@RealHousewivesOfTaunton
My church became so stingy a few years ago and it's really sad. No cleaner, instead guilt-tripping members of the congregation to join a cleaning rota
Is it stingy or just finding a cleaner? We've just been looking for one at the church I work at. First round of advertising we got a couple of people who seemed great; we'd have been happy with either one.
They both pulled out - one because they couldn't cope with the size of the building, the other because they didn't want to work out of normal hours, then when we offered to try and make office hours work (we have lots of hirers, so it's fitting round them) said they didn't have spare space during office hours for 10 hours a week.
Second round of advertising got zero applicants.
Third round we got someone who is a cleaner for a member who is giving it a go and they are brilliant, but very busy so not sure they will stay.
Problem we found was that most cleaners are full enough that they don't want to take on an extra 10 hours a week; if they're on their own, they don't want to be cleaning out of hours in an empty building; and the building is big so takes time.
We were very clear we were happy to be flexible around what they could/wanted to do, but even so we didn't get people.
Someone suggested we raised the hourly pay, but I pointed out that we hadn't even put rate on the advert - no one was getting to the point of finding that out. It was genuinely that people didn't want such a big job.
Having talked with other local churches, they're having the same issue finding people.
@SereneCapybara I left our local church when we were doing an action sing and I realised the kids were all at Sunday school and it was just adults being infantilised to wave our arms around.
I've got a couple of stories around children's songs. One was when the dc were little and we went to Spring Harvest. Ishmael was leading the children's worship. He'd, at the time, written quite a lot of songs that said approximately "I have two hands so I can clap, two feet so I can dance".
He started the first session with "Let's see your hands. Everyone's got two hands, haven't they?" And my little 2yo said clearly (and factually) from the front "I haven't!"
He opened his mouth to say something, probably along the lines of "of course you have" and saw dd2 happily waving one arm and one hand, and closed his mouth again. At the end he came over and apologised, and I don't think he wrote another song on that lines.
The other was many years back dh (who did the music) objected to a children's song on the basis it was all about dancing and shouting etc and nary a mention of God or why they might be doing that. The minister said that as long as the children were singing it as a worship song, did it matter?
So I wrote a song for him to use. I haven't got it still, but it started with:
"I will brush my teeth and wipe my underneath" and went downhill from there. The minister changed his mind and we got more meaningful songs for the children.