Rumour has it that there are more lay people " pewsitters " than clergy in our church. But the evidence can be hard to find.

Hang around the official and semi-official chat rooms, read local blogs and you will find them written by our ministers or full of quotes from them.  

If there is a story about a local parish in Southern Cross, the main person quoted is almost always an ordained clergyman.

In fact the only space in Southern Cross where you can be sure you won't read the words of a minister is right here.

That might be enough to put you off wanting to see more of the non-clergy. That could be one sensible reaction to this column, I guess.

But as a higher and higher percentage of the money spent in this diocese gets spent training and caring for clergy, this pewsitter wonders if us un-clergy aren't becoming a bit invisible.
This situation is likely to get worse before it gets better, because the cutbacks in the diocese will fall far less heavily on areas that prepare and train clergy. There is a desire to "protect the future".

In addition, my not necessarily educated guess is, the percentage of people employed by our group of churches " the Diocese " who are un-clergy will fall.
The place will feel more clerical.

I am not sure anyone wants that, nice as our clergy are. And it is good that they are well trained. And of course it would even be good to have more of them.
But they are a "them".

The pewsitter has been thinking about the two tribes in Sydney churches. Our ministers are being trained for a longer and longer time, with the let's-see-if-you-like-doing-this-stuff Ministry Training Scheme apprenticeships, followed by Moore College, followed by intensive mentoring and training.

No longer than what a brain surgeon does you might say. After all they are sort of soul surgeons. But surgeons are a tribe apart in our society, isolated by long hours as junior doctors, and then often a special lifestyle.

Brain surgeons and "souls surgeons' have some things in common.

So we have two tribes, pewsitters and ministers. [Simplistic I know" but bear with me.]

So what is the difference?

To quote a minister (sorry): "normal' workers need to study the Bible and the ministers need to encourage them to do that. But ministers, with years of college, and working at their sermons each week, don't have the same need. Rather they need to study the workers and the culture they are in. And there are more tribes than workers.

So what if ministers really did work hard at understanding us?

There would be a lot less of straw men in their preaching, more of a sense that they know what it is like to, say, lose a job, or work in something arduous and unrewarding. To be a victim of domestic violence, or a sudden sacking.

So what if we really listened to them? [It's okay " this is the non-clergy column so they are not reading it.]

We can admit that we doze off in sermons. But if we were gripped by the good news in the way we once were, our lives would be a lot less beige.

If you asked our ministers about their chief failure many would say it was not having energised people for evangelism.

Our two tribes can only be truly alive if we work together.