Other than to prove that God has a sense of humor, why are we in ministry? When did you decide to go into the ministry?
A young adult, wrestling with a germinating sense of call, asks his pastor, “When did you decide to go into the ministry? The answer? “This morning.” “No, really,” the young man persists. Again the reply: “This morning.” And maybe that is the truth. The call comes again and again, when the going gets tough and we are faced with incredible sadness, unfathomable injustice, petty disagreements, and property committee debates that rage for hours over whether to paint the fellowship hall ivory or eggshell — maybe it takes hearing the call over and over to stay in the ministry. Maybe we are in ministry because we cannot possibly avoid it.
Think about the lives we have touched and the lives of those who have touched us. We all will fill in the blanks slightly differently, but the characters and settings will be recognizable to us all: the tiny infant baptized at the same time as her big, burly father; the nursing home visit that left us feeling better than when we’d arrived; the unscripted water balloon fight that turned out to be a breakthrough for the shy child who had never fit in; the Christmas Eve candlelight communion service when peace on earth actually felt possible, if only for a moment. Ministry is an awesome privilege, with every definition of awesome in play. It is not for the uncalled, or the faint of heart. But it is a high calling, a calling that really matters.
My first week on the job, way back in the summer of 1988, a stalwart member of Presbyterian Women asked me to teach the group’s Christmas lesson. Of course I accepted, wrote the date on my calendar, and proceeded with everything else all of us do in a new call: meeting the people, learning the customs, trying to keep straight whether offering plates are handed to the ushers or taken back from them, whether elders are served communion first or last, and what prompts are necessary for the organist and the preacher to stay on the same page.
A month passed. Before the summer was over, before school had even started, Caroline was in the church one weekday. She asked what I thought was a casual question. (I did not yet know that Caroline did not ask casual questions.) She asked, “Have you started preparing the Bible study for Christmas?” The arctic blast and scathing rebuke that greeted my honest reply caught me by surprise. Meanwhile, my colleague (read Boss, the senior pastor), a wonderful man who had been ordained forever — was on the other side of the partition overhearing the exchange. He had collapsed in laughter, unable to speak. Finally he stammered out his best advice: “Next time, lie!”
Yep, fresh out of seminary, still wet behind the ears, I went to serve a church in Tennessee. It was a county seat town, with a county hospital. About 90 percent of the pink ladies were members of First Pres and they took it as their personal responsibility to call me if anyone who had ever darkened the door of the church was admitted to Williamson County Medical Center.
One day I was told that Mrs. B., a once-upon-a-time member, was a patient. I knew the drill. I trotted out to pay a call. Mrs. B. was quite elderly, at least to my eyes. I introduced myself, and we chatted, pleasantly enough, for a few minutes. Wanting to be a good pastor, I asked Mrs. B. if she would like for me to pray with her before I left. Eyes snapping, the diminutive figure before me drew herself up to her full height and snarled, “I’d never allow a woman to pray with me!”
Yes, ministry is always interesting, never boring. Like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, we never know what we’re going to get.
In the middle of a fight over re-locating a church (all of a mile and a half away), when petitions were flying, alternative slates of officers were being proposed, and an elder was shaking his long, bony finger in my face and screaming, “Leave Christianity out of this!” — in the middle of this family fight that divided brother from brother and parent from child — the church secretary went out shopping. At check out, the clerk asked her where she worked. “First Presbyterian Church,” she said. “Oh,” the clerk replied, “it must be wonderful to work at a church, where everyone loves one another!”
If only people knew what we know!
Last fall a colleague who had been ordained 35 years lamented how much more difficult ministry is now than when he began. The world we live in is far more litigious: churches are no longer welcome additions to neighborhoods; people no longer hesitate to sue churches over all manner of things. We no longer enjoy the implicit support of the culture, but engage in battles with creeping (or galloping) secularism. Sundays now are co-opted for sports competitions, play practices, and other events that prevent regular participation in church school, worship, and youth fellowship.
Denominational loyalty does not help us attract or retain members, who now are more apt to be swayed by posh facilities, convenient schedules, and a multiplicity of offerings (Do you have a choir for five year-olds who are left-handed and have astigmatism?). Stewardship is a foreign concept in an era when individuals prefer designated giving, funding projects where they can see immediate and tangible results. There is pressure for worship to morph away from a service with attention focused on God into a feel-good experience so that the worshipper “gets something out of it.” The church and her ministries also are affected by an economy that all but necessitates that both adults in a household (if there are two) be gainfully employed, thereby cutting way back the potential pool of church volunteers.
