As of January 1, I embarked on a new pattern of professional endeavor. The budgetary challenges my congregation faces have made it necessary for me to reduce my hours at the church considerably. This means I have to make up the difference, so to speak, by working in the secular world. Not a bad concept as far as concepts go.
In Detroit in the 1950s, there was a ministry experiment in something called the Detroit Industrial Mission, in which ordained clergy took jobs on the line in the then burgeoning auto industry. I actually served a congregation which had once participated in that project. In that model, the congregation had three pastors who shared parish responsibility while each earned a living working in an auto factory. The idea was that the participants were to bear witness to the industrial milieu of a city like Detroit in the hope that their experience would help them become ministers who would be formed by what they did for a living, as well as to bring something of God into the world of industry and commerce.
In 1974, the late Studs Terkel, a Chicago icon, wrote a book entitled Working, which was a series of monologues about working life from all sorts of people. Terkel observed that the experiences he chronicled were as much about earning daily bread as they were about finding daily meaning. I think most of us can relate to that.
My Reformed faith teaches me that all I do is to give glory to God and that whatever any of us do for a living is to be done excellently. By that reasoning, every client I represent in the various labor/employment proceedings in which I am engaged is performed to the best of my ability–not for the sake of professional responsibility alone–but because God requires it of me. My love for God mandates that I be the face of Christ to some folks who are spiritually unsettled because of their present circumstances. They do not have to know I am a minister, and most don’t.
It is largely a matter of vocation, which emanates from my baptism, and not from my ordination. Every disciple is under the same mandate. For me, there may be a unique advantage that will find voice in my preaching and teaching. However, I would be less than honest if I do not confess that working in another sphere involves a necessary distraction and forces me to be more intentional about spiritual formation. Again, not altogether a bad thing. Perhaps I will be a better pastor and preacher because of it.
My particular religious tribe, as Leonard Sweet would say, understands ordination as a rite which sets me apart for the unique roles of preaching and the administration of the sacraments. Indeed, Paul reminds us that all spiritual gifts have their specific purposes and are gifts of the Holy Spirit, which combine to effect the up-building of the Body of Christ. Being a minister is who I am, but being a disciple is perhaps more to the point. The same is true if one is a police officer or a teacher, an auto worker or an accountant.
I must also confess that for all of my attempts to be sanguine about my new work pattern, there is a bit of anxiety around the edges. What if my non-ecclesiastical work is slow or uncertain? Still, I am kind of excited about the possibilities. As with all things, I leave it in God’s hands.
Raising Basileia 