I’m a candidate for ordained pastoral ministry in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and this is part 3 of my candidacy approval essay.
Approval Part 3: Missional Leadership
Prompt for Part 3:
- Based on your responses to the previous two questions, especially your theological constructs above, how has your understanding of yourself as a missional leader been shaped by your personal faith in the Triune God and your key theological building blocks?
- Within your response integrate scriptural insights regarding:
- God’s mission in the world
- missional leadership
- God’s mission in the world
- Include a reflection on the positive aspects of the life experiences you listed above and what you learned theologically and practically that will inform your future ministry as a missional leader.
The way I see myself as a missional leader in the church is rooted primarily in my understanding of myself as a sinful person claimed, redeemed, and forgiven by the grace of God in Jesus Christ. While I think I have some strong gifts for ministry, there are many gifts and skills I’m lacking. I don’t ever want to lose my sense of amazement and gratitude first that God loves me enough to come and die for my sake and second, that God is calling me to a life of public service and leadership in God’s church.
As Paul writes in Romans 12:2-3, “For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function.”
My calling to my pastoral vocation is not special, or somehow better than anyone else’s calling to their vocation. As I wrote in my endorsement essay, an image that continues to be helpful for me in thinking about my particular vocation comes from Barbara Brown Taylor’s The Preaching Life, where she writes the chief difference between the ordained and the baptized is that the ordained consent to be visible in a way the baptized do not.1 All of us are called into ministry in our baptisms, called to respond to God’s gift of grace by living out our vocations in service to God and our neighbors. We are all called to be in relationship to God.
But the pastor is set apart, uniquely charged by the church with the responsibility for leadership. I quoted Thomas Long’s The Witness of Preaching in my essay before internship, and I’ve kept it in mind each time I dared to publicly proclaim God’s word in preaching this year. He writes, “To call the preacher an authority does not mean that the preacher is wiser than others. What it does mean is that the preacher is the one whom the congregation sends on their behalf, week after week, to the Scripture.”2
My vocation is to be the one given specific training for pastoral ministry, equipped to study the Scriptures and proclaim God’s word to the congregation. It’s not that others cannot study the Bible, or lead worship, but in ordination, I will be charged with being responsible for making sure the church remains the place where “the gospel is taught purely and the sacraments are administered rightly.”3
My confidence in my calling and in my ability to respond to the Holy Spirit’s promptings has been shaped by people who have trusted and empowered me to step out as a leader. My love for planning, facilitating, and leading worship has come from being trusted as a young teenager to put together media for worship services in my home congregation, Ascension Lutheran. Being empowered to help lead music and plan worship services in high school, which grew into me being on the leadership team for Focus, the student-led worship service I participated in at Luther College.
As a teenager, I was also given opportunities to facilitate small groups for the Alpha Course, and to help lead youth group meetings and events. That gave me the confidence and experience to work at Crossways Camps as a summer camp counselor for two years and gain experience working with youth and with others living in an intentional Christian community. My experiences working at camp encouraged me to heed God’s call to ordained professional ministry as a pastor.
Similarly, some of my first preaching experiences came through serving on team at Teens Encounter Christ weekends, where I was trusted by leaders to proclaim God’s message to the weekenders. People in my congregations have been willing to teach me, to listen to me, to encourage me, and to walk with me when I’ve had questions and challenges. I’ve been equipped to be a missional leader by the work of others who have accompanied me on my journey to this point.
As a pastor, I want to empower others to respond to how God is calling them. The pastor’s role is to facilitate ministry, not to be the one doing all the ministry (as if such a thing were possible!). Again, the Lutheran understandings of the priesthood of all believers and of vocation are helpful here. I see my call as empowering and equipping others to recognize God’s activity in their lives and respond in faithful, missional service, similar to how I was encouraged to recognize my own gifts and put them into action.
I want the church congregation I serve to be an institution willing to try things, willing to listen to and even actively seek out new ideas and promptings of the Holy Spirit, willing to try and fail, secure in the knowledge that God is the one working through our successes and failures. I want to help others form a personal relationship with God and be empowered and sent out to use their gifts as they participate in God’s mission.
