Ministry and the pragmatism of God

I’m off to a two day meeting to talk about ministry, in particular how to intepret the apparent dearth of ministry candidates in the current cultural and church climate.

1. Is God calling fewer people to traditional forms of ministry?
2. If so is that being compensated by churches and people  developing different forms of ministry, perhaps more fluid and adaptable to a culture now in chronic rapid-change mode?
3. Or has the career displaced vocation, and the career trajectory replaced the sense of upward calling, so that against a career with its rewards, ministry is unattractive as a vocation with its cost?
4. Or is it that the forms and styles of ministry being modelled are increasingly unattractive – because of tolerated mediocrity in standards and competence, obsessive attachment to outmoded forms, negative joylessness about ministry as a way of life, churches resistant to change and frustrating to the point of muting calls for change, or whatever else?

That the hard-edged distinction between ministry and laity, or between clergy and the rest, is neither valid nor healthy, has long been conceded by those interested in learning from NT understandings of the correlation between ministries and gifts. The recovery of vocation as God’s calling on each life, and as conferring on all ethically legitimate work that Christians do, the blessing of God’s call, was one of the clear gains of the Lutheran Reformation.

But still, churches need leadership as service, and such service requires the freedom to evolve and the equipment to be effective to fulfil it well. So how are we to resource needed ministry today? And accepting the theological clumsiness of that question (because it is Christ who resources all ministry in the power of the Spirit), what are the promising possibilities presented by today’s experience of church decline, contemporary ministry needs, missional thinking, accepted human limitations, ongoing pastoral uncertainty?

• If there’s one kind of ministry the contemporary church needs it’s………….what?
• If there’s one underlying vocational motivation ministry needs to ignite it it’s………what?
• If there’s one thing God is saying through the experience of "ministry shortage" it’s….. what?

These are pragmatic questions – they look for answers that might work – I’m not worried about that. I wonder if amongst other attributes discernible in the creative and redemptive activity of God,there is an element of divine pragmatism? Though seldom addressed as such in the more careful categories of systematic theology, is the pragmatism of divine grace, God’s love looking for ways of redeeming that work – would that be pragmatism from an eternal perspective? And for all our agonising about the hows and whys, isn’t that eternal perspective the needed reminder that the health and future and completion of the church’s mission in God’s purposes is secured by sovereign self-giving love, that chooses to use us?