But ministry always has been challenging. In 1929 Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “The modern ministry is in no easy position; for it is committed to the espousal of ideals (professionally, at that) which are in direct conflict with the dominant interests and prejudices of contemporary civilization” (Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic: 4). Ministry, our shared endeavor, has never been easy.
A young pastor, serving a church in Memphis in 1968, overheard a conversation between two elders as they prepared communion, three days after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Filling tiny glasses of grape juice, the men reviewed the events of the last few days in Memphis, using words that our MTV-conditioned ears still cringe to hear: “Black B——— sure got what was coming to him.”
A short time later Michael stepped into the pulpit, led the Call to Worship, read the Holy Scriptures, and preached the sermon he had prepared. Then it was time; time to invite people to share in receiving the body of Christ, broken for the sin of humankind, given to all to point toward the unity made possible in Christ with one another and with the God who creates and loves us all. It was time to take bread and cup and speak of oneness and peace and communion; time to remember our Lord handing the common loaf to Peter who would deny him and to Judas who would betray him and to the others who would scatter as if they did not know him.
Michael said to his congregation, “Some of your elders have prepared these elements, some of your elders have set out this bread to remind us of the body of Christ.” Then he repeated their chatter, the conversation they had been having while handling the body of Christ, the bread of communion, and the pastor said, “So I cannot serve you Communion this morning.”
Michael closed the Bible and left the sanctuary. There was no final hymn, no benediction, no good word blessing to end the service. There was just silence, silence soon filled 12
with murmuring, soon filled with anger, soon propelling the session to tell Michael that he no longer was welcome at their church, that he best take his family and go.
Faithful ministry has never been easy.
Just a couple years ago, another church faced a difficult decision — or a life-giving opportunity. The church building, once full of young families and children, now had long hallways of church schoolrooms sitting empty through the week.
A faith-based social service center approached the church with an idea: allow the agency to operate a not-for-profit day care facility in the building Monday through Friday to serve families at 200% and below the federal poverty limit. The win-win idea, using the church’s unused space to serve needy children, met with immediate opposition. A low-level, destructive buzz began spreading through the congregation. Those children may have head lice. They are going to be immigrant children. What if they haven’t had their immunizations? It could be dangerous to have them in the building if our elderly members come around. Why should we open our doors to them? Their families won’t come to worship here anyway.
Just as pastors in the 1960s were told not to preach texts like Galatians 3:28, this congregation’s pastor was told not to talk about the proposed day care center from the pulpit. So she preached the Gospel of Luke: Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them. Her call, after all, was to preach the gospel, and the gospel is full of truths we may not want to hear. “If [it] is preached without opposition, it is not the gospel which resulted in the cross” (113).
The session met. Impassioned speeches spoke for and against the idea. After a prayer for God’s guidance, the session voted. By an 11-2 margin, the church doors were opened in welcome.
Friends, ministry — simultaneously a most demanding and most rewarding call — has always been difficult. We bury the dead brought home from foreign wars as well as those killed on our city streets. We preach care, not ostracism, for the lost souls who conspire to blow up buildings, take guns to schools, and blow up themselves and others. We weep when bombs fall. We rage against the injustice done the people of New Orleans, left to bake or drown in the days after Katrina. We organize mission trips and hope people remember what we have seen when we get back to comfortable homes and well-stocked freezers. We teach Bible studies and meet with starry-eyed couples and visit the sick and counsel those who are downsized. We listen to the lonely and encourage the young, and somehow find the time to meet prospective members and interview potential staff and write countless newsletter articles and lesson plans. We recruit teachers and thank volunteers and struggle with how to be pastoral and prophetic. Since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart (II Corinthians 4:1).
Although we are hard pressed to explain exactly why, we cannot imagine doing anything else but ministry. From the mundane to the momentous, from the trivial to the tragic, ministry engages us in a sacred trust, a holy privilege. It engages us in work that is never finished, and work that we must never think we do alone. For surely, when we serve the Lord, it is a shared endeavor. We serve with the One who calls us, nurtures us, and sustains us. We serve with the One who names us his own, and who gives us the strength to do what we cannot possible avoid.
Thanks be to God.
Fairfax Fullerton Fair is pastor of Highland Church, Louisville, Ky.