Sharing the Ministry

Reverend Darcey Laine
April 29, 2007
Palo Alto, CA

When I came to this church 7 years ago, something called “Shared Ministry” was all the rage in churches and seminaries. Actually this was not a new idea but a renewal, a re-languaging of a very old idea. It goes all the way back to the Protestant Reformation, when the radicals reacted against the idea that priests had a unique spiritual authority, a step higher up the spiritual hierarchy than regular folks. The Protestants looked at New Testament passages like the First Epistle of Peter, 2:9:

… You are royal priests, a holy nation, God’s very own possession. As a result, you can show others the goodness of God, for he called you out of the darkness into his wonderful light. (New Living Translation)

And interpreted this to mean that anyone who has seen the light, as it were, could lead others out of darkness.

Our high school group has been studying neighboring faiths, and when I went into the Purple classroom last week and saw their list of characteristics of the Baptist tradition, there it was: “Priesthood of All Believers”, still an important part of Protestant faith today. This is the same tradition we come from. Way back at our beginnings the Baptists were some of our closest theological neighbors because of teachings like this. But for a tradition like ours that does not pre-suppose a belief in god, that passage from Peter I read might seem to be talking about some other group. And if you say “Priesthood of all Believers” to UUs they are bound to ask distracting questions like “What is a UU Priest?” or “What is a believer, and what do they believe in?” Some of the other traditions must have had the same semantic difficulties because the phrase “Shared Ministry” is one adopted by some of our theological neighbors today.

In an ecumenical manual on the topic by Jean Trumbauer, Shared Ministry is defined this way:

Shared ministry lives out the affirmation that [life] calls all people to ministry. As members of faith communities, they are invited to serve together in a spirit of mutuality as partners. Working cooperatively, they strive to discover, develop, utilize, and support the gifts of each person and, as responsible stewards, to participate in [life’s] ongoing creative and restoring activity in their communities and the world. (Sharing the Ministry p. 50)

So shared ministry seems to have 3 key elements to me:

that we work together cooperatively,
that our work is gifts-based, meaning that we want to choose work that not only fills a need but helps us to discover and grows our own gifts,
that through our our work we participate in creating and restoring the world — what theologians call “co-creation”.

And what does it mean to co-create? Remember that story we read on Easter, called “Making the World”? Whether the author knew it or not, that book illustrates a theology of co-creation. That any time we grow or change or help or even just be present, we are part of the unfolding of the creation of this universe that began so many billion years ago with that first flaring forth. Co-creation happens in very concrete ways — when we plant a tree or build a building we are co-creating the world. When we drive a gas-guzzling Hummer or dump heavy metals into the water table we are shaping the world, but not in a creative or restorative way.

But if we focus too much on material kinds of creation, we might miss the point of Shared Ministry. I think for a while folks at this church got to wonder if “Shared Ministry” was a code word for “we need more volunteers to answer phones and serve on the Board.” And of course those are both examples of extremely important work here at the church. But whether or not they become ministries depends on whether this uses the special gifts of the person, and whether these roles are done in ways that are life-giving. And if it is to be shared ministry, it must be done cooperatively as well.

The reason this Shared Ministry seems like a radical new idea is because we liberal religious folks have routine memory lapses about our early idea that all believers are priests. This amnesia is not just afflicting the UUs but exists throughout organized religion.

As Jean Trumbauer wrote “Even with the renewed emphasis on the ‘priesthood of all believers’ after the Reformation, many Christians and faith communities have still behaved as if ordained clergy are called to ministry while other [lay people] are not. Church systems have generally not functioned in ways that reflect a deep belief in the call of all people to minister. The model for ministry has been patriarchal, hierarchical and clerical.” (Sharing the Ministry p. 49)

Trumbauer is not saying that the problem is that clergy have this special amnesia, and get power hungry, she is saying we all forget, without regard to ordination or education. For example, when a new minister comes to a congregation, it is good idea to do a “Start Up”. During this weekend, the congregation shares its history and expectations with the new minister, and together they try to clarify how they will share the ministry of the church. After my start up, I remember being in Room 9 with some lay-leaders of the church, standing around a large sheet of easel paper trying to articulate what ministers do, what the staff does, and what the laity does. We got to the category called something like “Spiritual Well Being” And all the lay folks knew immediately that this was the minister’s job. I said “isn’t this everyone’s job?” They pondered for a while, and said “really the lay people are responsible for running the business end of the church, for finance and infrastructure, and the minister is in charge of our spiritual health.”

I kept pushing, because I was new and didn’t know when to stop, and said “we could have a church without a balanced budget, we could have a church without a building, but what does a church need to be a church?” Eventually we shaped together a vision of how we could share responsibility for our spiritual wellness, as individuals and as a congregation and I have made a concerted effort to learn more about church finance and our physical plant, and to share the ministries of fiscal and physical health of the church.

