Thursday, September 18, 2008

Church Nightmares


Lately my wife and I have taken to watching "Kitchen Nightmares", starring chef Gordon Ramsey (great name, by the way). It's really interesting and funny. He goes to these dysfunctional, failing restaurants, where everyone on the staff is fighting, and has lost their passion to cook decent food, and then he analyzes the whole situation, and provides them solutions on how to move forward and have a successful restaurant. There are clips of the show on "You Tube" which give you an idea of what it's like. Unfortunately since chef Gordon has something of a "potty mouth" I cannot link to one of the clips here, but if anyone if interested in looking at a clip I suppose he could find one on You Tube.

Anyway, as we were watching it the other day I thought about how fascinating it would be to have a show like this about continuing Anglican parishes (or dioceses, or provinces). I can see it now: some really successful godly, but tell-it-like-is priest, who has had years of great ministry and done lots of phenomenal work goes into some struggling, dysfunctional parish that's run by a grouchy old, misanthropic, micromanaging rector, and rakes him, and everyone else in the place, over the coals.... explaining, between all of the cursing, why no one wants to come to the church. It could be a really riveting show, but somehow I don't think TBN, EWTN, or any of the other religious broadcasting networks would carry it!