3 Minute Ministry Mentor

This weekend a dear person in my life died unexpectedly. Louise and I have been part of the same faith community for 18 years. She was a member of that community for decades before I arrived. Lou and I shared many different seasons in our relationship, and we had more connecting points that I can count.

I’m sharing this loss with you today, not because I want to eulogize Lou. Our faith community will do that beautifully in the days and weeks ahead. And I am capturing my own memories as they come up for me. What I want to do, however, is to praise the beauty of the relational character of shared ministry.

I’m fortunate to be part of the community of faith that meets at Glendale Baptist Church. In that community I know the joy of being in relationships over time that grow and change shape. Dozens of people at Glendale, including Lou, helped me to survive graduate school, and the long and sorrowful journey to parenthood, and the birth of my daughter, and many job changes and vocational shifts. I’m a better person, and parent and minister for all the support and belonging they have lavished on me.

My life is also richer for the many ways I have been a part of their lives as well:  the walking together and the praying, the welcoming new life and grieving lives lost, the cooking and caring, the navigation of conflict and change, and the work of serving people who are hungry, aspiring to more justice, and re-creating life together. Through all these many processes my family has a place of belonging at Glendale. And  together these relationships give shape to an authentic shared community....

#3MMM

To be a church leader in our time requires not only a clear calling but also courage. If you hope and desire that your faith community will be part of the change for justice and equality rather than one of the obstacles to it, then you need knowledge, commitment and willingness to to risk something big for the sake of something better for all people.

No simple path to change is available. The complexity of how the systems of inequality are maintained is a part of their power. Their hiddenness contributes to keeping the status quo.

Let me make an example of the entangled, complex and hidden aspects of powers of sexism and racism in my own life. My identity as a woman is entangled with my identity as a white person. I both suffer the social exclusions of society and church as a woman, and I benefit from the privileges of society and church as a white-identifed person. At the same time...

Read more of this excerpt at: Equity in Ministry in Episode 8. 

#3MMM.

All this talk of thinking, reflecting and asking questions… yet the practice of ministry is so much more than thinking and talking. It is an embodied, relational, and spiritual practice. So this week’s podcast presents a story that begins with ministry to a new family with an infant and stretches out into all the ways ministry is embodied. #3MMM

This week’s episode of the Three Minute Ministry Mentor is about you connecting with your friends as a support for your practice of ministry. Doing ministry is really not solo work, as we already considered in Episode 4: Collaboration.

Finding friends who are also living into a call to ministry can be life-giving to you and to them. 3MMM wants to add support to your peer relationships by helping you to jump start your conversations! That is one of the main reasons I launched this series.

The Three Minute Ministry Mentor is the fruit of many years of study, research and writing, but it is also the fruit of this year’s choice to own my deeply resonating purpose.

This week’s Episode of #3MMM is about “being there.” This is the essential idea for ministry that we bring ourselves fully into the lives of those we serve. Showing up, being there, is so important especially when those in our care need most to know the presence of the holy.

God’s collaboration with creation and especially with humanity, however, can go amiss. And in ministry we know it oh so well… when we start planning special holy-day services, depend on people for a great variety of tasks, or gather with families in crisis and grief. Then collaboration can seem anything but obvious. Missed communications, misunderstood meanings, a plethora of differing expectations can fill the air, making ministry seem nearly impossible.

Yet when human collaborations are at their best, when we take time to understand each other and work patiently, they can demonstrate the wonder of God’s presence in our work. For a story about collaboration in the production of the Saint John’s Bible, take a look at Episode 4 of #3MMM.