Who are we blessing?

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Blessing the Backpacks - photo by Moses Leos III, Hays Free Press, Aug. 26, 2015
Blessing the Backpacks – photo by Moses Leos III, Hays Free Press, Aug. 26, 2015

by Fletcher Lowe

Did your congregation recently have a blessing of the backpacks as your students went off to school?  It’s becoming more and more an add-on to our Episcopal Liturgical calendar. Questions come to mind:

  • Were the students themselves and their parents also blessed?
  • What about the teachers and professors and the school administrators and their staffs and the principals and the members of the school and university boards—were they too blessed?

Well, they were blessed at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Chesterfield County, VA.  Those added blessings broaden the backpack “liturgy” to include and affirm those who are giving their God-given time and talent to the all-important educational enterprise.

Soon many congregations will celebrate St. Francis by having a blessing of the animals.

  • What about the “owners’ of those animals—will they, too, be blessed?
  • What about those who work in pet shops and zoos?
  • What about veterinarians and their co-workers?
  • What about SPCA and animal rescue workers and those who provide temporary care and shelter to foster animals?

Will they, too, be blessed and affirmed for their ministries with God’s blessed pets?  I hope so.  If not we are missing a significant teachable moment and opportunity to affirm the calling that people have in their daily life and work.

And then there is

  • Labor Day and
  • Luke’s Day (those in the medical profession) and
  • May 1- Lawyers’ Day and
  • August 15th Mary’s day (parents), etc…

Our Liturgical calendar is filled with opportunities to celebrate and affirm the ministries of the Baptized as they offer their God-given time and talent day by day.

What about Rogation Sunday (the sixth Sunday of Easter) when the means of production not only of farm and fishing but of all of us can be offered up as symbols of our daily life and work?

All of this helps a congregation connect with the real world of those who come in and are fed in order to go out into their worlds of home and community and work, rejoicing in the power of the Spirit.

Being the church

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by Demi Prentiss

Being the church – it takes more than “being nice” or preaching salvation or converting the heathen. “Being the church” means “being the Body of Christ.” A transformative agent in the world. One of a community of followers in the Way of Jesus.

BeingTheChurch-JoyFMFew of us are capable of doing that 24/7. With God’s help, it becomes possible when do what we’re commissioned to do: be disciples. The Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20) gives the orders:

+ “Go” – into the world, not just to church

+ “Disciple” – be one, rather than “make” them

+ “Baptise” – as a sign of being born into a new life, not into membership

+ “Teach” – “at all times,” as St. Francis recommended, adding, “When necessary, use words.”

Jesus isn’t interested in our delivering a product, he’s asking us to be transformed into a new way of being – walking the Way of Jesus. For support, we draw on resources that have been part of the Christian life for millennia – prayer, study, worship, fellowship with other believers. Some of those things are provided in our church communities; all of them are accessible at all times, and in all places.

Let’s go be the church. Let’s change the world.

The most powerful phrase in our language is ‘Thank you’

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by Peyton G. Craighill

How many times a day do you say “thank you”? I’ve never counted, but it must be many times. Sometimes the act’s casual, and sometimes it’s heartfelt. I say “thank you” to the clerks at the supermarket when they count out my change – that’s casual. And I say “thank you” to my wife when she carefully picks out a birthday card for me and inscribes it with a loving thought – that’s heartfelt!

Whether casual or heartfelt – or somewhere in between – “thank you” always carries a message of bonding between you and the person to whom you say those words. It acknowledges a human act of kindness, however casual, that binds two people together. And in bonding them together, empowers them, however slightly or however much. In empowering the two people, the phrase give them a blessing.

Among people of faith who sing, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow…”, any blessing, however secular, comes from God. However remote from your thoughts, when you say “thank you” to a person, you are serving as God’s messenger, empowering that person with God’s love and God’s power!

What’s a congregation for?

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by Fletcher Lowe

I am at the stage in my life when I am attending more funerals than weddings!! As I hear the eulogies of the deceased from friends and family, I have been impressed with their accomplishments in their civic and business lives as well as in their family relationships.  As I have listened, among the several thoughts going through my mind has been what role did the person’s faith community play in supporting, affirming, equipping him/her in that impressive journey.

It is a reminder to me that we in the church need to reinvent ourselves: less directed toward building up a congregation’s programs and more toward “equipping the saints for their ministries.” (Ephesians 4:12).  How special it would be—as I have heard once in a recent funeral—to learn how the person found in her faith community a watering hole, a place where she was affirmed and supported in her significant gifts as a doctor.  After all, what is a congregation for but to empower its members in their daily lives of family and community and work?

Salty Christians

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by Fletcher LoweSaltcellars

I like to salt my food, sometimes even before I taste it. A little salt gives the vegetables and the salad and the meat a better flavor.

Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount has called us to be the salt of the earth—note earth, not church. A congregation is called upon therefore to “equip the saints for their ministry” (Eph 4:12), in short to aid us in being “salty Christians.” We are to flavor our environment—our workplaces, our homes, our communities. The Episcopal Church’s Baptism Covenant fleshes that out: Proclaim by word and example…, Seek and serve Christ in all people…, Strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being. Other faith communities have their equivalent.

The message is clear. We are to use our time and talent as God-given, using our abilities and experiences to bring the values of our faith into our daily lives. We are Christ’s salty ambassadors, exercising our kingdom citizenship in our earthly citizenship. Our oft-repeated Lord’s Prayer puts it this way: “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven….”

What is salvation?

