Vision for Ministry
All right friends, we’ve been working together for a year now. You’ve heard some of what I have to teach. We’ve had some great times together. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done. I can’t do it all. “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.” So, I’m enlisting all of you to do the work. Here’s what I need you to do: preach about the reign of God, heal the sick, raise the dead, and cleanse the outcast. I really need a weekend off! I give you authority to do everything I’ve been doing. Now Linda and Kathryn, you take Sunset Park, Neal and Michael you get Clinton Hill, Sunu and Troy you get Williamsburg, Pam and Joyce, you take Carol Gardens. The rest of you can talk to me after church and I’ll give you your assignments. Oh, and by the way, you can all leave your wallets and purses here. God, will provide. And that will be far easier to see and believe if you demonstrate it by having a little trust and not moving about with all your stuff. Now go ahead. Good luck. God bless you.
It’s pretty confrontational isn’t it? I don’t think we appreciate how radical and confrontational a story it is. Here were the disciples who, up until this point, were more than content to listen to whatever little gems Jesus had to offer. They were grooving on following him around and watching him go about doing good works. But suddenly he turns it all on its head. He turns to them and says, “You are not consumers of God’s love anymore. You are not here just to be comforted and consoled anymore. You are not here just to hang out with like-minded people anymore. You are meant to be providers of Gods’ love. I need help. I need partners to do work in my name. You are not followers any longer. You are given responsibility. You are a doers.”
It’s an amazing little story. The disciples were given the task of doing exactly the same things that Jesus himself had been doing, which is a pretty daring plan when you think about. The disciples were no wiser, capable or more faithful than anyone else. In fact, the Gospels seem to go out of their way to prove that they were ordinary people who were had no particular qualifications. The disciples often missed the point, jockeyed for position and managed to misunderstand and screw up as much as any twelve could. Their sole qualification seems to have been their willingness to get up and move when Jesus aid, “Follow me.” It’s a daring plan to entrust the work to them.
Jesus could have followed a different model. Jesus could have said that they were going to be his assistants. But he didn’t. Instead, he transferred his ministry to them. He entrusted his work to them. With very little training to go on, he sent them out to heal. That is God’s daring plan.
I also think it’s interesting that Jesus looks at the crowds and sees them bewildered, lost and vulnerable and is moved to compassion. Some can look out on a crowd like that and see a bottomless pit- more work, more pain, more endless suffering. It is easy become discouraged or depressed. But instead of being discouraged and dismayed Jesus sees it as an opportunity for his followers to exercise their gifts.
I could go a lot of places with this story. But as we approach the end of my first year with you I wanted to share a little bit of my vision of a way we might go about doing our work together as a church, if we take this story seriously. It s simply one model for ministry that I find very exciting
It flows out of several basic assumptions. First, the firm conviction that we are all called to ministry. I believe every one of us is called to touch some pain in the world. Every one of us is called to be doing some act of compassion or creating structures for justice, or doing work that will support those who do. One of our first and most basic tasks as a church is to help people discover their calling. Unfortunately calling is generally only spoken of in reference to ordained ministry; you are called to the monastery or the ministry and everybody else just goes about their daily work and attending worship, which is very unfortunate. We talk about the priesthood of all believers but then we only talk about the calling of clergy and in so doing we have cut ourselves off from the very thing that will empower us for ministry. We also have to work at helping people discover their gifts. Because we are all gifted, you and I. You may not consider yourself so, but you are. And I will preach some more sermons on discerning call and gifts. But for right now all I can say is that we are all called. That is our basic assumption.
The second assumption is that we best fulfill that calling in community. You notice that Jesus did not send his disciples out one by one. He sent them out two by two. I suspect that Jesus knew that without someone else to carry to vision they would be easily discouraged. There would be time when they would be down and would need someone else to pick them up. I suspect he also knew that not one of them would have all the gifts necessary for the task. One would be a good speaker, one a good organizer, one with an extra measure of compassion. So, he put them together in community to fulfill the calling so that they could all exercise their gifts for the benefit of the whole. Jesus may also have realized that we need community to keep us accountable. Left completely to my own devices, it is very easy for me to drift from the task I have committed myself to. That is why 12 step groups require community sharing. To hold one another accountable to the task of recovery, or doing good works.