These are the words you spoke to me at my installation:

We, the members of UUCPA, pledge to remember that the work of this congregation belongs to us all. We recognize that we bear a responsibility for the welfare of this congregation and for our own spiritual development. We recognize that we bear a responsibility in your material welfare and spiritual development. We recognize that in each of our lives we have a ministry to fulfill. We strive to manifest our highest ideals, but promise to embrace our humanness.

So what is the ministry called for from this community? And what is it that we believe anyway? I turn towards our Statement of Purpose for guidance here, the statement you the members of UUCPA adopted over a decade ago:

With a legacy of openness and in accordance with the UU Principles, we come together to support one another in our continuing commitment to a free and loving search for spiritual meaning and to the expression of that meaning in our community and in our lives.

This statement, at its center, is about our search for spiritual meaning — how we are going to go about that (in a free and loving way, supporting each other, and in accordance with our principles). And what we are going to do about it once we find that meaning — we are going to live it out in our community, both our church community and the larger world, expressing that meaning in our lives.

These past few years we have really invested some time in the “how we are going to do that” by creating our Relational Covenant that Phyllis read. We believe that HOW we go about our shared ministry matters. As Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” So you can put together a tolerance task force, for example, and volunteer on that task force and you are using your gifts to co-create the world you want to see. But the deeper, more radical thing to do is to become that value of tolerance, to live it out in your being, in your life.

Okay, that’s hard. In some ways it is easier to, for example, serve on the welcoming committee than it is to have a welcoming ministry — to maintain a presence of openness for the stranger and the guest, and to help them feel connected, safe, at home. Let’s take our 7^th principle that we’ve been working so hard on here, “respect for the interdependent web of life of which we are a part.” So you take the time to get a babysitter and a carpool to come see “Inconvenient Truth”. Maybe you go online and buy carbon credits to offset your emissions. Maybe you then hold a fundraiser at the church so the church itself can become carbon neutral. That search for meaning lead you to see the movie, to find ways to live it out in your life, and then becomes part of the cycle of that search, informing HOW you will continue your search. To continue with this example, a search that leads us to a sense of meaning about environmental sustainability can be done in an environmentally sustainable way, and can lead us to creating a more environmentally sustainable world. The search itself has more power, more integrity if it comes to embody the values and principles of meaning that were uncovered on the search.

Because we do not know where our search will lead, we hold fast to our principles which include love and respect. It is really powerful to take a principle that is meaningful for you and begin to apply it in as many aspects of your life as you can, using that principle to navigate by. Then we need our relationship with supportive community as a balance, to make sure we are remaining in right-relationship as we pursue our search. Because sometimes our application of a particular principle in isolation can lead us out of balance. So with our companions on this journey, we cultivate the qualities of freedom and love at the same time. We are free to pursue our search for spiritual meaning, only in so much as we can do it lovingly.

So this is the ministry I understand us to be sharing:

Supporting one another on this path (which includes supporting our tradition as a whole, so it is here to support our children and their children across generations)
Searching for Spiritual Meaning
And expressing that meaning in our lives and in our community.

Now let’s focus on this search for spiritual meaning: The search for the meaning of our lives, and of life as a totality, the why and “to-what-end” of it.

We use the word “spiritual” here to indicate that it is something different than the other searches we make in our life. Different from

The search for love
The search for material success
The search for our tribe
The search for beauty
The search for financial security
The search for scientific truth

Beyond, among and holding together all these things, we want something ultimate. Something that doesn’t fade with our technology becoming obsolete, that doesn’t fade with bankruptcy, with the passage of years, with the death of a loved one. Theologian Paul Tillich calls this “Ultimate concern” which is a nice phrase for theists and atheists alike.

Some faiths already know the meaning and goal of this search, and remind practitioners of it in their creed, a creed which then binds them together as a people. We have a knowing of something different. We know about mystery. We know that out beyond the edge of what we know lies all that is yet unknown. We find answers and insights on our search, but we also find that “the more you know, the more you know how much you don’t know.”

So what characterizes our search is that we know that we will always be on it, that while we cherish those moments on the mountaintop when everything clicks together and we exclaim “Ah, now I understand,” still we know the world is always changing and growing, and we begin to see the whole range of mountains before us.

So professional and lay ministers alike are always searching for spiritual meaning
and it matters deeply to us how we do that, that it is in a loving and supportive way
and it matters deeply that we live out that meaning in our daily life, and don’t just leave it on the mountain top.

So as I prepare to leave this congregation in June, I think to myself, “thank goodness there are 300–some other ministers here to stand by one another and support one another through this change, through whatever mysteries this search lays open. And thank goodness you have two more loving, principle-driven professional ministers to walk with you, supporting and loving you as you support and love them.

Blessings for your Shared Ministry.

Blessings for your search.

Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Sharing the Ministry

Sermon: Leadership as Ministry by Phyllis Cassel