Rather jaded

Just in from the sort of Deanery Synod meeting that makes you wish you'd never heard of the Church of England, still less been ordained in it...We spent 2 hours circling various painful issues to do with pastoral reorganisation, finance and the like, and I emerged feeling that we are, as a body, complacent, self centred, parochial....
Oddly, I found myself sitting with Fr Spikey, from the Forward in Faith parish up the road...with whom I get on splendidly, once we have got over the little fact that he cannot recognise my orders, and he felt like a real ally, in that he was someone who was hugely concerned for Gospel principles and shared my distress at the way the people of God were behaving.
Anyway, by the time I emerged from the meeting, I was wondering why on earth anyone ever bothered with the church at all, so it was both consoling and disquieting (if such a pair of contradictions is possible) to visit the weary pilgrim blog and be posted on to Ryan Bolger's blog, where he develops the core assumption that "if you are trying to make Christ known to your community, I shouldn't start from here". Lots of good stuff. Go read, please....then we can discuss later, when I've recovered from the C of E.