Go this week to any supermarket, farmers’ market – maybe even a butcher – and the number of varieties is only exceeded by coffee combinations in Starbucks.  The sausage industry has diversified: there are mass produced sausages, hand made sausages, long sausages, short ones, Finest sausages, Taste the Difference sausages, chilli and beef sausages, cranberry and venison sausages and so on.  Although (to be fair) you can probably make these all in the same machine, the ingredients vary wildly, and so do the resulting sausages.

I am increasingly convinced that most parts of the C of E recruitment and training machine – the system - can really only cope with recruiting, making and using standard sized and flavoured sausages, which is unfortunate if you want to be a sausage, but don’t quite fit the standard recipe (i.e. male, under 30, no kids, little experience in doing the kinds of things you might have to do once ordained.)  I used the word system deliberately. In this context I mean a construct put together with the best of intentions which attains a life of its own, is hard to change, and risks failing to serve both the purpose for which it was intended and the values with which it was created.  Individual components  of the system can still be profoundly good, and some individuals may have a good experience of the system, but taken as a whole, it does not seem to be set up for variety or with imagination. There is no one accountable person or body looking at the whole system.  Things (and people) fall through the cracks, and it’s no one’s job to sort it.

A system built to make interesting sausages – to take the raw ingredients – the skills, the talents, learning, life experience as well as the hurts, foibles and tender areas, would say “wow, what an amazing sausage we could make out of this.”

But my observation so far is that it can’t do this: MinDiv centrally, Bishops, DDOs, Selectors, PTE advisors and training courses are either too knackered, too poor, too scared or too busy to make interesting sausages.  The system would much rather have safe sausages.

Of course, I must not forget the ultimate creativity and integrity of the Holy Spirit.  But He works through humans and  the systems they create, and I can’t help thinking that at times the system makes that really really hard. What can be done? An integrated system with a compelling vision in which everyone involved was treated as an equal would be a good start, since that would respect all the ingredients of the sausage to be, and that includes their families too.

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Back to Pink Floyd again: Dark Side of the Moon this time.

“I’ve always been mad,
I know I’ve been mad, like the most of us are…
very hard to explain why you’re mad,
even if you’re not mad…”

If accused of being mad, it’s just as hard to explain that you are not mad, since trying to prove it only underlines your need to prove you are not mad, which must mean you are mad.

This is directed at the C of E, not Coverdale Hall by the way.  They’re mostly still wonderful.

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