people have the potential for great suckiness in or outside of the church
Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Before we proceed with today’s blog entry, please sit back and relax for a short presentation from:
Marginally Funny Christian Joke Theatre
Mom: Did Jam start her new job this week?
Brother Mark: I don’t know. She was waiting on a background check.
Jenny: Well, if Heather was starting this week, then Jam should be too. Don’t they have the same job?
Brother Mark: I don’t know.
Jenny: That’s what I was lead to believe at B.S. on Sunday night.
Dad: B.S.? Brother
Mark: Bible study. Mom (to Brother Mark and Jenny): I don’t like those conspiratorial grins on your faces.
And… SCENE.
* * *
I haven’t had much time for blogging this week as this is the annual pledge drive at my campus/community radio station. This is my fifth year volunteering there, and while I no longer do a show, I still help out when I can. During my sojourn away from church, I think the radio station became kind of a church subsitute to me. Like church does for many people, it became the locus of my social life, the place where I spent spare time, the place where I logged my hours of volunteerism. Like churches, campus/community radio stations are traditionally male-dominated, though like churches, that’s changed in recent years. Thankfully the record-collecting culture that shaped C&C radio throughout the past century is being opened up to women more — I guess I’m proof of that. (That said, men outnumber women in music programming. The women who have been getting involved in C&C radio are primarily involved in spoken word [C&C parlance for “talk”] programming. I’m an example of that — when I did a weekly show, it was a feminist spoken word one. SURPRISE SURPRISE.)
Today, most of my close friends who live in this city are radio station people, and while I don’t spend nearly as much time up at the station as I did during my university days, I still feel comfortable and welcome there. Well, the latter part is kind of debatable right now. Like any community organization (eg. church) the station isn’t perfect and has its problems. The station is made up of over 100 human beings who, as human beings do, have a tendency to mess up a lot at various levels of severity. Staff stay on longer than they should, certain volunteers grow weary of doing all the work, and so on. Actually, one thing our C&C radio station would do well with is the church tradition of firing ineffective leadership (perceived so rightly or wrongly). But I’m not naming names.
I guess what I’ve learned from involvement in a community organization other than the church is that the church is subject to the same pitfalls as any other organization, and vice versa. Which maybe makes me want to cut churches a little more slack.