Commentary

I said that I would comment on the previous post. I am seeking here to convey some of the complexity of it, so this is a longer post than usual. What the photos show is that we were at full strength – alternatively, up to full strength – during all of my final year and final months in city ministry. The photos don’t cover everything: additionally, the Church leadership, social events, ministry to the community, the worship team, the Sunday School, prayer groups, and so on. Now when my wife Mirjam (an ordained minister) died at the start of 2011, the Church was effectively reduced to one minister, from two. This was a very big shift, and a very big challenge for me, not only for the great increase in oversight, but because I was deeply shocked by Mirjam’s death. It is said that those who love deeply grieve deeply. I continued my ministry with the cancellation of just one Church group – which was my own Bible study group. After my departure from the Church, most of the groups one sees in the photos closed. The real decline, in my view – at the end of my ministry – was a decline in respect, in a multi-cultural Church. We had a big problem there. With two ministers, we had been able to work on this continually – but one minister, with my particular gifting and temperament, was not enough. There was another, major problem. There was anger over my suggestion that there was something the matter with the Church's audit in particular. That is no longer a maybe, if it ever was. The only maybe now is whether the fraud, which continued for seven years, will be prosecuted or not. So at the end of the day, we had the curious situation where a minister handed in his resignation (in this, case never finalised), while the Church was strong both in its daily life and in its finances. We had, in the area of our finances, just two months earlier received report of the highest annual income in a generation. Some said that this was a fluke – yet in urban ministry, every year is a fluke, and in this case we could put the surplus down to deliberate policy. Then, I was assaulted, and I was injured and ill for more than half a year as a result. Ten days after that, purportedly in the name of the Church, I was handed serious threats – and that was where I said enough is enough. Today, a few pivotal people are under investigation for things which I recount here (and personally, I could do without that). But back to the subject of the “strength” of the Church. During 2012 and 2013, we experienced something strange, in our Atlantic Area, which we openly discussed and probably recorded. On Sundays, our highs were still as high as ever, if not higher, yet attendance was sometimes patchy. This was the same for other Churches in the area, when we compared notes, and that was a comfort to us all, although we did not understand it. OBSERVATION: By way of a general summation, and by way of balance, a thriving ministry, as one sees in the photos, is due to an integrated approach with the involvement and commitment of many people. In one sense, while a minister is central to everything in a Church, he or she cannot properly be singled out as the Church’s blessing. It is all far bigger than that.