Category: ministry

Stanley Hauerwas doesn’t need his popularity ratings boosted – two reasons – one his stature as pastoral theologian, ethical thinker and ecclesial critic is already assured – two, the popularity of his views is the last thing that bothers him. I’m pleased however that a number of folk have emailed me to say they’ve bought his Matthew commentary on the strength of what I’ve quoted and commented on here. Good. But I’ll give it (and Hauerwas) a rest now. Meantime, here’s the Matthean Hauerwas illustrated by Picasso!

Christian discipleship requires confrontation because the peace that Jesus has established is not simply the absence of violence. The peace of Christ is nonviolent precisely because it is based on truth and truth telling. Just as love without truth cannot help but be accursed, so peace between the brothers and sisters of Jesus must be without illusion.

Yet we must confess that truth is about the last thing most of us want to know about ourselves. We may say that the truth saves, but in fact we know that any truth, particularly the truth that is Jesus, is as disturbing as it is fulfilling. That is why Jesus insists that those who follow him cannot let sins go unchallenged. If we fail to challenge one another in our sins, we in fact abandon one another to our sin. we show how little we love our brother and sister by our refusal to engage in the hard work of reconciliation.

……pastoral theologian, ethical thinker and ecclesial critic…..all three in one short extract. Superb!

The dedication of a child is one of the unambiguously positive statements the church makes about children. As a minister few services give me more pleasure and reason for spiritual affirmation than holding a baby who represents the love of the parents embodied in a life, and now offered in gratitude and hopefulness, while a congregation sings the Aaronic blessing, the Lord bless thee and keep thee.

This weekend has been one of the saddest of my life. A young man who was killed in a tragic accident while doing his job, two days ago, was one such child, the focus of a church’s prayers and his parents gratitude, over 20 years ago. He was growing into all they had hoped – not perfect, and all the better for that. And he had such exciting plans for the next stage of his life training as a teacher. He would have been a brilliant acquisition for the teaching profession.

His entire family are desolate – and for now, no words describe, explain or anaesthetise their anguish. Ministry begins in the silence of shared grief. Pastoral support becomes the unspoken agreement that some questions are unanswerable but have to be asked. Now and again it’s important to encourage brave gestures of remembering, holding on to the reality and permanent importance of their now absent son, brother, grandson and nephew.

Somehow, the unbearable must be borne, and in the strength of the One who was also asked, "My God, why have you forsaken me"?

And we all know the Easter outcome of that.

But right now feels like Easter Saturday.

One of my favourite writers complained in one of her books that life was happening too fast, that experiences, conversations, people and thoughts require time to be assimilated. She viewed unassimilated experience as wasteful, an irresponsible squandering of life’s significant moments, a culpable extravagance that failed to learn from other people’s ideas.

That’s how I feel after a working retreat (oxymoron?), when important conversations, shared times of prayer, intentional time away from the usual routines, were dedicated to giving us space and inclination to think, talk and plan, to dream, grumble and get whatever is in our hearts off our chests! There’s a couple of intriguing questions that I want to think about, (assimilate!!) – then in a day or two suggest some of my (probably tentative) conclusions, so that if you are interested you can offer your perspective, correctives, insight.

What is the relationship between community and leadership?

Is leadership individual or corporate? Is it a personal charisma or a community gift?

If it is not an either/or, how can it be both personal and communal? 

These kinds of questions are important because if we aim to identify potential leaders, develop gifts of leadership, grow certain kinds of leadership (visionary, enabling, strategic, prophetic etc), it seems to me one way or another they have to come from, emerge from, and find rootedness in the community. Or do they?

Then there is the Baptist thing. If I ask, how do we develop effective leadership within Baptist communities, what difference does the word Baptist make to the style and implementation of leadership initiatives?

Is it idealistic to say that in a Baptist fellowship the congregation is the source of leadership as it seeks through prayer, conversation and listening to Scripture, under the superintendence of the Holy Spirit, to discern the mind of Christ together?

What then, is the role of the prophetic individual? The persuasive motivator, the convincing strategist, the inspirational thinker whose ideas seem exciting, attractive – are these gifted individuals to be muted in a process that seeks the common denominator of communal agreement?   

Or, put more positively, what in practice does it mean for the body of Christ to function effectively, to act in a co-ordinated and purposeful manner, under the head who is Christ? Specifically, what does leadership look like in a Baptist community, where the word Baptist is definitive as well as descriptive. I mean by that, Baptist as a self-description given content by such identity conferring principles as personal discipleship following after Jesus, covenanted community of shared mission and ministry, co-operative faithfulness to Jesus as revealed in Scripture. What is leadership that emerges from such a context?

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?

Over at Faith and Theology, Ben Myers is doing his usual good job of nudging his blog visitirs towards books they havn’t heard of, or would never think of reading – to our loss. This time from a slim volume by Schleiermacher, Two Letters to Dr Lucke (1829), he highlights one of Schleiermacher’s rare one liners!

“[T]he verse John 1:14 is the basic text for all dogmatics, just as it should be for the conduct of the ministry as a whole.” (p. 59)

It’s the biblical reference that makes the statement meaningful let alone remarkable. The eternal Word embodied, incarnation of divine in human, creator in creature, living amongst us, exuding uncoercive glory, overflowing with grace and replete with truth. The basic text for ‘ministry as a whole’? There is an entire curriculum in that one Johannine testimony, "the Word became flesh"; and a lifetime’s vocation living out the meaning of "dwelling amongst" the people we are called to serve; a humbling unreachability for us to bear witness to the glimpsed glory of Christ, except – He is still "full of grace and truth", grace for our emptiness and truth for our evasions.