Below is a case-study which with some details slightly amended is a real-life situation in an Australian Uniting Church. The minister asked for my help with this situation. What would you suggest?
Shalom! Rowland Croucher http://www.pastornet.net.au/jmm/ (now 13,000 articles) http://articlesandreviews.blogspot.com/ ~~~ '"Fred" is the church secretary in a suburban congregation which usually has 60-70 at worship on a Sunday. Fred moved to the congregation 5 years ago. He is 60 years old, married and works as an engineer. His congregation has a woman minister who has been there for 3 years. Fred is very efficient and diligent. The minutes of every church council meeting are on email the morning after. He works with the treasurer and assistant treasurer to do the budgets and provides excellent graphs to tell the congregation of their financial situation. All the correspondence is correctly documented and filed. The minister, while basically liking Fred, finds him very difficult for two reasons. The first reason is his lack of any discernable spirituality. The minister is passionate about encouraging people to pray, and especially members of the church council. Fred clearly finds this threatening, although he has not been able to articulate this. On one particular occasion, when the minister was leading a church council retreat, Fred's behaviour sabotaged a time of lament and the prayerfulness of the day was lost. He claims to be a person of simple faith who sees no need for any growth in that area. Secondly, Fred regularly makes remarks that are inappropriate. For example, when talking about the church's budget at the congregational meeting he spoke of one person who is the biggest giver and expressed the hope that this person would not die. One member donated a considerable amount of money for a children's playground. Fred brought this up on several occasions, expressing his annoyance that this person thought they knew better than the Church Council. He believed that the money should have been used to pay off a small debt. The anonymous donor was actually present and not pleased. The minister, noticing this, suggested to Fred that the donor had wanted the grounds to look attractive to children, but he still insisted that the playground money should be put into general revenue. Fortunately, we did not have the right to do that and the playground was built. After the church council retreat that went badly, Fred discussed the issue with the minister. He said that he really respected her as a minister, but that he didn't find her the least bit attractive as a woman. While the minister was able to shrug this off, it is indicative of a serious lack of social skills. In fact, he could have said something like this to another woman who might have instituted charges of sexual harrassment. (It does fall into this category, I have checked) Lastly, the minister is unclear of where to go from here. She believes that anyone can develop their spirituality and is unwilling to give up on anyone. After the Tom Bandy conference, his first response was that he had better resign immediately, because he could never answer the question "What is it about his experience of Jesus that this community can't live without?" How to invite him into a deeper exploration of his spirituality?' ------------------------------------------------------ - You are subscribed to the mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] and put in the message body 'unsubscribe insights-l' (ell, not one (1)) See: http://nsw.uca.org.au/insights-l-information.htm ------------------------------------------------------
