what will we do when there are no more fires to put out?


hispanics, cuss words, bishop-gate, OH MY! these are headlines to only a few storms that have driven their way through the humc congregation over the last several months and years. sharing space with a congregation with whom we had a hard time communicating ended predictably, with that congregation going somewhere else. blogs being disseminated to an unsoliciting and unaware group of people that were asked to care about how how i choose to voice my often asinine opinions ended with somewhat of a whimper. people either chose not to care or just stopped making eye contact with me. either way, nobody hurt. bishop-gate came and felt like a hurricane for a couple days, but it was really more like tornado warnings five years ago (back before doppler technology went and got real!!!) when the sirens went off and a whole county would freeze at one time, but really the storm was just passing through a cow pasture in the southwest corner of county-in-question and was never coming towards your home.

the most recent non-issue that we forced into being an issue came in the form of our wednesday night dinners. for the duration of my time served on our finance committee, we have known that one particular line item in our budget (food account) was off. depending on how late in the year we were looking at it, it seemed way off. speculative opinions were shared and worried over. "ms. ellen is buying too much food." "ms. ellen is making too much food." "ms. ellen is choosing the food that is too damn expensive." "people aren't coming because the food doesn't taste good." "someone needs to talk to ms. ellen." "should we discontinue our wednesday night dinners, because, obviously, this line item is telling us that the food service is a drain on our budget?"

except that it wasn't.

after much gnashing of teeth and huffing and puffing about what needed to happen in the kitchen or in between the kitchen and our church office, a wednesday night evaluation committee was force-forged in our administrative board meeting two months ago. the group would ask questions relevant to wednesday night dinners being offered to our congregation and, hopefully, provide some insight as to what our church wanted to do with those dinners moving forward. the list of questions was written and published in our weekly messenger and also sent out to the church's email list with the following request...if so moved, please take a few minutes of your time to answer these questions and help the evaluation committee come to a consensus on what is/isn't offered on wednesday nights in the form of dinner and programming. that's it.

the response was...underwhelming. 17 responses came back. the information culled from the responses, though, was valuable to a point.

what ended up being more valuable was something, admittedly, that should have happened a long time ago. for two months, the church made a point to collect actual data, not merely opinion. the data would include meals served, meals prepared, cost of goods, revenue generated from attendees, etc.

to many's surprise, after crunching all the numbers, it was discovered that the money spent on wednesday nights was not out of order at all. it was discovered that the amount of food prepared was a "planned surplus" to be used in the daycare the following day. it was discovered that the amount of money charged by the church for dinner was just about right. it was discovered that the cost of the food served on wednesday was consistently covered by those in attendance. finally, it was discovered that there was never any drain to speak of, only a minor accounting quirk that, honestly, should have been repaired before now. now that the representative church is aware that the "issue" is again a non-issue, maybe finance can find remedy for the error at our next meeting.

myth:

wednesday night dinners are a financial drain on the church. we need to offer programming that removes offering the service of dinner on wednesday from the equation.

myth. busted.

in an appropriate-for-us move, the argument, if you will, evolved, and another non-issue was cited as an issue. ms. ellen still isn't walking through that door in the fall! so programming (read: staff) needs to decide what we are going to offer on wednesday in the fall so we can decide what to do, goddammit!!!

and so, as one myth is busted, another is perpetuated, that our paid staff must decide for us, the church, what it is we should do.

ugh.

to me, this feels backward, but, then again, maybe i am alone.

my understanding of a healthy church would be one that, ideally, hired and paid staff to perform the ministries of their church they felt were important. unfortunately for our staff, we still don't really know what's important to us as a church, so we are left with asking our staff to figure it out for us.

does that really make any sense? shouldn't we be asking our staff to be creative within the realms of their current job description? grow their areas, come hell or high water? be rare? be relevant?

maybe.

or maybe not.

i don't know.

i am finding it harder and harder to work up a good piss-off about anything related to the church. if my little kohi experiment has proven anything to me, it's proven that i've got way too many good things (family, friends, limbo, work, running, fantasy baseball)  going in my life to waste very much time being super-negative about anything.

i will say this, though. we are at an unfamiliar crossroads in the life of our church. the non-issues that we are choosing to activate as issues are becoming more and more trivial. in the grand scheme of things, we are at a place where we have two very defined choices.

do something.

or don't.