God’s mission in the world is reconciliation.4 Through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, God is making all things new, and God has entrusted this message of reconciliation to us, the church, the body of Christ. Claimed by Jesus and empowered by the Holy Spirit, we participate in God’s mission by proclaiming the good news of God’s reconciling actions in Jesus by our words and deeds of service. Knowing that God is interested and active in all of life, in both the church and the world, we are called to proclaim God’s loving grace into all of life. To be missional means to be engaged in God’s mission, welcoming others into the truth of the gospel by reaching out in loving service and proclamation.
Being missional means engaging in local communities beyond the walls of a church building, but it also means making our congregations welcoming and accessible to all. For a church to be missional as a church, rather than just a social club or a charity or social organization doing good works, it needs to be centered in worship. Being centered in worship keeps us focused on who we are and on what God has done for us. Doing good works of community outreach and seeking justice is great and is part of how we participate in God’s mission, but if we as a church community are not centered in worship focused on the crucified and risen Jesus Christ, then we’re missing our calling.
As Presiding Bishop Eaton put it, “If our life together consists primarily of being affirmed by God’s unconditional love and doing works of justice and charity without understanding that God has brought about the transformation of justified sinners through the costly grace of the crucified Christ, then we are not church.”5
Doing good in service of others may further God’s kingdom, but to do service alone is missing the mark as Christ’s church. We have been entrusted with God’s message of reconciliation in Jesus Christ. We need to name Jesus Christ as the reason we serve, the reason we are freed and made able to serve. As Paul writes, what is of first importance is “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.”6
As a missional leader in the church, one of my passions is welcoming others and showing hospitality to strangers.7 In its life together, the church participates in worship and is sent out from the worship service to live out its missional calling, worshiping by serving. As a missional leader, I believe I am called to facilitate worship in a way that relevantly proclaims the gospel through word and sacrament, equips people to serve as freed, forgiven children of God, and sends them out in service.
A church engaged in God’s mission needs to be welcoming to outsiders. Being missional to a community requires a congregation to welcome the community into worship services. I see welcoming and hospitality as a calling for all Christians, but the pastor has a unique role to play. Facilitating welcoming worship means starting with the expectation that God will draw people into worship who are not used to “the way we do things” and finding ways to include them.
As Sam Giere, one of my preaching professors put it, “Fundamentally, the Word of God is relevant to human life. The Word already is interesting… It is something like a heresy for the preacher to make the Word of God boring or irrelevant.”8 As a leader, I believe it is crucial to do worship in a way that welcomes people in to an experience that, culturally, is increasingly likely to be foreign to them. Welcoming, relevant worship and proclamation has little to do with a certain music style, with whether or not worship leaders wear vestments, or whether a hymnal, bulletin, or screen is used.
Instead, making worship relevant means helping people access the traditions and practices of the church, both by explaining what’s going on during a service and helping people value traditions, and trying new forms of worship that are more accessible in a given context. Missionally engaging with neighbors means serving them and in the process of serving them, proclaiming the good news of Jesus to them that they may be drawn to the hope of the gospel and the worship that results from the good news, then be themselves sent out in missional service.
My faith in Jesus Christ as my savior and my confidence that I have been set free by God’s actions in Jesus on the cross enable me to live out my vocation. Because of my faith in Jesus, I can love my neighbors, and I can care about other people’s struggles. I can move past my focus on myself, because I know that even when I’m not good enough, even when I mess up, God is still at work in me, through me, and on me.
My faith in Jesus gives me purpose in my life. I continue to be immeasurably grateful that God chooses to love and forgive me, to claim and adopt me as a child of God, and to call me into public leadership as a servant in Christ’s church.
Read part 1
Read part 2
Continue to part 4
Footnotes:
[1] Taylor, Barbara Brown. The Preaching Life. (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1993), 30.
[2] Long, Thomas. The Witness of Preaching. (Louisville: John Knox Press, 2005), 48.
[3] The Augsburg Confession, Article VII, Latin Text, in The Book of Concord, 43. ¶1.
[4] 2 Corinthians 5:18-19.
[5] Elizabeth Eaton, “Getting to What Really Matters.” The Lutheran. January, 2014.
[6] 1 Corinthians 15:3-4.
[7] Hebrews 13:2.
[8] Sam Giere. Lecture for Preaching class, February 17, 2014.