September 3, 2015

Ministry by the Book

I had to do a bit of Biblical ministry this past Sunday.

I arrived at my final Sunday service (a Spanish service that has been going for about a year) to discover that almost no one was there. It was (or at least seemed in the moment) actually worse than having no one there at all. There was one lovely family, newish in the church, stalwarts of this new thing we are trying to build. They had gotten themselves there and were all ready to have church. They were looking around a little nervously, a little hopefully, waiting to see when the others were going to show up.

I greeted them, and retreated to the sacristy. I put on my vestments and had an irritable conversation with Jesus, who was, as usual, unflappable in the face of ecclesiastical catastrophe. He drew my attention to the fact that there were some perfectly serviceable people outside in the parking lot. They had come to talk to me about planning a special-occasion service. They had arrived just at the time mass was supposed to start. When I explained that mass was happening, and we could talk after, they retreated affably to wait for me. I had hoped they would come in, but they hadn’t.

Jesus made me walk outside, in my vestments, and tell the people in the parking lot that I was about to do mass with one single small family, and that I would really like them to come inside and be with us. It was humiliating. Successful priests, I seem to believe, get to put on their vestments and emerge triumphantly from the sacristy in all their fabulousness to a full house that gathers just because everyone already knows that they are fabulous. Sweating in my vestments in the parking lot, I felt like a visible failure, the priest who threw a party and nobody came.

It turns out that I was following the wrong book. Like so many of my colleagues in both lay and ordained ministry, I was operating as if the book we were following said, “If you build it, they will come.” That line comes from the script of a 1980s fantasy movie about a ghost baseball team that plays in a cornfield in Iowa. The fact that Kevin Costner was able to summon baseball-playing ghosts and adoring fans all while looking rumpled and handsome does not in fact have anything to do with ministry.

The book we do follow says, among other things, “Go out into the roads and lanes, and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled” (Luke 14:23).

Doing church by the book, as this new era seems to increasingly demand, is not easy. I only had to walk as far as the parking lot, and my new little flock came rather willingly, not much compulsion required. They seemed unfazed by the small turnout, and gamely participated in the service. I found words for a sermon that had struggled to come together at the earlier service. I didn’t look nearly as cool as Kevin Costner, and I didn’t get a chance to show off. I did get to invite a new group (which had come seeking the services of the church in their own way, after all) into the project of building something new and worth having -- a church for our scrappy neighborhood that has room for everyone, that celebrates the good news of our salvation day after day, week after week and year after year not to be popular, but because the news is true and life-giving and worth celebrating.

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