Am I schizo...?

At times I seem to be two different people.

I am patient.

I can patiently explain a complicated mathematical process to a struggling student, carefully going over the parts they struggle with as often as necessary until they develop the required skills to tackle the process independently.

I am impatient.

However, as a car driver, I am far less tolerant of other road users who take an age to get in gear when the traffic lights go green. Am I impatient? Probably, but when you've waited ten minutes or more to get through a set of lights that will be green for about 20 seconds, and over half of this time passes before the first car moves, and there's a queue of about fifty more cars behind you, perhaps it's the dopey one at the front who is more insensitive to the people behind them than I am of their slow response.

I am tolerant.

More frequently, I find I am in contradiction with myself in the church environment. As a teacher, I am far more disreeet in the classroom about dealing with behaviour that five years ago I would have confronted publicly...

I am intolerant.

I am amazed when I see fellow church members inappropriately criticising others. How quick we can all be to jump down one another's throats at the slightest hint of anything we don't like, irrespective of whether or not it is a moral issue.

I am controlling.

I spend most of my time at work as a teacher exercising good classroom management, which apart from being organised means controlling young people.

I am releasing.... (but still intolerant)...

At church, my whole approach is to want to release people, not control them, and I find my levels of exasperation steadily increasing when I see people who should know better, obsessed with their ministry, their status, their calling, their relationships, their destiny, their significance, and using other people to achieve their aim. This "me - centred Christianity" is about as far removed from what I read in the Bible as you can get. The leadership I read about in the Bible is all about how to empower people, not about how to empower myself at others' expense.

I am fed up with empires.

The church is so blinded by who's going to lead, who's in charge, that it has almost completely lost the plot. The Christian media is full of those who get paid by others to be professional christians, ususally male up to 15 years either side of 55, and not about ordinary people. If you want to get on in the church, you've got to lead a home group, then maybe you can preach occasionally, then eventually rise to the dizzy heights of elder, or even senior leader, before taking your empire into the region and the nation. So, we now have Vineyard churches all over the UK named after one in California, and are starting to see those associated with one in Australia known for its Hills and its Songs, er... called Hillsongs!

I keep getting told I am a leader.... (but don't want to be part of an empire)

In just about every church I have been part of, at some point I have been told I should be an elder. Once, even the elders told me this, and I briefly was one. The church is crammed full of gifted people, but I don't see why there is this obsession with using your gifts in the church: as an experienced communicator, I can preach a good sermon with the rest, but that's what makes me good at my job - it doesn't necessarily make me a future church leader. It doesn't necessarily mean that I have the wisdom to empower people and take them to the next level in their lives, which is actually what we should all be encouraging one another to do all of the time.

I guess this post didn't finish off where I intended it to - got a bit carried away and just ended up having a rant: sorry! This is not a criticism of any particular church or person - I have seen these things far too often to attribute my rantings to any one individual or group, so don't go taking it personally.... unless of course, you feel any of this applies to you....