There should be a class in seminary called All Those Practical Things We Haven't Taught You. The syllabus could include things like:
- How to tie your cincture
- Where to buy clergy shirts that actually fit well
- Ashes - where to buy them, how to prepare them, what to put them in
- How to tactfully remove fundamentalist tracts from your Lutheran congregation (I just took them out of the pews and nobody seemed to notice...)
- By the way, your job description does include buying a new computer for the church office, knowing what to do with the phone system fails, and other surprises.
4 comments:
Ive got a few....How to teach the Sunday School Music hour when you arent the most musically inclined?
How to make coffee in the huge coffee pots?(lets just say I kind of had a blonde moment one day)
How to laugh at yourself when you make silly mistakes, observations etc?
how to deal with scheming junior high kids when you have to share a hotel room with them for the weekend?
how to convince the facilities committee that they NEED to cut out a portion or two of the pews to make the sanctuary handicapped friendly and get them to realize that maintaining the maximum capacity of the sanctuary is NOT the most important concern?
how to effectively and efficiently delegate responsibilities to parents and other people without you feeling as if you are imposing on them? (maybe that's just me...)
How to find items filed by the secretary who was replaced by the secreatary who was replaced by your current secretary.
How to stealthily advance the clocks in a member's house so they make it to church and council on time.
How to file a workers' compensation claim.
How to avoid buying raffle tickets for every cause in the county.
How to graciously accept the fact that the Girl Scout Cookies you ordered were consumed by a house fire.
How to respond briefly when members of other churches compare you positively to their pastor.
How to respond briefly when members of other churches compare you negatively to their pastor.
How to respond briefly to anything.
How to respond briefly to blogs.
How to learn brief responses on your own and simply stop typing.
How to figure out how much and what kind of lunch meat to buy for a meal for your junior high youth and adult sponsors.
How to figure out if a parishioner is legitimately worried about the health of their child, and not using it as an exuse to come along on a youth trip at the last minute and create issues.
How to cope/manage when it seems as if there are a milion things that need to be done and there is an impossibly limited amount of time in which to do them.
Ways to effectively deal with nursing staff when you attempt to visit a parishioner, but they make you wait until after they have inserted an IV, and performed several other tasks, and by the time they allow you into the room, the medicine they were administering through the IV has successfully made the parishioner drowsy and he is sound asleep.
those are just a few more issues that i may... or may not... be dealing with today. right now. they MIGHT be things with which i should be dealing rather than commenting on your blog. just maybe.
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