Something has to be written about the last episode of Rev.

There was something joyous in watching the last ten minutes.

Not some sadistic shardenfreude thing at Adam Smallbone's disastrous attempt to seduce the local headmistress; win an argument with his wife through barked swearing; dance badly or cling to and then let go of his vocation.

The joy was in recognition.  Of seeing myself there.  Not the details (although apparently all of these do have their origins in real events), but the deeper motivations - the self-pity, the questionning of whether all this is worth it and we haven't just succumbed to religious hoax ("'Dan Barker was right' whispers the demonic voice in our head), and the redemption through the least expected: the policeman who we think has come to arrest the drunken Reverend; the local gang who refuse to offer Smallbone a fight despite his insults; and the dying woman who grants the Reverend the honour of needing him.

The 24 hour news channels fail to cover themselves in glory at this kind of event.  They are after information for the sake of being watched and being interesting.  If they can't be exclusive, then they must deny the exclusivity of the other channels.  They keep referring to these horrific events as a "story" - "this has been a long 'story' for the peopel of Rothbury" said one news anchor last night.  There is greed to be near to the "story" - these events are happening "only 100m behind me"; "we have been moved further back by the police".  This conversion of crisis "news product" is doubly troubling.  It belittles human pain, and it is guilty of hypocrisy.  It masks its true intentions in the false cloak of urgent concern and the public's "right to know".

The primary "news product" is conflict.  Peace is a terrible thing because it is dull.  Thus, one news reporter at 6.30am this morning said "the question that is being asked around Rothbury this morning is 'Why did it take so long for the police to find Raoul Moat?'".  You want to question this in so many ways.  Firstly, a mere four hours after Raoul Moat's final act of annihiliation, during which most of the people of Rothbury would have been in their beds, did this reporter really have the ability in four hours to crystallise the complex and diverse thoughts of an entire village, into "the question that is being asked".  One suspects that this is code for "the question that we journalists are going to ask to get more mileage out of this 'story' is..."

We've got this huge challenge in the Church of Scotland at the moment, reducing our ministry posts from 1244 (not 1400 as it was in Life and Work this month) down to 1000.  In Glasgow, that's a reduction from 160 down to 132.

How to make these reductions involves crossing an intricate minefield of Church legislation, local needs, wider considerations, transparent processes and the fact that it is very difficult to get hold of what a Church is, and make a fair decision about whether it needs a minister or a deacon more than the Church up the road.  Too much goes in congregations that is invisible, only God knows what goes in the corner of every Church - we don't have the eyesight required to make those assessments.  And yet we have to.

One problem is blindness.

The other is competition.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said that whenever you got more than two disciples together, there would arise "a reckoning amongst them" - a competition to work out who is the greatest.  When we read the that the disciples were arguing about "Who was the greatest?", we can't believe the baldness of the discussion, the brazen-ness of a Peter turning to Thomas and saying "here's why I am greater than you?".

“As of tomorrow, I want everybody on this bus to bring a book” – here’s a thought provoking story for us in priority areas of Rosemary Peterson (‘Ms Kookyi’), the school bus driver who recognised there was a discipline problem with the kids travelling in her bus and decided to take charge. Enjoy the clip at www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/ns/nightly_news#36802449. A thought-provoking example of seeing a need and not waiting for the professionals to attend to it!

- Thanks to the Priority Areas Newsletter

There are two reasons why the Big Society was never going to work.

The first is because David Cameron was never going to be able to defend it within a week of taking office.  The Big Society was the centrepiece of the Conservative Manifesto (this I know because I had to read the thing, was about to say "wretched thing", but actually it wasn't that bad) - pages of attractive graphics and slogans like "Small Government - Big Society".  But it didn't even last four weeks on the campaign.  It hardly lasted a week on the campaign.  How bad must your judgement be if your big idea, your central philosophy, doesn't even last a week in the campaign?  And if it can't last a week on the campaign, it won't last a day in government.

So the first reason it wasn't going to work was that David Cameron was defending it like an injured Rio Ferdinand.

Secondly, David Cameron has clearly never tried to organise a volunteers rota.  James Delingpole (I hate to quote Delingpole approvingly) characterises the "Big Society" as

Dave’s bouncy new “Big Society” plan for teenagers and grandmothers to be compelled every other week to whitewash their local community centre.

In our Church, when there are strong faith-based reasons to do big things voluntarily, like collect for Christian Aid, we struggle for volunteers.  What chance was Dave going to have cajoling a chronologically-impoverished, disinvested populace to replace paid carers with voluntary labour.  It was crazy.  Getting volunteers is tough when you're fishing in a warm pool.  What chance in the frozen ice-lakes of stress-dense dormitory towns?  Dave never had a chance.  It was only ever going to be way of Dave being able to live with himself when he had just shut down 200 day-care centres.