A HEART TO HEART TALK ABOUT MINISTRY Paul R. Powell St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church, New Orleans Sunday, September 8, 2013 Two Sundays ago I had a heart to heart talk with you about money, and last Sunday a heart to heart about membership. Today, the subject is ministry, in part about the profession but especially about the ministry of the church. As I mentioned, last Sunday marked the fiftieth anniversary of my ordination and I told you just a bit about the first two or three churches I served in pastoral roles. When it became obvious to me that the pastorate to which I had been called was just not resulting in places of service as a pastor, I had to reconsider just what it was I was called to do. About two years after completing a seminary divinity degree, I felt a better way to fulfill my calling was in church music. Some of my family and fellow church members treated me as if I were leaving the ministry; in other words, denying my call. It never seemed like that to me and in fact I felt just as called into music ministry as into the pastorate. So, I headed back to seminary for yet another three-year program. It was a good time to be there, but after about a year and a half of study twice as intensive and difficult as theology had been, I needed to drop out and replenish funds to continue my studies. The story is far too long to tell here, but after suffering a terrible experience in the church I was serving as Minister of Music & Youth, I swore never to set foot in a Baptist church again for as long as I lived. So, I headed back home and worked for a while in my old job as a case worker for the welfare department. I even considered going into social work, but God was not through with me. Several months later, I simply told God that if he wanted me to continue in ministry he would have to find me a place of service. I sent out a few letters of inquiry to state conventions and within two weeks had received invitations to two fine churches, one a young growing church in South Carolina, and the other to an old-line established church in Virginia. I had an interview the first weekend in South Carolina and the next in Virginia. It was not an easy choice to make both wanted me and I could have been happy in either. But when I walked into the beautiful sanctuary at First Baptist Lynchburg, somehow I knew God had sent me where I belonged... and the rest, as they say, is history. Not coincidentally, their worship made me think so much of ours here at St. Charles Avenue and it was only later that I learned that two of their former pastors had been called here to serve our church. At that time and until just two years ago, I could not have imagined in my wildest dreams that I would someday serve as the acting/associate/interim pastor here. Perhaps you won t believe this, but the thirty plus years of service in music and youth ministries was just the experience I needed for such a time as this. Just as an aside, I m perfectly content to be called just by my name, but among some of the younger generation there has been a tendency to call me Pastor Paul, often with a sense of 1
respect and affection I ve never experienced before. Two years ago there was a student work group from Florida staying in our buildings for a week and it was a pure joy to walk into the fellowship hall every morning and see a bunch of students sitting around the breakfast table studying their Bibles and praying for God s blessing on the day ahead. They nearly always greeted me as Pastor Paul and it was a very special greeting. It s been kinda fun looking around the internet for sermon materials and illustrations, and you never know just what you might find. I always assume that if I m looking for something to say on just about any topic that someone else has probably already said it and very likely better. So, this week as I looked around for what others had to say about the church s ministry and its ministers, I came across a sermon by a Baptist, no less, which spoke to my interest. Somewhere along the way, Baptists got the idea that every sermon should start with a joke or funny story. So Pastor Brian Bill of Edgewood Baptist Church in Rock Island, Illinois, began a sermon on mobilizing for ministry with some actual excerpts from the classified sections of city newspapers: Are you illiterate? Write today for help. Alterations Shop: We do not tear your clothing with machinery. We do it carefully by hand. Auto Repair Service: Try us once; you ll never go anywhere else again. Man wanted to work in dynamite factory, must be willing to travel. Stock up and save! Limit one per customer. Girl wanted to assist magician in cutting-off-head illusion. Good salary and Blue Cross Insurance. We will oil your sewing machine and adjust tension in your home for 1 dollar. Used cars: Why go anywhere else to be cheated. Come here first. I thank Pastor Bill for these illustrations, but I won t blame him for much if any of the remainder of what I have to say. I hope you picked up on my sermons these past two years that I don t always interpret Scriptures as you might expect; or, maybe it s that I do interpret Scriptures the way you would expect but just don t want to hear it anyway! When Jesus says that we cannot serve two masters, that is, God and the world, I take that quite literally. It matters not whether you are talking about money, membership or ministry, if God does not take first place in your heart and mind and life, then the world is your master and you are 2
left struggling to make sense of it all. When we are saved, it is a matter of being saved as much to something as from something. We have been redeemed for a reason, converted to a cause, saved to serve, and that is as true for those in the pew as those behind the pulpit. In Galatians 6:1-10, the apostle Paul describes two important ways Christians minister to one another. One way is by bearing burdens. The other way is by sharing blessings. Once at the church I was serving in Indianapolis, I sat down on the church steps beside one of our youth to wait with her for her parents to pick her up. She seemed a little down and I asked her if there was something troubling her. She didn t hesitate to tell me she didn t think she believed in God anymore. I wasn t the least bit shocked I had been there more than once myself. But as we talked I suggested that maybe she should just tell God she didn t believe anymore and ask him to reveal himself. Her parents came, we hugged, and she kept on coming to church. Ministry occurred because I was willing to share her burden and just be beside her in her doubt and her continuing journey toward faith. In the popular comic strip Peanuts, Lucy asks Charlie Brown, Why are we here on earth? Charlie Brown replies, To make others happy. Lucy ponders his reply for a moment and then asks, Then why are the others here? One another is a key phrase in the New Testament. Love one another is found at least a dozen times in the New Testament, along with pray for one another (James 5:16), encourage one another (1 Thessalonians 5:11), be devoted to one another (Romans 12:10), offer hospitality to one another (1 Peter 4:9), and many other similar admonitions. Paul says in Galatians 6:2: Carry each other s burdens. The Christian who is led by the Spirit and not by his human nature thinks of others and how he can minister to them. Just as I mentioned in the heart to heart talk on money that we have because we give, so today I say to you that the Bible, particularly the New Testament gospels and letters are very clear that the church must minister to others in order to be ministered to. We are always closest to God when we are closest to God s children reaching out to church members and non-members alike to demonstrate God s love for them. James puts it most plainly when he says, Whoever says he loves God and hates his brother is a liar and the truth is not in him. How, indeed can we say we love God and yet refuse to share God s love and blessings with those in need, whether their need be food for today or bright hope for tomorrow. 3
