by Alice Goodman, Prospect
Middle-class people who are newly-retired are no longer automatically helping out with their local church
Dave is moving to the West Midlands to be nearer his grown children. Dave is the man who’s been responsible for bundling up copies of our parish magazine. He makes sure that each of the volunteers doing the actual door-to-door delivery has the right number. We’ll need to find someone else to do this, someone as reliable, and, ideally, as cheerful, as Dave. When Dave stepped down, the friend who helped him quit too. This is, unfortunately, quite normal with volunteers. For Dave’s friend, the camaraderie of working with Dave was the thing that made bundling magazines worthwhile. He’s not interested in continuing with whoever comes next.
This worries the editor, and so it worries me. The editor would quite like to step down too. There are other things he wants to do in retirement besides editing the parish magazine. He’s a good editor though, and, having had difficulty replacing the last one, I’d like to persuade him to stick around. This means finding a couple of other people to be sub-editors.
That’s just the parish magazine. There are other posts that need filling. For starters, only one of my three parishes has a church warden. Church wardens are vital. They’re legally officers of the bishop, and, essentially, lay ministers, “the foremost among the laity”. The list of their responsibilities has grown over the years to the point where the prospect of becoming a church warden makes stalwart Christians quail. My one church warden is, naturally, in the smallest parish, the one with a tiny congregation, not much money, and two churches in its bounds. He says that being a church warden is surprisingly satisfying. The satisfaction comes from the people involved: the people to whom he brings communion in their homes, the ones attending services, even the parochial church council (PCC). The form-filling, however, increases every year, he says, and is soul-destroying. In theory we should have two church wardens per parish. In practice there is just this one good old man whom I scrutinise every time I see him for signs of discouragement or decay.
In my biggest parish, Fulbourn, we need a treasurer quite urgently, because our current treasurer has been trying to retire from the job for the past two years. We need a secretary for the PCC as well. Actually, we need two of those. One of the other parishes is also limping along without either a church warden or a PCC secretary.