Thoughts on Servant Ministry

This last Saturday my brother and I, along with six new friends from our church, had the opportunity to give of ourselves in servant ministry. For a few hours we used our God given abilities (meager in my case) to assist in the building of a new home for one of our sisters and her family. It was an incredible day, full of sunshine, warmth, and hard work.

I believe that servant ministry is really at the heart of the mission of the church- a mission to be salt and light, to live in the world as Jesus lived. Sometimes I lose sight of the importance of our mission, perhaps because, in the busyness and complexity of my life, I lose sight of Jesus, and all he came to teach.

Jean Vanier is, in my opinion, one of the most incredible persons of the 20th century. In his book Community and Growth he includes this short synopsis of what Jesus was doing in bringing together those who had ears to hear for a purpose.

Jesus first of all called men and women to him and told them: ‘Leave all: come and follow me.’ He chose them, loved them and invited them to become his friends. That is how it all began, in a personal relationship with Jesus, a communion with him.
Then he brought together the twelve he had called to become his friends; they started to live together in community. Obviously it was not always easy. They quickly began to quarrel, fighting over who should be first. Community life revealed all sorts of jealousies and fears in them.
Then Jesus sent them off to accomplish a mission: to announce good news to the poor, to heal the sick, and to liberate by casting out demons. He did not keep them with him for long, but sent them out so that they would have an experience of life flowing out of them: an experience of giving life to people and an experience of their own beauty and capacities if they followed him and let his power act in and through them.
The pains of community are situated between the joy of this communion and friendship with Jesus and the joy of giving life to others: the mission.

The mission for those of us who would try to follow Christ is to bring life to others, to carry the love and hope of Christ to those who struggle. Sometimes that life comes in the form of a warm smile, or a loving touch that validates the others worth as a child of God. Sometimes that life comes in the service of a teacher to a small child, a tutor at a local community center. And sometimes that life and hope comes in the form of a ‘greenhorn’ construction worker, helping to build a home for a new family. But as Vanier reminds me, the bringing of life always reveals “to others their fundamental beauty, value and importance in the universe, their capacity to love, to grow and to do beautiful things and to meet God.” May we all be salt and light, serving others and carrying to the world the life that is truly life!

Why be Part of a Church: The Necessity of Interdependence

“No one [person] however talented, or however completely inspired by God, can grasp all God’s truth by himself. The variety of human experience is almost infinite, and every human condition has its own lesson… Therefore the healthy spiritual life is communal, and the knowledge of how to think rightly about God, how best to worship God, and how effectually to obey Him is the slowly accumulating possession of the church.” John Lawson, p. 128, An Intro to Christian Doctrine

The fact that the church is a diverse community is no accident. If each of us, as individuals, were substantially alike, then we would be equal and therefore have little need for others. This living independently would naturally inflate our sense of self- sufficiency, feeding our pride and self- centeredness. But because we are each made differently, with different strengths and weaknesses, different perspectives and ideas, then we are drawn not toward independence, but rather interdependence. We are taught humility through the realization that we cannot do it alone, and are not sole possessors of all the answers. We are forced to learn how to do life together, how to enter into partnerships, how to negotiate and compromise, etc… all the for purpose of building up the community as a whole, understanding God rightly, and sustaining our life together. And as we develop an understanding of what it means to be interdependent, of the importance of being in relationship with each other, we come to better understand what it means to be dependent upon God. After all, people who realize that they need each other are much more likely to realize a need for God.
Let us be people who strive for community, even when the community is imperfect or falls short of our wish dreams, for it is only in our interdependence that we develop humility and love.

Gangs and Sanctification?

I participated in an interesting meeting yesterday. There is a group of ministers here in Hattiesburg that have been gathering every couple of weeks to talk about the growing violence in our town, particularly that related to gangs. At this point a lot of thought and dialogue has taken place in these meetings (good stuff for sure), along with several educational opportunities… but not much action yet. In any case, yesterdays’ meeting was good, and we began to talk about some more concrete ways to move forward.

One of the suggestions, and one I liked a lot, was that we get to know a gang member, or maybe several, in an attempt to better understand the life and issues we are thinking about. We talked about bringing someone to our meeting, but it is hard to ignore the fact that few if any gang members are going to be willing to go to a meeting with a bunch of straight- laced clergy types. Heck, I am not even sure I would want to go to that… especially if I knew I was the focus of their conversations.

So maybe we need to go to them. This is a frightening thought for some of us. There would certainly be some danger, and a lot of unknowns… But somehow this course really appeals to me, and so I spent most of yesterday thinking about that. Why in the world would I want to go hang out with gang members?

In my mind I clicked through the normal list of reasons. This would be a good opportunity for me to learn, so that I might be of more help. This would be a chance for me to get involved in these lives and maybe do something meaningful… really make a difference. This would be an opportunity for me to connect these guys to God in Christ perhaps. All of these seem like good reasons, but I kept coming back to another thought, one more selfish I guess. I kept coming back to the idea of sanctification.

As one in the Wesleyan tradition, I have a strong belief that once a person has acknowledged and accepted God’s grace in Jesus, she are regenerated, or made new, and sets out on a long path toward sanctification. Sanctification is just a big way of saying that we are on the path to being made perfect in Holy Love: the loving of God with our whole hearts and minds, just as we love our neighbors completely and without reservation. Understanding sanctification this way, I can not help but wonder if this call I am sensing on my life, this call to be with those who are hurting, to somehow immerse myself in ministry with the poor, even those caught up in the power of violence, is not a step in my pilgrimage toward sanctification. Is it possible that for me to move forward in my walk, to continue following Jesus, I need to intimately touch those he would touch? Or perhaps, as Jesus indicates in Matthew 25, this is where He actually is, in the suffering gang member, or the kid on the verge of falling into the gang life. Could it be that the my next step toward holy love, the kind of love that Jesus lived, is to go and be with these that are hurting and in desperate need?

Clearly getting involved with those trapped in violence and poverty is a risky step. But what if not taking this step is even more risky? What if refusing to take this step means not moving further along my path to Holy love? Jesus said that to have life, the sort of life he was offering… life of holy love… we must be willing to give up our lives. Could this be what he was talking about?