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Where do you live out your calling?
Robert Benne's Ordinary Saints: An Introduction to the Christian
Life identifies four domains in which we live out our Christian
callings: congregation, work, home, and community.
In the coming months Connections
will unpack each of these domains, but we're starting off with the
congregation. Why?
For starters, the congregation served
as the subject of Luther Seminary's recent
Mid-Winter Convocation. More
importantly, the congregation plays a dual role; it's a place we can
live out our calling as well as a place that equips and sustains our
callings in other domains. What then does it mean to live
out our calling in the congregation? Keeping an eye on this dual role
provides some clues.
At a recent
Orientation Conference, one pastor
described this insight as turning the congregation inside out.
Instead of thinking of a congregation solely in terms of internal
roles, choir and
committee members, she began to count nurses, teachers, and
accountants as well. The congregation's dual role presumes a dual reality, the
church as gathered and scattered.
Benne goes on to identify seven congregational
practices that "involve filling the cup of the people of God and
spilling that cup in corporate mission. [And notes] that [this]
corporate filling and spilling enables each Christian person to fill
and spill her or his cup in the Christian life." (1)
- worship
- study
- administration
- community
- service
- evangelism
- ecumenical concerns
The Centered Life initiative gets at
the congregation's dual roles, calling (internal) and equipper of
callings (external), through two images created as the culmination to a
five-year action research project at
Andover Newton Theological School,
1977-1982. The project devoted itself to the question, "What would we
do differently if we were really serious about the ministry of our
members in daily life?"
The insights from this project live on
in Luther Seminary's Centered Life initiative; they form the backbone
of the
Process for Congregational Renewal
(and
here). But for our purposes the
project's summative "Is" and "Vision" images, depictions of the
congregation's present and hoped for future, are of greatest interest.
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"Is" Image:
Here we see a disconnect, truly a chasm, between Sunday and
Monday, church and world; the stick figure stretches to span the
gulf alone.
When church groups view the image,
comments include: the sun shines on the church, but a cloud looms
over the world (while clergy at times perceive the opposite); the
breath of God is at work moving smoke and clouds; the individual,
big but isolated, lacks peers and identity; the person, while
stretching towards the church and perhaps trying to pull the world
along, remains more attached to the world; the church contains no
windows, only a closed door; shall we open the church and see all
God’s people?
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"Vision" Image:
Here we see the church building form the "Is" Image (center)
turned inside out, a representation of congregant's varied
callings in the world.
Again, when church groups view the
image, comments include: the local congregation suffers as narrow
witness when understood as a building, but enjoys an enormous
reach when understood as an equipping agent; imagery abounds:
church as body of Christ, vine and the branches, good fruit, the
cross, apples!; lots of people; deep roots; interconnected; in the
world; dynamic, alive, etc.; some wormy apples.
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Pursuit of the mythical "balanced life," as represented by the "Is"
Image above, momentarily preserves the illusion of control, but then
quickly collapses in exhaustion, or grows brittle and breaks.
By contrast, the "Vision" Image
presents the literal and figural body of Christ spread out upon a
tree. In the language of Colossians 1:15-20, in Christ, not our
efforts at balance, control, and self-justification, "all things hold
together." We are creatures, not the Creator.
This clarification of the
creature/Creator distinction bears two implications:
- First, as creatures, we are
fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14). And made, we are
freed from the need to be self-made. Our unique strengths and
abilities provide clues to how we can make a difference in God’s
world.
- Second, God is still at work, making
and remaking the world. Our daily grind, in all its particularity,
matters to God: the “Word became flesh and lived among us” (John
1:14). Because God is hidden amidst the mundane and the everyday, we
need not cross an ocean or perform some especially pious act to be
of some earthly good. Our location, wherever it may be, also
provides clues to where we can make a difference in God’s world.
What then does it mean to view the
congregation as Christian calling? To quote the Centered
Life coffee mug, "It's not living a different life, but living life
differently." Benne's seven practices (worship, study, etc.) still
remain, but they take on new meaning with God's mission in the world
as their horizon, filling and spilling the cup.
Jack Fortin describes this movement,
the reality of the congregation's dual roles, as a dance between justification and
vocation, experiencing belonging and making a difference,
community and mission. Community without mission is
self-absorption; mission without community is exhaustion.
Together, community and mission create fulfillment, lives
centered in Christ.
(1) Benne, 207
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