A Calling
A common first question that is asked when you are brought in front of any ordination board is “tell me about your call story?”. Mine was nothing terribly profound, no “come to Jesus” moment at a youth gathering or spiritual awakening. Simply, it was a slow awareness that grew into what I would call today a mystical experience.
When I was a Sophomore in High School, I received a bible from my grandfather, I am not sure if it was a gift or something that he just passed on to me. My calling was a joint experience of digging into those scriptures and mystical experience of God’s presence at my local church. From here, I heard my first call to preach.
My business partner has been encouraging me for years to inquire about going back into the church and I have been hesitant for several years, to the point of not attending due to the strength of my call. Recently, with the changes in the UMC there appears to be an openness to some of the progressive ideas that have been a hallmark of my faith and ministry are become more acceptable. With this thought in mind, I reached out to our new district superintendent to look at the process.
As I have been thinking about reentering the process, I have been deeply thinking about what the church is and where do I see my role in it. My thoughts from this contemplative work follows.
What is the Church?
This question reminds me if the ordination question, “Describe the nature and mission of the church, what are its primary tasks today? In my computer, I keep a revised copy of my original ordination paper from the UMC, I have revised it over the years as I got older. My current answer to this question is this:
The church is “an expression of God’s destiny for mankind. The Christian church demonstrates this principle in its celebration of Jesus’ last supper with his disciples, where the fellowship of each individual Christian with Christ becomes the basis for solidarity of all Christians with one another”(Pannenberg, 1977, p 16). In living in solidarity with all other Christians, we must commit to a life of mindfulness and learning and it is felt that the church needs to be our central gathering place to rehearse the skills that we will need each week to carry out Christ’s call to make disciples. The mission of the church has never changed; however, the demographics of our churches has. The Christian church has done a very poor job of keeping up or in many cases, just plain refusing to adapt to the changing needs of our ever increasing global world. It is felt that this has caused a major cancer in the church and has caused a slow death to many major and minor denominations over the world.
In the Western tradition of Christianity, we have a very stale understanding of what church is and what we do. We seem to understand it as something that we do only once a week and occasionally do a mission project or two. We may even go to church during the middle of the week and sit on a board or two. Pannenberg, quoting Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, offers “The Church is a kind of sacrament or sign of intimate union with God, and of the unity of all mankind” (Pannenberg, 1977, p 151), In the Eastern tradition of Buddhism, one has the tradition of the sangha, the community in which one practices the work of being a Buddhist. I like the word practice. It has a sense of action; a sense of togetherness that I feel is lost in our Western individualistic identities. In our churches today, we need to be a sangha that practices prayer, studies church history, scriptures and theologies that form our faith and occasionally engage in sacramental worship. “One’s practice is what one does to assure that the heart of one’s religion is also one’s own heart; it makes sure that one is personally plugged into whatever it was that got this religious tradition going and that keeps it going. Practice, more concretely, is all the things that a Buddhist or a Christian does to keep connected with the experience of Gautama or Jesus, and to make sure that the energy of this experience grows, adapts, applies, and holds tight in all the rough times of life” (Knitter, 2009).
In Acts chapter 2, it is offered that the early church was a place full of the Spirit, devoted to the apostles teaching and growing daily their numbers (The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrapha, 2001). I feel that worship needs to be the engine that drives the local church and must be inspiration for even the smallest of churches to devote themselves to Christ’s call. I feel that the key to the postmodern church is to adopt a pre-Christian attitude to worship.
If worship is the central gathering for the believers of Christ, then preaching and prayer must be the primary language we speak to promote the Gospel and the changes we seek to make in this world. Trost (2007) tells us that the preacher preaches not of his own thought and will without basis but founded in the words of divine Scripture (p. 173). For worship to embody these elements of prayer and preaching, one does not necessarily need a Sunday morning service. In the pre-Christian days of Acts 2, worship was done in houses, in mission, on the corners, in the coffee houses if they had them back then. Today, too, adopting a pre-Christian attitude and change of perspective allows us to see the men’s breakfast at the local diner as worship; the deaconate meeting and all the other times we get together in community and gather in a spirit of prayer, compassion and love.
What do I Want to Do and What I see for the Church’s Future?
The church in a lot of ways has existed for itself, it has become a club for those on the inside. It does ministry for the people of the community, not with the community. Missiology has become a MacGuffin for a lot of churches. It has become an ego driven, judgmental, conservative place where young people specifically feel that the inhabitants of these churches are unconcerned for their futures.
Jesus sought liberation from oppression. Wesley went out of the church to where people were at and preached, lived with them. Early Methodist preachers in the frontier engaged with their communities when they were around. Jesus welcomed all and created a kinship of like minded people. This is the kindom of God, a place where everyone thrives and justice reigns.
When done properly, church becomes a sanctuary for the spiritually wounded, a place to find meaning, belonging and connection. It becomes a healthy, contagious place where people drawn to out of sense of desire rather than fomo. It becomes a place that is focused on the outside rather than those on the inside.
Whatever this looks like as a ministry, I want to be part of it.
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