Bridget Phillipson – the Labour chair and minister for women and qualities – was in the news yesterday being questioned about (among other things) the next budget. Her headline was that next month’s budget will be more difficult because of the American war beinbg waged in Iran. This is inevitably true.

It has been the case for quite some time that budgets in the UK are generally not impacted most by the spending decisions of the government. A significant factor in what we can spend or hand out as tax relief is impacted by global issues beyond our control. This was writ large during the sub-prime mortgage debacle, the global recession, the covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and now the war in Iran. It matters not one jot whether we caused these things or if we are even directly involved in them or not, the impact these things have on our economy are huge and tend to have a bigger impact than internal spending or saving decisions taken by any government.

There is something of a parallel here to the church. So much of what churches are able to do owes very little to matters within the control of the church. There are plenty of churches that are well organised, with solid teaching, doing all the supposedly right things that nevertheless remain small, struggling for finance and limited for workers. There are, likewise, plenty of churches that are none of these things who have great finances and fulsome staff teams.

There are frequently decisions taken within churches that may or may not be the right thing to do, they may or may not be wise decisions, but they ultimately have no bearing on whether people will be saved, often don’t translate into people sticking with the church, and may not lead to people growing either. These things are typically outside the control of the church elders.

Churches ought to recognise as well as anybody that what the Lord determines to do is ultimately what will impact us most. And what the Lord determines to do may not align with what we are hoping for. Similarly, we may want to do all sorts of things as a church, but we can only do what we can do with the people the Lord has given us. Even the people we have cannot be (or, rather, certainly should not be) “controlled” in the way we might sometimes feel would serve our aims. These are all things outside of our control and what happens in the church rests less on our plans and ideas and much more on factors well outside of our control.

The good news here is that we are not in control and that is for the best. The Lord is ultimately in control and his plans are better and wiser than any of ours. But it also means that churches should probably give their pastor and elders a bit of a break if the church isn’t everything they think it should be (ditto government economies, to some degree). None of us have quite the control over these things we might like and much of the way things are and the ways we have to operate are determined by things that are beyond our control and to which we are ultimately beholden.