3 Minute Ministry Mentor

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.

I remember early in the planning stages of the Learning Pastoral Imagination (LPI) Project that Chris Scharen and I had several thoughtful conversations about whether or not self-reflection was essential for a robust pastoral imagination. My training in pastoral theology, care, and counseling, had me pretty convinced that it was a crucial, it not universal, component of pastoral practice.

This week in Episode 2 of the Three Minute Ministry Mentor, you are invited to think about the holy depths of ministry. No matter where you are engaged in ministry — from leading protests to leading Holiday Blues services, from distributing diapers to preaching about peace, hope, love and joy — attention to the holy depths of the moment is a part of the practice of ministry. Learning to attend and speak to the sacredness of a moment is one of the postures of ministry that takes persistent paying attention. 

Ministry itself, like most professions and complex practices, is dogged and driven by a rush to achieve. Yet to learn a multifaceted professional and spiritual practice such as ministry takes time, preparation, and experience. The first episode of #3MMM helps us get started thinking about ministry as a practice.