Nurturing the Call

I'm on a sabbatical from writing for the United Methodist Reporter right now, as I'm getting ready for some big exams coming up in the month of December.

There has been a lot of good content in the Reporter of late, though. Allow me to point you toward some of it, gentle reader.

My friend and colleague Eric Van Meter, a campus minister at the Wesley Foundation at Arkansas State University, has a recent column looking at the importance of nurturing the call to ministry in youth and young adults. Eric has the ability to speak hard truths that are, nevertheless, expressed in great hope for what the church could be.

He writes, "The call to ordained ministry begins with catching the breath of God beneath our wings and seeing where it will take us. In the best of settings, we hear others shouting encouragement throughout the journey."

Eric reflects on the possibility of his own son someday following his footsteps into ministry. He wonders whether the church can move toward a fuller understanding of ordained ministry and a healthier process for those called into that form of service. This is a topic I've taken up myself recently, both in an article on structural change of the ordination process and an article on the reform of personal attitudes in the church.

I think Eric is right on when he directs us to look at our own approach to discipleship and ministry as the best way to set an example for future generations: "We have to be the ones who set positive examples. We have to be the ones to offer them opportunities for meaningful leadership. We have to be the ones who, despite our desire to protect them, go with them to encounter desperate and hurting humanity. We have to step up and be the disciples we want them to emulate."

Eric is good at expressing both frustration with the status quo and a guarded optimism that we can still follow the Holy Spirit's leading toward a more robust church. I think we all need a healthy dose of both of those qualities: the frustration to drive us to seek a more faithful path, and the hope that God ain't done with us yet.

Our most crucial need...

... is vibrant & faithful campus ministry.

The church as a whole needs to embrace this idea in a big way.

Here are two reasons why:

First, the transition from high school to college is fun & exciting, but also scary & disruptive. You leave a stable environment, where the structures of nurture, authority, and accountability are all very plain. And you move into an environment where nurture is tough to find, authority is in flux, and accountability is often nil. Campus ministry provides a setting where young adult men and women can continue to grow in grace as they navigate the waters of college life.

Second, for many young men and women, the stirrings of a call into ministry that they might have sensed in high school come into full bloom during that crucial period from age 18 to age 22. But in order to really hear that call and begin to respond to it, they need the right environment. When it is resourced well and led capably, campus ministry offers that environment.

A colleague of mine, the Rev. Creighton Alexander, has written an op/ed in the United Methodist Reporter that asks the question, "Does anybody care about UMC's campus ministry?" Creighton offers a compelling argument both about the current neglect of campus ministry in the UMC and about the urgent need to reverse that neglect and embrace the potential that campus ministry represents. Creighton lays it out much better than I could, so go read his column for yourself.

Our campus ministries are a vulnerable part of the church's overall ministry. Wesley Foundations at state universities and Christian Life programs at UM-related colleges typically depend on apportionment dollars (either directly or indirectly) for their funding. And when the economy is bad, it is those programs that often suffer from cutbacks.

Another friend, the Rev. Eric Van Meter, has written compellingly in the past about the need for us to ask new questions and think unconventionally if we want the church to have a strong future. Eric is a campus minister, of course, at the Wesley Foundation at Arkansas State University.

And Eric, along with many of his colleagues, know how crucial campus ministry is to the health of the church - not because we want to prop up an institution, but because we want that institution to be the kind of community where the gospel of Jesus is proclaimed, broken people are given saving grace, and mature disciples are formed.

Campus ministry has the potential to 'stand in the gap,' as it were, providing a solid faith community for young adults during a vulnerable period in the lives, as well as offering an environment where those whom God is calling can hear and respond to that call into ministry.

Campus ministers and their ministry settings need our help. So be an advocate. Speak out. And pray without ceasing.

Two articles worth reading

Eric Van Meter has got a new article in the United Methodist Reporter as a part of his "In Therapy" series that takes a creative look at how young adults relate to the UMC. In his ususual, insightful way, Eric takes aim at how the church tends to want to "package what it values" so that young adults will buy into it. The problem, as he sees it, is that what the church is packaging (or re-packaging) is oftentimes a "connectional web" of structures, processes, and institutional forms that offer little sustenance to the hunger that young adults feel for true Christian community.

He doesn't say it exactly this way, but I think a lot of what Eric is talking about is the way in which the church so often tries to offer a program for something that can really only be lived. What young adults want is what the grace of the Holy Spirit teaches them to want, deep in their souls: sacrificial discipleship in a community of Jesus' friends.

Also, I don't know how I missed this one, but John the Methodist (of Locusts and Honey blog fame) also has a really good, short article in the Reporter where he looks at the issue of calling in ministry. Countering the oft-heard statement that you should "only go into ministry if you can't see yourself doing anything else," John cites numerous biblical examples of calling where figures such as Elijah and Jeremiah remained faithful to the calls even when their own lives would have been made easier by doing something else.

I would want to qualify John's closing statement: "Those of us who serve in full-time ministry ... do not do so because we find it blissful. We do so because we are called." In one sense, he's right - but only if you define 'blissful' as the kind of sugary, superficial consumerist gratification that the world names as happiness. For that matter, the article's title: "A calling: not the same as happiness" evokes the same distinction (only with 'happiness' instead of 'blissful').

It may be the case that calling or vocation should be understood not through the world's definitional claims but rather through the new meanings for words like happiness, bliss, joy, and love that we learn when we are formed in the community of the church. The Johannine account of what it means to be a follower of Jesus is key in this changed understanding. Take, for instance, Jesus' words to the disciples in John 15:15: "I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you." There, we have an example of how Jesus' calling on the disciples opens up new meanings to them - specifically, they know Jesus himself in a new way, and that will change the whole lens through which they view the world.

Another Johannine example is in 1 John 3:16 - "This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers." Again, in our day to day lives, we don't often equate love with sacrifice unto death. But here, we have love redefined for us - and this has connections to what we ultimately understand happiness and joy to be.

So I think calling can and does bring real happiness. But only if we understand what real happiness is all about. I would go so far as to say that the experience of ministry is sublime. The practice of ministry itself is a means of grace that can open up levels of deep joy and love one would be hard-pressed to find elsewhere.

John, I hope your time away from L&H has been restful. You are missed.