B. What community of faith helped shape your understanding
of God’s mission and your gifts for missional leadership? Identify missional
leadership gifts that were developed and strengthened by your experiences in
this formative faith community and provide a few examples.
Many
communities of faith have shaped my understanding of God’s mission and the
gifts that God has given to me for use in that mission. From my home
congregation in Salem, Ore., I learned about the variety of ministries and baptismal
chrisms that God produces in the church for its edification. That congregation
saw its unique purpose as reaching out to students and faculty at Willamette
University and to workers in state and city government. It was in the context
of this vibrant congregation that I learned that “all who are baptized into
Christ are baptized into his death and resurrection, into his mission, and into
his body.”[1]
From
Bethlehem Lutheran Church, West Dundee, Ill., where I served for nearly five
years as an assistant pastor, I learned about working with a senior pastor in a
large suburban parish, about pastoral counseling, and about the nuts-and-bolts
of leading an organization staffed almost entirely by volunteers. During those
years, when I was also a graduate student at the University of Chicago Divinity
School, I began to recognize and develop gifts for teaching. I was at that time
blessed to be the student of many master teachers, among them Martin Marty, Langdon
Gilkey, Brian Gerrish, and Robert Bertram.
From
Immanuel Lutheran Church on the south side of Chicago, which I served on a
part-time basis during my years at the Divinity School, I learned a lot about
urban poverty, racism, drug addiction, gang violence, “white flight,” nihilism,
despair, but also about Christian hope, faithful perseverance in the face of
adversity, and trans-missioning Christ’s love and grace to people who were hurting
in very troubled families and neighborhoods. The music of John Coltrane, Johnny
Cash, and U2 helped renew my spirit in those trying days (and subsequently).
From
Immanuel Lutheran Church, Michigan City, Ind., where I served for nearly four
years as an interim pastor, I learned patience. During those forty months, when
I was also a full-time professor of theology at Valparaiso University, the
congregation and I were forced to keep plugging along together, by God’s grace,
through the power and guidance of the Holy Spirit, under the cross of Christ. We
focused primarily on the day-to-day, the week-to-week. I grew in my
understanding of the fact that the church’s mission is more than just what the
pastor does, an insight that I first received during my ministry within the
other Immanuel congregation.
From
my fifteen-year involvement in the Chapel of the Resurrection at my university,
I have come to appreciate how God’s Spirit empowers and motivates students to
assume roles of leadership in the various chapel ministries (e.g., peer-to-peer,
music, drama, assisting in worship, small-groups, spiritual retreats). I have
had to hone gifts for pastoral care and counseling to struggling, hurting,
grieving students. I have been blessed to see and hear world-class preachers
and theologians in action, both in the chapel and in other campus settings, and
these proclaimers have inspired my own faith, while at the same time providing me
with rich examples of the kind of evangelical, Christ-centered preaching to
which I aspire.
C. As an outgrowth of
your personal gifts for missional leadership, envision how you will nurture and
empower others to serve as missional leaders through their vocation and
participation in the life of the church. Within your response, integrate an
expression of a Lutheran understanding of vocation.
I understand
my vocation at Valparaiso University to be that of a Christian missionary. Just
as Christ set aside his glory and took the form of a servant, so I understand my
vocation to be that of a humble, Christ-like servant (Phil. 2; Mk 10.42-45). As
an ordained Lutheran servant-educator, I have tried to complement the theology department’s mission
to enable “all graduates of Valparaiso University to be knowledgeable of the
Christian faith, sensitive to religious issues in our global society, and
prepared for roles in which their understanding of religion may enhance their
contribution to church and society.” Through my teaching, I hope all students
gain understanding of the Christian faith, especially of the theology of the
cross and of a distinctively Lutheran approach to “vocation.”[2]
I seek opportunities to teach and mentor students toward their spiritual
formation and empowerment for service—and to extend God’s welcome and care to
all. I’m grateful that my vocation allows me the opportunity to explore the trans-missio of
God’s word for the sake of eliciting trust in the gospel promissio.[3] Indeed, “promissio is the secret of missio. For the mission’s Sender was
himself the keeping of that promise. And the mission’s gaps, across which we
move with our theological doings, are ultimately spanned by the same promise—of
himself by the Spirit through his Word.”[4]
I
do hope that, along the way, at least some of my students come to consider that
it is possible to move from a naïve, childhood understanding of the Christian
faith, through criticism and doubt, to something akin to what my teacher Paul
Ricoeur called a “second naiveté.”[5]
Every semester I remind myself and them of the functional wisdom of Bernard
Lonergan’s advice to young theologians, in the form of what he called basic
“transcendental precepts,” which work well with a Lutheran understanding of
vocation: “Be attentive, Be intelligent, Be reasonable, Be responsible.”[6]
The risen Christ forgives and frees one to be creative, to be imaginative, to
be open to the new life-giving realities that God is creating today in and
through Christ and the Spirit. I hold up before my students the promise that
Christ is the Lord of all creation, that he calls all to serve God in every
honest occupation, and that for followers of Christ all of life is the arena of
Christian ministry to God and all of creation.[7]
[1] “The 1965 LCMS Mission
Affirmations,” a set of resolutions that articulate some of the best missional
theology that this church body has adopted. The pastoral and lay leaders in my
childhood congregation made significant use of these resolutions in that
congregation’s own missionizing in the 1960s and 70s. See “The 1965 Mission
Affirmations” (online), http://thedaystarjournal.com/1965-lcms-mission-affirmations/ (accessed 4/5/2018). (I am the
editor of this online journal.)
[2] Toward these ends I invite
students to read my textbook, Fundamental
Theology: A Protestant Perspective, afterword by Martin E. Marty (New York:
Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2015).
[3] Robert Bertram, “How a Lutheran
Does Theology,” The Report of the
Lutheran-Episcopal Dialogue, Second Series, 1976-1980 (Cincinnati: Forward
Movement Publications, 1981), 77. The original title of this essay was “Doing
Theology in Relation to Mission.”
[4] Bertram, “How a Lutheran Does
Theology,” 87.
[5] See Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson
Buchanan (Boston: Beacon, 1967), 347-357.
[6] Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (New York: The
Seabury Press, 1972), 53, 231.
[7] This language also comes from the
1965 LCMS “Mission Affirmations.”
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