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BY LESLEY A. CARTER

This was a sermon delivered by Lesley A. Carter, the conference webmaster, at a worship service at the mission center June 13.

We've spent a lot of time in recent weeks and months thinking about and talking about what we seem to be calling "non- and nominally religious people" – who they are, how we reach them, why they aren't part of the church.  Bishop Schol gave us an impassioned and moving speech during Annual Conference about his daughter, Rebecca, a 'nominally religious' person who more easily finds God outside the church walls than in them.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must tell you that I stand before you today as someone who has wrestled for many years, and continues to wrestle deeply, with my own leanings in this direction.  Particularly since I finished divinity school, I have really struggled to find a place within the church where I belong, where whatever gifts I possess are welcomed and utilized.  Theologically, I know that faith is supposed to develop most deeply and effectively within community.  And I crave that community.  But I also believe that the beloved community, the Kingdom-building community, welcomes a multiplicity of gifts, both ordained and lay, and weaves them together into one cohesive whole for the common good… and I am still searching for that place.

Not long ago, the president of the Episcopal House of Deputies, Bonnie Anderson, said this:

"We, laity, clergy and bishops, have conspired… to define the ministry of the laity as what we do at Church – read, acolyte, be on the vestry… sing in the choir…  Don't get me wrong, these things are very important… (but) we are all missing the point.  The real job of the laity is to reconcile the world.  Out there."[1]

A pastor friend of mine is fond of saying that laity perhaps have the tougher job of faith – clergy get to be professional 'faith' people, but laypersons have to mix it up out there in the trenches and live their faith in all manner of situations.  Reconciling the world is hard, hard work.  And I think that, as Kingdom people, people of faith who are called to transform the world, we are all – clergy and laity alike – definitely called to do that work. 

Paul tells us that there is a variety of gifts, but one Spirit.  Some of us are called to be clergy.  I think we're all very familiar with that particular charism, that gift.  But do we perceive lay vocations as gifts in quite the same way?  Is a vocation only lived out in the context of the church's walls?  I think not.  I don't think that is what Paul is telling us at all.  The building up of God's kingdom is a much bigger job than people in funky collars and fancy vestments can do on their own.  We all, every single one of us, have a vocation and a calling to use the gifts God has given us for the betterment of the world around us.  As the mystic Hildegard of Bingen said, "When humans do good work," our work affects the universe itself.[2]

One of the reasons that I think non- and nominally religious people have had difficulty finding their place within the church is that there is a gulf between the world within the walls of the church and the world outside it.  If the church community is a circle, it is a closed one, and its boundaries are often almost rock-hard in keeping the 'churchy' stuff in and the 'worldly' stuff out.  As Bonnie Anderson said, we so often think of the ministry of the laity – and the clergy, for that matter – as what we do in church that we fail to see what we do outside it as sacred. 

In his book The Reinvention of Work, Matthew Fox argues that "young people want to participate in a Great Work.  They don't want their lives to be trivial or trivialized.  They don't want their souls to be shrunken to fit into a tidy box or a procrustean bed called Jobs."[3]

I think this goes for all of us – deep down inside, we all are craving a deeper meaning for our lives than simply getting up in the morning, sitting in a cubicle all day, and going home to sleep.  We want that time in the cubicle – or the shop, or the courthouse, or wherever we work – to mean something, to have a bigger purpose.  And we want our work – our ministry, if you will – to be of one piece with our faith lives, not a completely separate entity.  We want the circle to be wide enough to encompass our whole being, all the gifts and charisms that God has given us to co-create God's world, not just our Sunday morning personae.

In my own Episcopal tradition, we see the Eucharist not only as a common meal of the beloved community, but also as food and drink for the journey of faith that we live out between Sundays.  One of our post-communion prayers makes this really clear: "And now, Father, send us out to do the work you have given us to do, to love and serve you as faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord."[4]  But there's seldom recognition in the church of how the work we're given to do is part of the Great Work and Commission, regardless of whether it's accounting, web work, graphic design, facilities maintenance, cooking, or the plethora of professions people choose.  Part of the problem is that all too often, we ourselves don't recognize those things as part of the Great Work.

Some of you know that I had a call experience when I was fifteen.  I have yet to seriously pursue any kind of ordained ministry.  There are many reasons for that, and I won't go into them. But where I think my theology and perhaps my sense of self-worth have been flawed is in feeling as though I have failed God if I choose to serve God as a layperson, and in not seeing my daily life and work as ministry because I lack one of those funky backwards collars.   

If we use our gifts in God's service, if we are intentional about what we do and why we do it, always keeping Christ in the forefront, living out our faith, listening to God's voice when God speaks to us, being Christ's hands, feet, and voice in the world, are we not doing ministry?  Paul says, "… there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone.  To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good." (v. 6-7)  The common good requires activities – and gifts – of all kinds to sustain it, and I think it also requires a church that feeds, fosters, and lifts up all those ministries, both ordained and lay. 

The common good also requires us to learn to be more mindful of what we do, how we work, and the impact that work can have on others.  In this, I think our Zen brothers and sisters, who spend much of their lives practicing mindfulness in everything they do, have something to teach us.  How often do we go through our workdays, not really paying attention?  How often are we less than present with our coworkers or customers, some of whom might need Christ's healing touch?  And how often do we fail to see that God is at the heart of everything we do, not just the churchy things we do?

One of the authors I've been reading in preparation for the fall Academy class I'm teaching wrote, "There is an arrogance among Christians that equates God's activity with service in the institutional church and that measures religious commitment exclusively by institutional service."[5]  I think that if our churches are to survive, we've got to do better than that, don't you?  I think our young people in particular are calling us to a different paradigm that calls us to make church a seven-day way of life, not just a Sunday morning activity, a paradigm that transforms church from an institution to a community, a Kingdom-building community that is constantly reconciling the world out there, a community that celebrates and utilizes the varieties of gifts in its midst as the manifestation of the Spirit in all parts of our common life and work.  Can you help me make that dream come true?  Can you help me find not just my place, but a place for all non- and nominally religious people in the community of Christ?

[1] Bonnie Anderson, "Courageous Change," Episcopal Divinity School Kellogg Lecture (Cambridge, MA), May 5, 2011.

[2] Hildegard of Bingen, Showings, as quoted in Matthew Fox, The Reinvention of Work (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), p. 2

[3] Fox, The Reinvention of Work, p. 180.

[4] Book of Common Prayer (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), p. 366.

[5] Anne Rowthorn, The Liberation of the Laity (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2000), p. 115.