I have quoted this old gospel song more than once, but it says exactly what I am trying to say to you today: Lord, help me live from day to day in such a self-forgetful way, that even when I kneel to pray, my prayer shall be for others. Others, Lord, yes others, let this my motto be, Help me to live for others, that I may live for thee. We often talk of ministry as if it is something that only those who are called and ordained to be ministers do, but the Bible never limits ministry to priests or preachers or prophets, but places the responsibility for ministering squarely on the shoulders of all believers. What a difference it would make in the lives of believers and unbelievers if those who claim salvation would take the words of Jesus literally when he says, not just to the eleven disciples in ancient Israel, but to all believers in every age: Go to all peoples everywhere and make them my disciples: baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to obey everything I have commanded you. And what he has commanded us to do is to LOVE GOD AND LOVE ONE ANOTHER. To love is to minister and to minister is to love. We cannot get away from this most basic principle of the Christian faith. We so often look for new members who look, and act, and think like us when in fact we ought to simply accept people just as they are and love them into being all that God has intended them to be, and what God has intended them to be may be markedly different from what we would like them to be. But if we obey God and love whom he has created, we just might become better persons and better Christians in the process. We grow in faith when we help others to grow in faith, and nothing will help others grow in faith better than to simply love them in the same unreserved and unlimited way that God loves us. Amy Butler, our former Associate Pastor and now Senior Pastor of Calvary Baptist in D.C. frequently writes a column for Associated Baptist Press and this week she had some comments about church budgets and ministry that are right on target. Amy quotes and disagrees with a writer who claims that churches are closing all over the country because our financial priorities are wrong. Compared to other nonprofits who work to keep overhead low, he explains, churches spend an average of 82 percent on personnel, buildings and administration things that are not mission and ministry. That s excessive, he believes, and with the institutional church losing credibility all over the place anyway, this state of affairs isn t going to help us draw people in. He further claims that congregations will need to re-prioritize their budgets to emphasize direct forms of ministry that givers will agree directly respond to Jesus two Great Commandments. Amy claims that the reason the author is dead wrong is that he s approaching a new situation the decline of the institutional church in America with an old solution. In other words, long budget committee meetings where we labor 4
over how to free up money by cutting this, that and the other, are missing the point. She believes that there is a larger, more fundamental ideological and societal shift that must be addressed in new ways. With our role in society shifting, we are no longer bastions of benevolent and overflowing food pantries that we graciously bestow on the less fortunate and then return to our churches filled with other scrubbed and spiritual dogooders to plan new ways to do ministry. What we are now are mission outposts. We are islands in a world full of increasingly adrift people. We are places of solace and hope, community and hospitality for people who are too smart to believe in God and pretty convinced they don t need the church until they do. Amy goes on to talk about how those who don t think they need the church often find themselves needing just what the church has to offer. Sometimes people who didn t grow up in church stumble into worship looking for solace and discover to their shock and amazement liturgy, music and preaching that help them begin to connect with the tradition of the church and the message of Jesus, things they find they desperately need in their lives. Or they are looking for a nice staging area for their wedding, feeling they might vaguely enjoy some kind of traditional twist on things only to discover from premarital counselling that maybe spiritual grounding of relationships has some merit they d never considered. Or maybe political leaders ask for a spiritual perspective on justice issues in the city, or in Syria. There are plenty of people around who can offer opinions about what s most politically expedient, but it turns out that sometimes our leaders want to talk about what it would look like to do the right thing instead of just the easy thing. So they come to the church and to its ministers. Or, you get called to do a funeral, visit a hospital or intervene in a crisis for people you don t know and they call because they don t know who else to call. The church-free lives they ve constructed don t offer the kind of resources they need to navigate the death of a child, the loss of a job or the break-up of a marriage. So they come to church, and when they do they encounter, or should encounter, grace-filled community that changes their lives. All these things require substantial investment of resources that we have labelled as administrative pastors, musicians, church staff, bulletins, air conditioning, janitorial services, capital repairs, instrument tuning but all of these things are ministry. In fact, they re frontline, on the ground, where-the-rubber-meets-the-road kind of ministry. It was my privilege to know a number of students and faculty at Westminster Choir College when I lived in Princeton. On occasion I would chide faculty members that it was no wonder they turned out such phenomenal musicians because they only admitted students who were pretty phenomenal musicians when they got there! Why don t you take in mediocre students and turn them into phenomenal musicians, I asked, only to be told that s not how we do it here. Our church has had a long history of phenomenal ministers and members over the years, but the real test of our effectiveness 5
as a church is not whom we have had as ministers and members in the past or whom we shall have in the future, but what are we doing to bear the burdens of one another and of the world around us and to share the blessings of God with all. If we can do that, then not only will we survive but we will thrive. In the name of Christ, may it always be so. AMEN. 6