Last night was an interesting exercise. Having had Sunday’s announcement – Monday night’s Leaders Meeting was opened up to the wider church – and we ended up with probably about a 50-50 split between leaders and pew-dwellers (is there any nice way to say that? Non-leaders? Peasants? The eternal difficulty of describing people by what they are not). And it was amazing to see the different reactions of people.

Many people had come ready to start talking about the next step. That’s about where I was at. I might be a bit of an emotional person – but I’m not willing to do that in public (and yes I do see the irony of writing that on a publicly available blog). I’m keen to get in and get involved with the process of helping wherever I can in picking our next person – although I’m also aware that it’s not really possible to be that helpful – I struggle to see what “general qualities” we’d be looking for that aren’t pretty self-evident, especially to the remarkably wise group of people we have on “The Council”. But it’s all fun anyway.

But others were quite clearly not that thrilled with the idea of doing anything until they’d dealt with some of the grief and feelings that had been brought up by having Pete and Kathy leave. Which wasn’t something I’d really considered that much. For whatever reason – I don’t think I ever start worrying about a relationship that’s gone until it actually has. That’s certainly not any criticism of the people who weren’t at that stage, it just wasn’t something that crossed my mind that much. To tell you the truth, grief sort of stikes me as a funny word for it. There’s certainly processing – working out what that means my reaction needs to be – working out how much this stuff effects the youth guys. But I’m not sure that I really understand a need for that kind of grief. Which is a purely personal thing – I have no doubt that for other people that’s a very real thing.