Thirdly, is that we can only fulfill that calling and do the work faithfully when it is nurtured in prayer, scripture and study. You can do good work without it. But my experience is that you will quickly burn out. It is often flash in the pan. My experience also suggests that the work will only have limited depth, or it will tend to lose its essence. I have known many a Christian service organization that continued to serve without being particularly Christian while doing so. Without a contemplative life to inspire, nurture, and add depth, it is very easy to lose the essence of what we are doing and handle it with only limited faithfulness. So, what does this mean practically? How do we hold this together?
What I would like to see happen is for people to slowly discover their calling. We have to figure out how to help people do that. I warn you, it’s hard. It’s a struggle. It sometimes takes a fair bit of time. There is often a time of discontent or boredom as one awaits discovering it. But what I hope will happen is that some will eventually be able to say, “ I am feeling called to work with homeless men, every time I see one in the street a part of me is broken open.” Or, “I’m feeling called to work on environmental issues, or for peace, or with battered women.” As you figure that out, as you listen to those pangs and drawing deep inside you, you start to voice that calling. Talk it up in coffee hour, write emails, make announcements till you find others (at least one other) who share a similar calling. And you form a mission group to work on that calling. That mission group, centered on one common call, becomes the organizing principle.
You form a group of two, six or a dozen people and you commit yourselves to whatever disciplines you think are the bare minimums to support your spirit. Individuals can decide what is optimum for their life. But the group sets a minimum. That may be half hour a day in prayer, planned study of scripture, a retreat each year, the reading of one solid spiritual book. Whatever it is, the group decides what will nurture them on the inward journey. And you meet weekly or biweekly to talk about how you are doing with that, to open up your life to the others, to work on deepening your capacity to love and elimination the blockages to love. You work on forming a deep community that will support you with these inward struggles. When you meet you also do any necessary study you might need to assist you in fulfilling your calling. If we were called to work especially on environmental issues, we might want to work through a good solid book on creation spirituality or the most pressing environmental issues.
Then, we spent the later part of the meeting working directly on the mission - planning, strategizing, and doing the work. But it will be work nurtured and supported by prayers, study and loving community. And it will be work that has immense power. This is not my model. I’ve borrowed it from the Church of the Savior in DC. But I have been witness to its power. I have never seen a church so faithful in ministry.This model for ministry does a few things that traditional church structures don’t do. In a normal mission or social action committee you inevitably have people called to different things. Certain issues burn for some while only flickering for others. The net effect of meetings tends to be that I put a wet blanket on you. I think we should be working peace, while you think we should be working on the issue of homelessness and in the end nothing of power ever happens. Another way we tend to do things in the church is to find jobs that we think need to be done, and then enlist people to do them. The end result is that they are often not done with passion because they are not things which people are called to. We fill slots rather than given people a place to live out their calling. And even if we are working out of a sense of calling, without the accountability of a few others it is very easy for us to never get anything done. But when you get two, three or four people together who are fired up about the same things, who share the calling, sparks begin to fly. The spirit begins to fly and there is no stopping the good work that will follow.
Secondly, this model holds together the inward journey and the outward journey in one unit, one meeting, one group. You can’t be expected to go to bible study one night, prayer group one night, a planning and strategizing meeting another, and a support group another. None of us has time for that. By the time we do all that we have no real time to be in ministry. So, all those functions are carried in one group, one meeting. You work on the inward life and the outward journey in the same group. Thirdly it takes care of the pastoral care issue. It becomes less easy for someone to fall through the cracks. When you are sick or in crisis, your intentional community of your mission group knows you are sick and can respond appropriately. When you struggle the group will carry you through.
Finally, it moves us beyond the false classifications of ordained and lay ministry and completely owns the truth that we are all ordained for ministry. This model trusts that we have the abilities to be faithful in prayer, in study, in work. It sets up a structure where there are not just a few doing work on behalf of the whole but that all are doing the work. This is my vision, which I wanted to share. I look forward to hearing reaction and talking about it. Whatever model we chose, one thing remains clear, that Jesus takes delight in taking ordinary people who don’t’ seem to have any particular qualification or credentials to be his partners in ministry. And he promises that he will give us what we need to be faithful. And then he sends us out into the community to be providers of God’s love.