Satisfaction

Many years ago I wrote about the distinction between sources of satisfaction and sources of dissatisfaction in churches. That is, the things that make people happy and pleased to be here and the things that tick them off. Fairly early in my ministry the penny dropped for me that they are not usually the same things. By which I mean, if you remove the sources of dissatisfaction you won't make people any more satisfied.

In a church, the things that make people dissatisfied are things like heaters that don't work or a buzz in the sound system; or the Vicar's annoyingly drony voice or the fact that whoever chooses the hymns around here has the taste of a blowfly maggot. Sources of dissatisfaction are easily identified - people let you know about them early and often. Sources of satisfaction are harder to identify. They are more subtle, deeper and often unconscious. People don't talk about them much and tend to take them for granted. They are things that are the reasons people joined a church in the first place: things like a strong sense of community; an awareness of the presence of God; the knowledge that people (including me) are valued and accepted in this place.

Many clergy operate on the squeaky wheel principle, attending constantly to the things people are dissatisfied with. They spend their lives chasing around after the sorts of trivia that people ring them about, getting tired and wondering why the roll keeps on dropping. Of course if there is a buzz in the sound system it needs to be fixed, and perhaps I could do with elocution lessons, but by and large, if the church is a satisfying place to be, people will tolerate all sorts of little annoyances, and even begin to enjoy some of them as evidences of character. So rather than a shopping list of minor things to get sorted, church leadership needs to quickly and consistently address itself to the bigger issues: the issues that are hard to identify and require years of patience and hope and discernment and commitment to establish and maintain; but which, when attended to, offer a real chance of building a lasting and deeply satisfying community.

It is the sources of satisfaction that need attention and thought. Sort them out and all the other stuff tends to take care of itself.

Of course, while this is true of church life, it is also true of every other relationship in our lives. While the arguments with our best beloved, or our friend, or our children or our God will manifest themselves in squabbles about our sources of dissatisfaction ( Do I have to do this again.... It annoys me that.... you never..... I always...... ) the fact that these things surface time and again is an indicator that perhaps deeper issues need attention.

Why are we in this relationship in the first place? And are those foundational things being nurtured and attended to?

Comments

Merv said…

A fascinating subject - church dynamics (& culture). I appreciate your perspective.

26 January 2016 at 21:48

Living the lies

In 1969, when I was 16 I left school and got a job as a labourer. My wages weren't high but to me they were a fortune and within a few months I bought my first car, a 1938 Morris 8 sports, this one here. It had a minuscule 4 cylinder engine and a wood framed body which meant it was slow and it flexed so much when going around corners that the doors would sometimes fly open. Nevertheless I thought it was pretty damned cool, especially with the modifications I made to the muffler for performance and advertising purposes, ie, removing it. Back then, the most popular TV program was The Avengers, in which the suave and resourceful hero, John Steed drove a 1928 3 Litre Bentley. Which looked kinda like my car, right? Yeah, right. Anyway, John Steed usually entered his car by leaping nimbly over the door, so I emulated him whenever possible. Now all this is preamble. I want to tell you about something that happened to me one day in Papanui Road, Christchurch. My car ...

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire. Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...

Why I Hold the Views I Do

St. Hilda's Collegiate School, taken with my phone after a recent meeting. This picture has nothing whatsoever to do with what follows, but I like the interplay of shapes and particularly the shadow on the wall. My mother is a Methodist, liberal in her theological and social opinions. My father was a socialist, just slightly to the left, in his politics, of Karl Marx. My siblings -there are 5 of us- are all bright, eloquent and omnivorous in their consumption of books and other intellectual fodder. One of my most cherished childhood memories is of mealtimes in our little state house. The food was ingested with copious amounts of spirited, opinionated, clever and sometimes informed debate on whatever subject happened to catch the attention of one of the family that day. Or whatever one of us thought might get a rise out of someone else. So, sex, politics and religion it was then - oh and motorbikes, economics, international relations, demographics, cricket, company ownersh...

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...

2 More Years

An autumn leaf, the evidence of the death whereby the grapevine lives and bears fruit There are 31,102 verses in the Bible, or at least in the Protestant version of it which the conservative section of our church recognises. Of these, there are 6 verses which explicitly condemn homosexual practice. The best scholars in the Christian world have pointed out the ambiguity of even these scraps of scripture, but this does not prevent their becoming the basis of an antipathy to contemporary same gender sexuality which I was repeatedly told, during General Synod, was "First Order". I'm not sure what "First Order" means exactly, but I was told that this is a "Salvation Matter". So, presumably, holding a proper view on homosexuality is right up there in importance with belief in the doctrines I would consider foundational for the Christian faith: namely the Holy Trinity, Incarnation and Resurrection. In any event, antipathy to homosexuality has already ...

Available Light

Search This Blog