His church because the Holy Spirit is mighty and effective.

2. It's a leader's responsibility to inspire others to action.  If a leader can't do that then they have no business bitching about others and their unwillingness to participate.

3. Have a whole heap of varied ministry opportunities available for people to participate in. The Sunday service isn't the most important part of the week, nor is the participation in it a gauge of the usefulness of a Christian. 

4. Serve your community by helping them in practical ways so that you might share the gospel with them.  Participate in community events.  You will have parishioners who want to organise this.  Let them.  If no one wants to do it, then don't.  Run with what you've got, but encourage participation.

5. Not everyone has to do everything, but everyone has to do something.  Communicate this and let people know.  Do't neglect Christian responsibility.  Light a fire in others that makes them see that the lost are lost and need to know Jesus now.  To do this you yourself need to know it.

6. Jesus has appointed some to lead and others to follow.  Leaders should lead and others should follow.  If you're trying to lead and no one is following then stop trying to lead for now.  Maybe try again later.  If you feel you have something to offer your local church in terms of leadership then speak up.  Maybe you've been overlooked.  Maybe there's a reason.  If you don't get the response you're happy with then pray hard about it.

7. Be a church that prays.  A lot.  About a lot of things.  This is what I find hardest and need to work on.

These are some of my poorly ordered, possibly incoherent thoughts.  What do others think?

Eating Animals III: Chooks

Ok, I think we all already know this, deep down. But it's easiest to forget about it!

There are two types of chook (used in factory farming, I mean), broilers and layers.

1. What happens to male layers?
They are killed asap. There are many ways. On Jamie Oliver (I hear) there was a farm visit once. The farmer drafted the males and females, and the males he put in a container and they all dropped dead. Gas. Other ways:

• They are placed in a tube, fall through a series of pipes until they reach an electrified plate. Apparently this is the most common method (in the US at least)
• They are placed in a container without gas, and left to suffocate, those on the bottom first, and slowly, eventually, those further up. 
• They are sent through macerators (great word!) = a mulcher.

So almost half of all layers are killed asap after birth. Without such ridiculous selective breeding, the males could just be broilers right? But who wants to pay for a chook that takes a long time to reach maturity, eats a lot in the meantime, and then doesn't provide big fat thighs and breasts?

Oh, and they're de-beaked. This protects the farmers, and other chooks. With the treatment they get, a lot of chooks go a bit crazy, and even cannibalistic. So better to de-beak them eh?

2. Who raises chicks?

Obviously layers can't raise their own chicks, they must keep laying. And broilers are killed on about day 40 of their life. And anyway, raising one's own chicks is inefficient. 

Chicks are placed in the tens of thousands in big permanently light rooms (light encourages eating) with little warm lights spaced evenly about. They crowd around the heaters, because it's kind of like mum's warmth, and are fed drugs and food through a tube. The drugs I'll get to.

3. Then what?

Once they reach maturity, at about 18 weeks, layers are put in a dark barn (sometimes completely dark 24/7) and a very low protein (almost starvation) diet for 2-3 weeks. Then the lights are cranked up, 20 hours a day, and the diet is turned to high protein. And she'll immediately begin to lay. A layer will lay 300 eggs a year, which is 3X the number she does in nature. This is because of selective breeding and the unnatural manipulation outlined above. 

4. Battery and Free-Range (US - is Australia better? I don't know)

Whether battery or free-range, layers will tend to have about an A4 page of space to themselves. Broilers have more like a square foot. Free-range can mean a vast barren yard with the chooks packed in side-by-side. Literally it requires 'access to the outdoors', which if you use your imagination, and remember they're farmed in lots of several tens of thousands, could mean anything at all. 

Safran says 'I could keep a flock of hens under my sink and call them free-range'. 

5. Grotesque

Broilers are not fit for this world. If they're allowed to live beyond adolescence they lose the ability to walk, and they eventually die from their incredible growth rate. They have been selectively bred not for their own health, but for farming benefits, and this is appalling. 

It's good that they're killed at 40 days then right?

Well, the problem is that life sucks for those 40 days. By the time they reach day 40, they're all having trouble walking (and so presumably are in pain), and apparently a percentage of them can no longer walk or are having so much trouble that it's obvious they're in a significant amount of pain. They're drugged so as to avoid infections, because their living conditions are so cramped and disgusting. In fact, they're given antibiotics, daily.

