Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Why not become an actual minister? pt. 2

I watch a lot of Celebrity Poker Showdown. Sadly, I'm not absorbing as much about the gameplay as I'd hoped.

But one thing I've noticed is that there are way too many charities named after the person sitting at the table.

If everyone has their own charity, then everyone has to pay people to do the same administrative jobs as if a few of those charities merged and could benefit from economies of scale. (On the flip side, don't look at World Vision and their supposed 47% administration costs. If true, yikes.)

Same reason, why start a new church when there is, right in front of me, one with 109 years of history? (My colleague calls it "109 years unimpeded by progress.")

Why start over if it could be fixed? I thought it could be fixed, though now I'm not so sure anymore.

Yeah, it would be really easy to start a new church. I could call up the senior pastor of the old church and ask him to be the Senior Pastor. We could probably launch with 250-500 attendees our first week. And I think I would do a better job of advising him than the last group did. (The fact that he's a teacher by trade and ends up repeating himself too often notwithstanding.) I lack the Biblical training and the proper empathy to be the face of the church, the teaching pastor. Business Administrator or Executive Pastor, yeah, probably. But usually Senior Pastor = Teaching Pastor, though that concept is even being rethought these days.

Yeah, I could start a new church. Let someone else do the Biblical teaching, even find (poach?) others to be the caring people to the public, while I worried about keeping the thing fresh and new, about making it alive and growing. I could do that, and it would be difficult, difficult work.

I mean, which would you rather watch? This Old House or Extreme Makeover: Home Edition? I know you personally prefer This Old House. They have to work within the constraints of the existing architecture, and honor the past, but in the end, they can come up with something really beautiful that has the potential to fully serve the needs of a modern day family. While EM:HE simply destroys everything and starts over with something that has no history, has no past, and whose future is based solely on what the designers did to meet the current needs today. (And to showcase beautiful Kenmore appliances.)

I also play a lot of SimCity. It's always easier to create a town from scratch than it is to take a town you've been working on and think about what's really wrong with it and work at fixing it. (Not a fair comparison, the little sims don't protest very much when you demolish their homes to move a street over a block, and the bulldozer is really cheap.)

I think it would have been more of a challenge, more of an exciting experience, to try to change the existing church.

6 comments:

James said...

I've been informed that World Vision's overhead is more like 27%.

(Don't you love it when people spread bad information? Isn't even more awesome when you're the one spouting off incorrect and ignorant facts? Awesome!)

Sorry.

Unknown said...

The reason I don't watch Extreme Home Makeover is... well, there are two:

1 - People always cry. It isn't that crying is bad, but it has nothing to do with home renovation.

2 - They rush the job. I'll never be faced with a situation where I have to build a house in seven days, or if I do I'll do a crappy job regardless of what TV shows I watched.

But to the main point, if the 109-year-old church can be fixed, by all means try to fix it. But it sounds like for you to do so would mean incurring the wrath of your current superiors.

James said...

No, it would require new supervisors. Something's gotta give and it's going to.

World Girl said...

I don't know, it must be the taoist in me that doesn't watch enough television that wants to say, don't try to fix it. Accept it as it is, and watch for miracles.

Unknown said...

I never realized I could blame Bush remaining in office on Taoism.

KEVIN МАРУСЕК said...

The reason I don't watch Extreme Home Makeover is... well, there are two:

1 - People always cry. It isn't that crying is bad, but it has nothing to do with home renovation.

2 - They rush the job. I'll never be faced with a situation where I have to build a house in seven days, or if I do I'll do a crappy job regardless of what TV shows I watched.

But to the main point, if the 109-year-old church can be fixed, by all means try to fix it. But it sounds like for you to do so would mean incurring the wrath of your current superiors.