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by Wayne Schwab

“Salvation” and being “saved from sin” are familiar words in the church and, often, in the media.

How can we talk about them afresh in today’s world?

There is a fresh and biblical way to understand them.

We have a problem.  So often we fall short of being loving and just.  We even do the opposite at times.

While we are strong in so many ways, we are also weak in so many ways and need help–we need more strength than we have in us.

We need strength or power to back up our limited strength or power to be loving and just.

“Receive the Holy Spirit,” says Jesus.  He shares his strength, his power, the Holy Spirit, with us!

With the Spirit’s power backing up our power we can begin to be more loving and just.

We are saved from our weakness.  Thanks be to God!

Coaching the Baptized

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by Demi Prentiss

One of the key tools of good coaching is the ability to ask powerful questions—questions designed to open the door to fresh perspectives and new insights.

What happens to your understanding of ministry when you answer the following questions? How does that understanding shape your identity as a Christ-follower?

  • What is God up to in your environment? (That could include home, neighborhood, social circle, town, school district, county, state, nation, world, even your church)
  • What about that thing that God is “up to” stirs your passion and your desire to engage?
  • What can you offer—of yourself, your gifts, your resources—to partner in that work that you perceive God is doing, to increase love and justice in the world?
  • How can you help others—especially your faith community—partner with you as you answer that call?

LIFE IS MINISTRY, or All Ministry is Apostolic, Presbyteral, and Diaconal (Part 2)

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by Edward L. Lee, Jr.

Part 1 of this blog appeared in late March. It maintained that the Book of Common Prayer establishes and asserts that there are four orders of ministry in The Episcopal Church, not just three, all sacramentally grounded in Baptism: lay persons. bishops, priests, and deacons. The sequence is essential in understanding the equality of all ministers and ministry in the Church. Ministry is the holy enterprise of baptized equals who understand that all life is ministry. Being a lay person is being a front line minister Sunday through Saturday, 24/7, 12/365.

The traditional ordained ministries — bishops, priests, and deacons — have, however, through history been regarded as the real ministers of the Gospel and Church. They got locked into that perception and role when the Church for centuries was what historians have called Christendom, an official sanctifier of empire and culture, of state and dominion, an arbiter and player in the halls of power and politics. To some extent it still is, or at least tries to be, even though the Christendom era and aura have waned significantly. The Church is now faced with the task of once again coming to grips with what it means to be baptized, “to be sealed by the Holy Spirit … and marked as Christ’s own forever.”

The Protestant Reformation introduced some key understandings of what the ministries of the baptized ought to be about even though it still clung to Christendom underpinnings. For example, it was Martin Luther who posited the broad ministerial scope of “the priesthood of all believers.” And John Calvin maintained that there is only one ordained ministry, the presbyter, and he (no women back then) was only one voice with lay elders in the governance of the Church. Still, it would be awhile before governance of the Church would not just be something akin to running the institution, as if that constituted ministry; but would begin to understand that real ministry in and for the world that God loves is inaugurated and imparted in Baptism, and is lived and exercised daily from dawn to dusk for a lifetime. All life is ministry and it is a serious vocation.

Let it be argued that the Episcopal/Anglican ordained ministries — bishops, priests, deacons — are still authentic in understanding the Church’s ministry. Yet they originate in Baptism and inform the baptized of how their ministries are apostolic, priestly, and diaconal without having to wear a bishop’s mitre, or a priest’s stole, or bear a deacon’s serving towel. Throughout any given day they manifest all three. Sadly the Church has rarely told them that, much less thanked them. Making these connections will be the subject of my next posting. Stay tuned.

What is a successful congregation?

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by Peyton G. Craighill

Thoughtful church leaders know that something is wrong with our congregations. The problem lies with the our definition of a successful congregation. The widespread assumption is that two features mark success in a congregation:

  1. A full church on Sunday morning.
  2. Offering plates with sufficient funds to support an effective church program.

According to our secular standards, this definition implies a good business plan for a congregation.

But this definition does not indicate why God established and continues to give life and power to our congregations. God sent his Son, Jesus Christ, into the world to proclaim Good News. Christ established his servant community, the church, to help him with his mission of love and justice in “all the world.” Through our baptism, we become grafted into Christ’s Body, the church. We accept his Great Commission to share in his mission with him, Monday through Sunday, in everything we do in our everyday lives.

Based on this paradigm shift,  our congregations are changed from “spiritual filling stations” on Sunday morning to “base camps” for mission, Monday through Sunday. How do we get our members to accept this new meaning of church life?

The first step is that you and I must live out our baptismal covenant – in particular, the five promises that we make at the end of the covenant – in every decision we make and every action we take in all of our daily life activities. We have to let Christ transform us from “me-centered” to “Christ-through-me-centered” lives. That change in vision is essential to influencing our congregations to accept a missional approach  instead of an attractional approach to defining success in our congregations.

What is God’s mission?

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by Wayne Schwab

Need a fresh and still biblical way to describe God’s mission?

God is on mission to make the world more loving and more just.

Wherever we meet love or justice, we are meeting God at work.

Wherever love or justice are weak or missing, God is at work to bring them.  Look around.  You will see signs of God at work somewhere, somehow.

Read the biblical story that way.  As the story unfolds, we are slowly getting the message that God does not want violence; God wants love and justice.

So, love at home but also be sure that you are fair with each other.

So, be just and pay fairly at work.  Pay fairly because you know and love your co-workers.

Seek to be loving and just and you are already part of God’s mission.  Open “eyes of faith” and see God helping you to love and to be just.