Do you have a unlimited amount of spare time and no desire to spend it in the garden, on the beach, or doing up the house?
Have you an unfulfilled desire to walk in front of vicars while carrying a large stick you are not allowed to use as a weapon?
Do you have no talents in stone masonry, boiler maintenance, Kung Fu, or bell lubrication - but a strange urge to "give it a go"?
Do you have a good head for heights and an interest in bending lead into interesting shapes?
Do you get sufficiently lonely that the alarm company phoning you up every night will cheer you up?
Then why not be a Church Warden? Wages are zero, so you might think you're better off being a bell ringer. But let's face it - who fixed the bells last time one fell off? That's right. Be a Church Warden and the bells will probably fall on somebody else.
The Church in Wales imposes an age limit of 75 on churchwardens (and other lay positions).
ReplyDeleteMy husband has been dodging this bullet for a while now. Being on the Deanery Synod is a better option.....
ReplyDeleteOnly if you can stand the sole agenda item being the Share allocation... Every time...
DeleteThe perils of a little history knowledge, I thought being churchwarden involved going down the pub during the sermon and rounding up the ungodly and throwing them in the village lock-up
ReplyDeletebut alas, it means giving up free time for Lent and sleepless nights when the bank loses the church silver and we lose the bank's receipt. Deanery Synod is far less stressful and even includes occasional cake and sandwiches.
I must pass all this on to our congregation. We have (one) churchwarden, but haven't had any Deanery Synod members for years. Trouble - is how do I make sure that the right people apply for Deanery Synod (i.e. ANYONE AT ALL apart from our brave churchwarden)?
ReplyDeleteOn second thoughts - let's just leave things as they are. I don't want to find people suggesting that maybe an experienced PCC Secretary would be just great as a replacement churchwarden!