Saturday, January 19, 2019

Rostered and Called V

This past November, I was officially installed as a rostered ELCA minister of word and sacrament and teaching theologian at Valparaiso University. As a part of the candidacy process that led to this installation, I had to write two essays, some of whose contents might be of interest to at least a few readers of this irregular blog. I have already shared sections from the "entrance essay" that began the process. Here are two further sections from the second one, "the approval essay":


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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