If you go to the doctor, they will be hesitant to prescribe antibiotics unless you really need them. The reason, of course, is that bugs adapt to the drugs. Farm animals are given drugs when they're ostensibly healthy! This is a significant problem for the control of disease.

6. Death

Layers are killed at one year, because they stop producing eggs at such an alarming rate. There's probably a layer rescue program near you, where you can get your hands on a retired layer. 

Broilers are killed at 40 days for their meat. In the US, poorly paid (think illegal or fresh immigrants) scoop up the chooks 5 at a time by their legs and jam them into transport containers. 30% of these chooks arrive at the slaughterhouse with broken bones. The turnover for these workers is >100% per year, because the job is terrible and plays havoc on your body. If you do it for a lifetime you'll lose the adequate function of your hands, and you may need pain relief to sleep.

What happens at the slaughterhouse is for another day. 

The life of a chook is crap. We have absolutely no respect for life when it comes to these guys (well, girls mainly). This is all fuelled by our hip-pocket, and that's something I'm pretty ashamed of. Ally and I are not eating chicken at home any more, unless the animal is family-farm, transparently raised. But we can't afford that kind of chook, so I think that's it.

This is torture. I don't see what else it could be called. I'm no animal lover. I just believe we have a basic requirement of respect, and this is lacking... completely lacking.

Eating Animals II: The otherness of fish

When you catch a marlin, or any other heavy game fish, you use a huge metal hook (wolfram alpha disappointingly couldn't tell me the name of it) to lift the fish into the boat. How is it attached? You swing it hard into the fish's head, under their neck, through its eye. This is after reeling it in for a couple of hours till it has nearly died of exhaustion.

I've never caught a big fish, and i now realise I never can.

When you catch a little fish, you do something pretty similar. You stick a sharp metal spike in the fish's mouth, down it's throat, or sometimes on its body somewhere. You then do battle with it for 10s-10min+. It must be terrified. Surely this could be called torture? Once you've brought it in you should kill it straight away. If you put it alive in a net or a cool-box, it will slowly drown.

I've caught many little fish (probably 5-10 for every one I've kept and eaten, by the way, if part of your counter-argument includes 'we've gotta eat'). I'm not sure that I can do this any more either.

Safran emphasises the 'otherness' of fish. We don't care if fish suffer, because they live in a whole different world to us. They're very difficult to relate to. However, fish are intelligent, social animals, who most certainly feel pain.

I'll get to commercial fishing another day, but for now, I need to work out whether I can ever go fishing again. I think probably not.

Church

This is a quote from the book 'Radical' that I posted on about a week ago.  It's about what church is.

“ Children and the elderly, students and workers, men and women all joined together in a body that is united with other followers of Christ around the world in a practical strategy to make disciples and impact nations for the glory of Christ. A community of Christians each multiplying the gospel by going, baptizing, and teaching in the contexts where we live every day. Is anything else, according to the Bible, even considered a church?”

I'm a bit disillusioned with the way we do church at the moment.  It all seems pretty inadequate.  I don't mean that my own church is particularly terrible, I think that most churches aren't getting it right.  It seems to me that church is mostly a case of Christians getting together on a Sunday to meet, read the Bible, pray, hear the Word explained and sing a few songs.  At my church at the moment we have a goal to get all members into a small group where people meet together regularly to pray and wrestle with the Word.  This is all great stuff, but it's only a really small part of what church should be.  What's happened to churches that we have to have as a goal that Christians will meet together to encourage and build one another up?  If we can't find time to meet with our brothers and sisters outside of an hour on Sundays then we're too busy with other things and need to reconsider our priorities in this world.

I think that a local church aiming for these things (attendance at church and attendance at a small group) is aiming low.  Really, really low.   The church is a community.  More than that, the church is a family. We're a family that should be doing everything we can to grow and to bring others from outside, in the cold, inside into the warm.


But that's not how we behave.  We bicker and fight with one another.  We show that we don't want just anyone to join our community, we only want a select few who we deem worthy.  We rarely, if ever, tell people about Jesus.  There are individuals who care for and take part in the community around them, but collectively, as a church, we're devoid of participation in our communities.


