by Fletcher Lowe

Over two thousand years ago, Paul said it this way: “equip the saints for ministry….” Ephesians 4:12

Sixty-six years ago, the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches, fleshed it out:

The real battles of faith today are being fought in factories, shops, offices, and farms, in political parties and government agencies, in countless homes, in the press, radio and television, in the relationship of nations.  Very often it is said the Church should “go into these spheres,” but in fact the Church is already in these spheres in the persons of its laity.”

Anglican lay leader Mark Gibbs 49 years ago put it in the context of clergy and laity:

“The laity are not called by God to any lower standard of discipleship than clergy or churchy laity. They are not limited to any less standard of Christian life and witness. They are, indeed, God’s first line of agents in the world.  [God] has placed them and can use them in secular structures where the clergy can seldom penetrate.”  (Mark Gibbs, October, 1971)

So now Episcopalians in their Catechism ask and answer the question:

Who are the ministers of the Church?

The ministers of the Church are lay persons, bishops, priests, and deacons. (BCP p. 855)

Notice, the first order of ministry in the Church is lay persons.  Notice also that the remaining three are in-house orders whose function is within the institutional Church.

In defining the ministry of the laity, the Catechism states it this way:

The ministry of lay persons is to represent Christ and his Church; to bear witness to him wherever they may be; and, according to the gifts given them, to carry on Christ’s work of reconciliation in the world; and to take their place in the life, worship, and governance of the Church. (BCP, p. 855)

Notice that the laity’s calling is beyond the Church doors with one exception – the last one, participating in the governance of the Church. Notice too that in the world of daily living, lay people exercise many of the functions the church asks of bishops, priests, and deacons.

1. 1. Lay persons are bishop-ing in the wider world. Often, they are called to oversee their workplaces, their homes and their communities, to work for unity and reconciliation, to make efforts to build up their organizations. That’s bishop-ing.
   2. Lay persons are priest-ing in the wider world. Often, they are called to give and receive forgiveness (pardon), to offer blessings with food and friends and family, to teach and to guide. That’s priest-ing.
   3. Lay persons are deacon-ing in the wider world. Often, they are called to serve others in countless ways. Most everything we do has a serving opportunity with it, be that in business or garbage collection or clerking at retail or fast food or medicine or homemaking or parenting or whatever. That’s deacon-ing.

Within the wider world the lay people, commissioned by their Baptism, are the front-line bishops, priests, and deacons.  The Dismissal sends them out from the Church building to be the church, to live into their ministries wherever they live and more and have their being.  Thanks be to God!!

by Demi Prentiss

It’s not uncommon, especially for those of us in the church / non-profit world, to think of our work as our ministry, or at least a major part of it.  While much of the time the work is life-giving — sometimes even empowering — all of us face times when there’s more tedium than uplift. The results seem to stagnate and the issues seem insurmountable.  The sense of call to our work can fade, and motivating ourselves can get harder.

We all know how the spiral starts on its downward path. The lack of enthusiasm starts to slide toward irritation — minor, at first, because of drudgery or overload or sheer weariness. And, as the irritation grows, the frustration builds, as we notice that the harder we push, the less we accomplish. Soon, the frustration upgrades to actual pain – the pain of not seeing results, or not completing what seems so easy for another, or suddenly recognizing that none of our work is any good at all. Ever. To anyone.  And there we are, trapped in anger and sadness at simple mistakes, hearing every innocent remark as targeting our failings, unmasked as the pitiful, incapable wretch we really are.  We begin to believe that Genesis spoke truth in identifying work as the curse of humanity.

Brother Lucas Hall, SSJE, recognized this pattern in himself, as he struggled writing a sermon highlighting the story of Mary and Martha. His reflection on the story and on his frustration led him to an insight:

Work is not bad. Even the most contemplative among us must work. But work serves an end. Even the holiest work of your life is not your purpose. It facilitates your purpose, and your purpose is encounter. The welcoming of the eternal, living God into your midst.

The good news is that each of us, in our daily work, inside and outside our home, has the opportunity for such an encounter. In every person we engage — and deep within our own hearts — we have the opportunity to meet Christ. Expanding our hearts to respect the dignity of every human being liberates us from focusing on what we believe we need to accomplish.

