Rector's Column

I?m sure you?re familiar with the phrase ?Practice makes perfect?. It?s one of those common phrases which is trotted out in response to the temptation to give up on some project when one gets discouraged, when one thinks there is lack of success or even competency. Living in an age when there is a desire for a quick profit and immediate success ? perhaps encouraged by the likes of The X-Factor, Britain?s Got Talent, and The Apprentice ? the idea of having to put in hours of work and practice gets forgotten.But someone (almost inevitably) has written a book on the subject. Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers has dedicated one chapter to what he calls the Ten Thousand Hour Rule. (I have to confess that I haven?t read the book, but it came up in conversation the other day and I have read some reviews of it.) Gladwell studied a good number of prominent individuals from Mozart to Dickens, to football and basketball players, to famous pianists and other musicians, to writers, to criminals, to entrepreneurs etc; and his studies show that each one did not reach real accomplishment until they had put in ten thousand hours of whatever activity they were engaged in. It is this input of hours that separates the good from the exceptional.However, just because the book has been written recently, it does not mean that we were not aware of it before. In fact, if you do the arithmetic you will find that ten thousand hours is the equivalent of five years worth of a forty hour week ? the traditional apprenticeship, or indeed in the church?s terms, a curacy. And having children who are musicians, I can see the amount of work over their lifetimes that has brought them to their current standard.And so I came to wonder what it might mean in terms of the life of faith. From time to time I hear people saying something like ?I am not a very good Christian?, or ?I?m not very good at praying?, or ?I don?t know my Bible that well?. Perhaps this ten thousand hour rule might help, that we cannot expect to feel we?re good at something until we?ve put in the hours. By the same token we should not feel dejected or tempted to give up on it because we have not been successful after only the first few attempts.For those who say, ?I tried church for a couple of Sundays but didn?t like it?, the answer is that you have to experience a bit more ? maybe not ten thousand hours but a two or three months rather than two or three weeks. Like everything else, the Christian life is about perseverance. It is about carrying on, even when you feel most discouraged with it. It is about learning it and living it; taking the opportunities to be present in church to worship, to be at study groups to learn more about what we believe and why we worship God as we do, to read the Bible and to pray. The hours don?t have to be crammed into a concentrated apprenticeship or curacy. We have a whole lifetime to do it in. But of course, living out our faith means that hour by hour we are gaining experience, and we can soon clock up the hours. Like any practitioner in sport or music or business, we don?t wait until we?re perfect at doing something before we do it. Practice means both actually doing it while at the same time learning to do it better.As we approach Lent, think about how you might include something each day or each week to help your journey of faith; becoming more practiced in it, aiming to say with St Paul, as he says in his second letter to Timothy (4:7), I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.

The Rector's Column from this month's edition of The Messenger