February 2019

“I have done what was mine to do. May God show you what is yours.” This quote from St. Francis was offered to the Iowa diocesan delegation in a response to the case study we presented at the Living Stones annual conference on the ministry of all the baptized. Our case study shared the story of four new ministry initiatives that have popped up in Iowa—Breaking Bread, The Way Station in Spencer, the Beloved Community Initiative, and Wild Church in Dubuque. We realized, as we presented, that we could have included so many more—Messy Church, Laundry Love, the Faith and Prairie Gardens, or even the shaping of a tree stump in Glenwood into “Praying Hands.” In fact, the people reflecting on our study wondered whether these new ministry initiatives, and the enthusiasm and support for them, were seen as a source of envy or threat or was the source of some dispiritedness among congregations that were struggling. It’s a worthy warning not to get overly excited by new and shiny things that we lose focus of everyone else. Again, we could have also referred them to the Revival, Growing Iowa Leaders or Engaging All Disciples consults and to the small church gatherings being planned for this Spring and Summer.

Part of the process of Living Stones is that the case study presenters get thirty minutes to speak, and then have to be silent for an hour and forty minutes while their reflectors enter into conversation about what they have heard. The reflectors obviously get only a slice of the whole picture but often their insights and wisdom prove invaluably for our movement forward. “Are these singular initiatives or can they be replicated in other places in the diocese?” was another insightful question.

“I have done what was mine to do. May God show you what is yours.” This is what engaging all disciples is all about. The assumption is that God is at work in everyone, and seeks for us to discover and engage what that work is. Most of it is found in the routine course of living our lives—of being in the Way of God’s Love for us and for everyone we encounter.

As I am never ashamed to repeat, I had the blessing of a pastor who asked, in prayer, “What will God do with this one?” for every one of his church members, and especially the younger ones. He threw us into preaching ministry in our late teens, encouraged us when we wanted to set up summer camp for children living in poverty and who had never been outside the city. And he prayed and discerned with us for God to show us what was ours to do. Ministry is a way of life; it is not a profession. It’s a call on our lives, and it takes as many forms as human beings vary from one another. There are so many gifts in ministry that I see manifest across the diocese: people who respond to need and hurt that is so obvious to them, and yet to which others of us might be oblivious. It’s through this ability to learn what is ours to do that God manages to bring about the Kingdom.

Near the end of the interaction in our Living Stones group, it was suggested that what we had presented were not really new initiatives; they were continuing initiatives—for God is always setting the whole ongoing work of Christ in new contexts. In that sense they seem new. If, however, through our new initiatives, Jesus is proclaiming forgiveness to sinners, purity to the unclean, hope to the joyless and oppressed, and life to the lost and despairing, then His work simply continues in our time and place as it did when St. Francis first heard in his time and place the Gospel call to sell all he had and give it to the poor.

God simply repeats this pattern, and invites us to engage. May God show you what is yours to do.