"There's Always A Siren Singing You To Shipwreck"

I was talking on the phone with my mother earlier this afternoon, and she mentioned to me that our church decided to fire the youth direction, who has been at UPC for about seven or eight years now. Why? They felt her job could be done by a couple of volunteers from the local Baptist college.

Admittedly, Rachel herself (the woman who was the youth director) and the guy who was youth director when I first joined the youth group way back in 1994 started out as college students volunteering. But Rachel had become the full-time youth minister, and was doing so much with it--mission trips, gatherings, and so much more. The church's reasoning? Budget concerns.

It strikes me as sadly amusing that we keep thinking of the church as a business concern. Admittedly, the church has business stuff that it needs to take care of--payroll, monthly bills, etc.--but isn't a church supposed to concern itself more with its world mission than with money concerns? As long as the church still operates, does it matter if it makes or loses money?

Oddly enough, the church actually has plenty of money. However, most of the money we have is earmarked for specific things--erecting a new building, missionaries, things like that. The money's usually not donated to the church for the payment of the minister and other church employees. As my mom commented, we'll end up like the other Presbyterian Church in Shawnee ended up (before it merged with our church)--we'll have plenty of money that we can't spend, and no one attending the church. So many members have already left, so many will probably leave now that the youth director's gone, and God only knows how the poor interum pastor is supposed to handle all this.

On an unrelated note, let me share a new (well, new to me) webcomic that I just finished reading today--Digital War, which I found through The Jaded and recognized as a prolifict poster on the Keenspace Forums. Digital War is an interesting read, and well-drawn. The current storyline is a quasi-LOTR parody with some nice twists, and the main character, War, rocks your socks. So go check it out. There'll probably be a link to it over at Dim Bulb as soon as I get around to it.

In other news, I finally beat Final Fantasy Tactics Advance this afternoon. Seventy-six hours plus of gameplay. Good game, though. Of course, now I'm without a game to play for the GBA, having beaten everything I have...oh, wait, except MarioKart. Still have that! But that's not really one you "beat," per se.

...yeah, need a new game. Or I guess I could start working on things like my thesis...maybe....

~chaos cricket

Song of the Moment: Radiohead, "There There"