A Voice from the Past - Part 2

 I've been thinking lately about churches; not "the church," but individual local churches. Last month's five Sundays had us focused on five different local churches. For some I was the preacher du jour. The venues were varied - sanctuary, parking lot, prayer garden, online - and the congregations represented a broad spectrum of church health from gloriously healthy to ingloriously struggling, a range, by the way, that has little to do with church size. Reflecting on that spectrum, I was reminded of two things.

 

One was my first visit to Tintern Abbey in Wales. My grandmother painted a picture of the abbey ruins as a wedding gift for my grandfather over 100 years ago, her perspective a bit different from the  picture here. Her painting hung in our living room when I was growing up and fueled a desire to see the site for myself some day. Social distancing among the ruins would not be a problem as long as you didn't mind sharing space with the occasional cow. I wondered what had started the slide centuries ago from a vital center for the gospel to what can best be described by the oxymoronic phrase magnificent ruins.

 

The other was that recently rediscovered recording of my ordination service that was the focus of the last blog post. Chuck Wickman's message focused on seven core concepts of ministry. It was an interesting exercise to view last month's five churches through the lens provided by those concepts. For your edification and encouragement, and as you consider the congregation you call your church home, here is a summary of his list:

 

1. Ministry is limited only by the vision of people and their willingness to walk with God. It seems to me that a lot of excuses get drowned out by that statement. How do we who minister encourage and model that vision and willingness to walk with God?

 

2. Ministry will rise only to the level of its object, and that object is Jesus Christ. Success in ministry will not be determined by the strength of our commitment; it is the object of our commitment that counts. 

 

3. Ministry will maintain its cutting edge by its definiteness. There needs to be a prophetic voice, a thus saith the Lord to our ministry. We must speak truth no matter how frightening truth may be.

 

4. Ministry is as meaningful as it is flexible. The shape of ministry gets defined by the people around us. In a world that constantly changes, ministry that cannot flex will cease to be seen as meaningful.

 

5. Ministry moves people from where they are only as it accepts them for who they are. It may be messy, but we meet people where they are, remembering that God has dealt with us in grace, and that we are likewise called to minister in grace.

 

6. Ministry is intended to develop Christian character, not to produce Christian conformity. Conformity will always be counterfeit unless it is conformity to Jesus Christ.

 

7. To be at its best, ministry must always have a good news orientation. While the good news of the gospel may begin with the bad news of sin, it doesn't end there. We are a people who offer hope, who offer peace, who offer joy, who offer life, who offer heaven, to a world that desperately needs to hear some good news.

 

It was a challenging list when I first heard it early in my pastoral ministry. It is no less relevant or challenging now. And especially for those who have been made a minister, it is a helpful guide if we are to achieve glorious health and avoid becoming magnificent ruins. 

A Voice from the Past

 

Some things are worth keeping. I came across one such item several weeks ago. It is an old cassette tape of my ordination service that I had forgotten I had - old as in over forty years ago. If it was worth recording then, surely, I thought, it must be worth listening to now. The problem is that cassette tapes are old technology, and unless it is buried more deeply than the tape was, I no longer own a cassette tape player.

 

Though the format may be outdated, I was pretty sure that the message wouldn't be, so I found someone with the equipment and knowledge to digitize the recording and entrusted the cassette to him. What I got back in addition to a cassette that I couldn't play was a downloadable .mp3 computer file of voices from the past with a message as fitting for me now as it was then.

 

Charles Wickman, who at the time was senior pastor of the Walnut Creek (CA) Evangelical Free Church, had agreed to bring the ordination message on relatively short notice, filling in for a district superintendent that had ended up in hospital. Listening to him in 1979, I found his words both encouraging and challenging as I looked ahead to the unseen and unknown pastoral adventures that the Lord had ahead for me. And now as I listen again, I can attest that his words are every bit as encouraging and challenging to me today as they were over forty years ago as I hear them this time with the added perspective of having lived through years of pastoral ministry. Chuck would go on to become a strong encourager of pastors, particularly pastors at risk. I don't know where he is or what he is doing these days, but if he's still around, I expect he is still encouraging, and if I could, I would tell him thank you again for a message that helped to shape me. 

He began his message with a powerful reminder of the source of ministry.  There is a word, he said, that scripture uses to describe God's creation of man and his universe out of nothing. That same word, he continued, is used in Galatians 4 to describe the virgin birth of Jesus. It is used in Ephesians 2 to describe the conversion of one who has been born again. And it is the same word the apostle Paul uses to describe himself as one who was made a minister. Neither church nor denomination makes a minister, he reminded us; we only recognize what God has already done. It is the Lord himself who makes a minister. (That, by the way, is a good thing to remember the next time you see your pastor.)

Chuck ended his message the same way he began with the sobering and powerful personal reminder to me that with all that it took for the Lord to create the universe and to convert a sinner, he had made me a minister. In between was a helpful exposition of seven key concepts of ministry, but that's another post. It is enough for today to be reminded that whether I am looking back through the joys and frustrations of ministry or looking forward to whatever may lie ahead, it is the Lord who out of nothing made Malcolm a minister. And I'm joyfully thankful that He did.