As Thomas Merton wrote to a young Jim Forest:

Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.

—Thomas Merton, “Letter to a Young Activist”

by Fletcher Lowe

You may have heard the story of a recent conversation between the Devil and God. Gleefully the devil says, “Well, God, looks like I have beat you this time.  My virus has shut down all your churches just as I planned.”  God replies, “You are correct that the church buildings are closed down. But the church is not, for the church are the people and they are very much alive, some doing extraordinary things to protect my people.”

That reminds me of a conversation I had with a person driving into the town where I began my ordained life. When he saw my clerical collar, he rolled down his car window and asked where the Episcopal church was.  I hesitated a moment and then said, “Well, the church is the teller in that bank over there, and down the road  the owner of the radio station and back there is the mayor in city hall and over there is the salesman in the hardware story.  That’s where the church is. But if you want to know where the building is it’s two blocks over on the left.”  I’m sure I gave him more information than he wanted, but it does follow God’s rebuke of the devil.  The drawing says it all!!

Jesus in Matthew 10 put it this way:

⁵ These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, ⁶but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

To paraphrase: “GO, partner with me in my mission, not to some foreign place but right here in your community.”

That call comes to us, again, to “GO, Proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ,” as the Episcopal Church’s Baptismal Covenant states.

A new favorite hymn of mine says it well:

Go my children with my blessing, never alone.

Waking, sleeping, I am with you; you are my own.

In my love’s baptismal river, I have made you mine forever….

Go my children, fed and nourished, closer to me,

Grow in love and love by serving, joyful and free….

Amen.

by Edward L. Lee, Jr.

COVID-19 is, of course, THE pandemic of our time, and quite probably for a longer period than we would like to contemplate. Already it has altered our patterns of living, some of which could be permanent. We don’t know yet, and it’s that rub of uncertainty which clouds our thinking and unsettles our well-being.

But in the wake of COVID-19 I believe there are three other pandemics that, while disturbing us, yet posit the possibility of initiating long-overdue changes in American life and living. I believe the church should look and listen carefully and welcome them for their possible outcomes that coincide with God’s purposes, Jesus’s mission, and our baptismal ministries “on earth as it is in heaven.”

These other pandemics are:

• • • our battered economy;
    • the reckoning of systemic racism engendered by white supremacy, privilege, and power; and
    • the rescuing of our strained democracy from the political clutches of a presidential administration gone amorally amok.

Some folk who practice their faith in the variety of American denominational churches will accuse this kind of thinking as being just too political, too secular, and not religious, nothing sacred, at all. To which I quote Mohandas Gandhi: “Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.”  I agree, because the opposite of secular is the eternal; the opposite of sacred is the profane.  Our pandemics are giving us the unique opportunity to deal with some of our chronic medical, economic, cultural, and political profanities.

This portion of a sermon that appeared in an April op-ed piece in The New York Times captured what this opportunity could be:

This is a powerful moment in human history in which we can examine, individually and collectively, the unnecessary decadence and cruelty of our contemporary society that we have accepted without sufficient scrutiny. …

 

Having tasted a simpler life (in the pandemic shutdown), perhaps we will shift our values and patterns. Having seen the importance of community, maybe we will invest more in the well-being of the collective and not just the individual. Having seen the suffering of others anew, we may find it impossible to ignore it in the future.

 

And having seen the ease with which the forces St. Paul called the ‘powers and principalities’ can mobilize to defend entrenched interests, maybe – just maybe – we as a people will feel empowered to demand the same urgency of action on our planet’s climate, domestic and global poverty, the health and education of all people, and the myriad pressing problems for which future generations will judge us harshly for tolerating.

Steven Paulikas, rector

All Saints’ Church. Park Slope, Brooklyn, NY

Might this be an agenda for the Church and all its baptized ministers? I think so. I hope so. May it be so.

Editor’s note: June 23, 2020, the date this blog was posted is the 85th anniversary of Edward’s baptism – June 23, 1935, one week shy of his first birthday. Edward writes, “My parents told me it followed the 11 o’clock Morning Prayer service (’28 BCP of course) in our home parish, officiated by a much beloved rector (and deservedly so). So began my baptismal journey in TEC. It’s been a wonderful and interesting ride.”