I think that our churches should be, as David Platt puts it, 'A community of Christians each multiplying the gospel by going, baptising and teaching, in the contexts where we live every day.'  But they're not.  We're too institution focused.  I hear people asking questions like 'how can you serve your local church?'  This seems like a good question, but it's not.  Much more appropriate questions are 'how can you serve Jesus?' and 'how can you serve your brothers and sisters?' and 'how can you serve the unbelievers in your community?'  The local church is an institution and we don't serve institutions, we serve our God and each other.  If we insist on asking this question we should ask 'how are you serving in your local church?'


So I want to propose some things that I'll expand on in later posts.


1. Leaders are to blame and they're the ones who have to turn things around.
2. Churches should have less paid staff.
3. Evangelism is everybody's responsibility.
4. Christian involvement in the community is paramount.
5. Evangelism is not more important than active concern for the poor and provision of material and earthly needs.
6. Concern for the poor is not more important than evangelism.
7. Holiness matters.
8. All Christians should administer the sacraments.
9. Christians should work with Christians from other churches.
10. Church leaders should be less afraid of their parishioners working with Christians from outside their church.
11. Churches whose meetings are all about property and money are worldly and not nearly as concerned with the things of the kingdom as they should be.  They will most likely be ministry ineffective.

Eating Animals I: Why not eat dogs

I have started reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer.

My delightful wife got it from the library for me. However I have recently been convinced that I should probably be buying books rather than borrowing them, so perhaps I should buy it.

Anyway, I'm a slow reader, I'm usually reading between five and ten books very very slowly at a time, and so I thought I might blog my way through this one.

Safran (from now on I'll call him this, apologies to the man if he prefers S-F) argues for eating dogs. What's the difference?, he points out. Pigs can show affection, fetch balls, and whatever else dogs can do. In fact, cows and even chooks are apparently just as capable as dogs (intelligent is the word we usually use, I suppose). He points out that many cultures around the world, and throughout history have eaten dogs. From an ecological point of view, hundreds of millions of dogs in the US are 'destroyed' each year, so it's just a waste not eating them. In fact, dealing with all that meat is a significant environmental concern. Much of it is processed and fed to livestock! Cut out that weird, wasteful, middle step, and just eat the dog meat yourself.

Why not?

I must say I was sold. We should be eating dogs, it's an ecological crime not to.

Of course, the dogs will keep coming up. I think it's largely for one reason: it's considered immoral, and in most cases is illegal, to treat dogs the way we treat farm animals. If you torture a dog, you can go to prison. If you permanently lock a dog in a dark room, confined to a cage not bigger than itself, I hope you can go to prison, but if not, I'm certain that nobody will like you. I could go on.

So why the double standard?

Reading this book has coincided with my being quite ill. I can't eat much, and I respond very badly to meat at times. I have been eating almost vegetarian (something we've been planning to do but never actually did for a couple of years now). So this book is particularly interesting at the moment, even though the illness is completely irrelevant. But if I become vegetarian for two simultaneous reasons, then I suppose it's twice as likely to stick?

Incidentally I should mention that I don't want to misrepresent Safran, and I apologise if I do, and at the beginning of the book he says this is not a book advocating vegetarianism...

Radical

At the end of last year I read a book by an American minister called 'Radical: Taking back your faith from the American dream'. 

It's short and easy to read.  It's written in accessible language and is pretty easy for anyone to read.

I was challenged by this book to consider how I'm living for God in this world.  Like 'Generous Justice' by Tim Keller and 'Crazy Love' by Francis Chan, I was challenged to think about whether my life is really just a sell out and whether or not my ideas are being defined by the Bible or my culture.

I think that the way I live my life is too defined by my culture.  My views on money, in particular, are prone to be very heavily influenced by the society in which I live as opposed to the God whom I serve.  I still think of my time, my family and my home as my own.  They're not. 


Too often, I think, we read the Bible as if it doesn't mean what it says.  We read what Jesus has to say and then we tell ourselves that that isn't what it means for us today, it's what it meant for them back then.  Or just one person back then.  But we call ourselves evangelicals, which by definition means that we take the Word seriously as our highest authority.

I'm trying to read the Bible through with fresh eyes and thinking 'What is Jesus says what he means and means what he says?'  It's pretty shocking and confronting.  Christianity isn't meant to be a whole lot of fun, nor is it easy.  But it is worth it.  In every way, a thousand times over.

I strongly encourage you to read 'Radical'.  It's challenging and inspiring and finishes with a challenge that is a good step into taking your faith seriously.