Total Ministry in the life of the church, Wes Frensdorf once said, “involves all of those activities in which the members offer their gifts for worship, community life, caring and nurture as well as organizing and administration…But the life of the church, as the body of Christ, exists primarily for the sake of God’s mission.” For Wes Frensdorf Total Ministry was more than just the way a parish is organized or does its ministry. Wes’ core value was a spiritual one and he placed the emphasis on acting out of a compulsion of the Holy Spirit and freedom not to cling to each other especially not clinging to the priest.
Compulsion of the Holy Spirit and the spiritual freedom not to cling are deeply related. The church is not about our business, the plans we cling to but rather about the work of God channeled through the Holy Spirit manifested in our lives as one community among many other communities that make up the entirety of the body of Christ. The church is a place where we align our desires with God’s desires. It is neither pious nor straightforward work.
The way we live as a community now including gifts of time, talents and treasures will have much influence on the next generation who will come to St. Stephen’s. In our communion with God we are deeply connected with those who have come before us and to those who will come after us. We interpret God’s mission through a discernment process of deep communal listening. We listen for the often very subtle nudges of the Holy Spirit that ultimately establish a pattern that cannot be easily ignored. It is this steadily built pattern that contributes to the compulsion to act inspired by the Holy Spirit. Compulsion is different than self-determination requiring us to shed that to which we cling.
Fear, joy, ambiguity and even anger all get mixed in together when the Spirit calls us to places that we would rather not go. Giving up our control to follow the beckoning of the Holy Spirit can be downright scary. It is probably why the John 21 text has been my favorite text in all the Gospels for over two decades. I feel totally understood by Jesus’ words to Peter when he lets John stay and sends Peter on his way.
Peter wanted to stay with Jesus, but he was sent on to do ministry elsewhere. Jesus asked Peter three times, “Do you love me?” and Peter, each time said, Yes”. Then Jesus concluded his conversation with Peter by saying when you were a young man you went about as you wished, but now that you are older you will go where you might rather not go. When we are following Jesus we are free to act through the compulsion of the Holy Spirit.
Yet we are typically like Peter faced with our conflicting emotions navigating between the joy of Jesus’ personal call and our resistance to letting go of our self-determination. This navigating can sometimes throw us off center. When it does not feel right then we can anxiously wonder, “Are we truly following the one Spirit?” The gap between that which we seek and what the Spirit seeks for us can be huge.
I would describe this gap as fully living into ambiguity with all its uncomfortable tensions and unanswered questions. I imagine spiritual ambiguity being something like turbulence in an airplane. In my earliest days of flying as a young businessman passenger whenever I felt turbulence I thought my death was imminent. One time I remember being on a flight from Ithaca, New York to New York LaGuardia airport, less than 500 miles in a propeller prop plane. I was so scared as the wind bounced the plane around that my hands were gripping on to the chair in front of me.
My hands were flying all over the place as the plane bound forward like what felt like a roller coaster in the sky. To my surprise and horror I slapped the head of the man in front of me. Oh my God, I was so embarrassed! Of course, he was surprised and to my even greater surprise he graciously accepted my immediate apology. Perhaps he had once walked in my terrified shoes.
The plane of course was safe and I have since learned that planes can withstand much more turbulence than most planes will ever experience in flight. The plane stays the course in turbulence perhaps the pilot adjusting altitude here and there, but rarely is it at risk. Likewise I have been learning that as I listen to the Holy Spirit it will inevitably involve some unexpected turbulence in my life, but I will be safe.
For most of my life I was convinced that the Holy Spirit was calling me to be a priest. I totally missed that I was called to be a priest just not a Roman Catholic priest. I should have known this. It looks so simple as I look back over my life. Now I see the pattern of questions that I asked even as a little boy were questions of a protestant as I always questioned authority over others where agency seemed to be diminished and at its worst lost.
As a Jesuit, I had affirmations by protestant ministers, I was curious of the lives of Episcopalian seminarians, invited by the Dean of an Episcopal seminary in NYC to even come to classes as a Roman Catholic and despite all of these things I stayed the course in seeking to be a Roman Catholic priest.
On his deathbed my staunchly Roman Catholic father said, “Joe I am convinced that you are being called to be an Episcopal priest.” I said, “No dad, I am suppose to be a Roman Catholic priest”. Dad said, “No, Joe, a time will come when you recognize your call and when you do, please know that you have my blessing and do not look back”. It was over ten years between that conversation and when I was received into The Episcopal Church.
In these years in between I was shedding my self-determination and embracing the Holy Spirit’s image of priest ministering in a parish like this one that rejects every form of imposed hierarchy and aspires to act on shared compulsion of the Holy Spirit and clinging only to God’s radical mission. Like you I was searching for a church that was not hierarchical.
Theologically speaking the greatest power we have is to live trusting the Holy Spirit. How do we know that we trust the Holy Spirit? One way we know is that we do not cling or clutch to our desires as I did to the seat in front of me on that plane to NYC or to a particular version of ordained ministry. We trust patterns pointing to the subtle direction of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
Peter clung onto his own vision of ministry impeding his action to freely follow Jesus until Jesus challenged him. Like Jesus’ and Peter’s conversation the deathbed conversation with my dad marked a dramatic turn in my life. The turn has meant that I live less with following my self-determination and that I increasingly trust the still voice of the Holy Spirit dwelling not exclusively in me but in the relational patterns of my life.
As I listened to the Spirit in this place last June I was compelled to present myself to your Search Committee. At each turn in the process I was drawn deeper into a call to this place at this time. The Holy Spirit has led me to a place I never expected or planned to be. I am not alone in this unexpected place as we heard two weeks ago when our Senior Warden, Nancy Petersen said that St. Stephen’s Vestry was surprised by my very presence in the search process and later that they were being drawn to choose me through our conversations. These kinds of Divine interventions suggest to me that the Holy Spirit is hovering over St. Stephen’s with her hand placed gently on this congregation.
On the last night that I met with Eleanor, Nancy and Norm not one of us wanted our conversation to come to an end. One part of the conversation I think that energized all of us is when I suggested that we think about making this part-time paid priest position a two-year term. I made the suggestion that if we worked together truly implementing the entirety of Total Ministry emphasizing our shared Total Responsibility that it is possible that this parish in two years might need less of my time or that of any paid priest’s time.
I am ready to work with you to create more possibilities than you may seem to have as a congregation today. We can discover these possibilities by not clinging to the future but by staying open and available to being moved by the Holy Spirit. In this way we will continue to be led towards unexpected places that draw us deeper into the heart of God’s mission for this very special church.
I want to share with you a story of a way this kind of availability to be moved was recently manifested in my life. The Sunday I preached here in August I did not have time to go home to change out of my collar before picking up Stefani at Trinity. As I arrived at Trinity their coffee hour was just about over. A young couple came up to me on the lawn and asked if I was a priest. I said, yes and they asked me will you pray for us and I said of course.
Like Jesus asking Peter if he loved him this couple asked me three times to pray with them. Finally it dawned on me that they meant right now not later. A praying circle gathered around this couple. A few minutes later another man came and this homeless man wanted to talk with a priest. He said he felt like a bum and was concerned that people were afraid of him. I assured him of his humanity, we prayed and he left.
A parishioner by name of Ted Moore watched these two experiences unfold. Ted immediately connected that morning’s sermon to push the walls of Trinity’s Church into the streets of Reno with these two unexpected visitors. Ted said there is a real hunger in this city for invisible street people to be called by their name and to be touched and blessed. Ted suggested we go out that week to see if his intuition was true. For a few hours every week since that August Sunday morning Ted and I walk for a few hours through the streets of downtown Reno asking homeless when they had their last meal, shower and warm bed and we pray, touching them and calling them by their name. By being attentive to the Spirit a new ministry has emerged at Trinity.
As a street priest I am learning from those on the street how not to cling but remain free. This work is not new to most of you given your outreach ministries. I am not preaching outreach to you, as this is one of the highest priorities of this parish, rather I am pointing to our shared ministerial sensibilities. I commit myself to you to participate with you in relational attentiveness to the Spirit and practicing freedom from that which we cling to that would otherwise impede our radical following of Jesus and living out of God’s mission.
I am convinced that God has called us to work together because God knows at this point as our journeys intersect that we need each other’s gifts. You and I probably don’t know exactly the way the work we have been called to do together will manifest itself, but if we resist our fear of a little turbulence then we will safely land in the loving arms of God. In time our shared purpose will emerge through the direction of the Holy Spirit as we participate in Total Ministry and Total Responsibility through Wes Frendsorf’s inspired spirituality and communal discernment.
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