The Taking Hold Approach to Ministry

The Basic Issue

The institutional renewal of the Protestant Christian Church has engaged my energies for the past thirty years, particularly at the parish level. I have had a particular interest in the empowerment of individuals through the provision of both context and tools to speed that process. This particular thirty-year period has seen a massive restructuring of many of Canada's major institutions, and the Church is no exception. There is an urban legend that circulates in church circles that quotes the Pope as saying:

In my job, you have to take the long view. The Church seems to have a two-hundred year cycle, ranging from its high points to its low. We are in a trough right now in all the denominations, and it will likely go on beyond my lifetime. What is evident in church life is not the Church at its best. However, we do not pull out of the trough by wishing it so. The Church is renewed by our taking hold and making the changes that are needed. If he did not say it, he should have. The Church is in great need of renewal.

When we undertook training for ministry in the late 1960's and early 70's, at the University of Winnipeg, the theme (Zeitgeist) at that time was "Church Renewal". Our program opened with a week-long retreat to set that theme for the three year study period, and it was interwoven throughout the time. Nothing,however, could have prepared us for what we actually encountered. The phenomena of "globalization", and "rural restructuring" were not even on the horizon, the environmental (now associated with "sustainability") and feminist movements were just getting underway, along with urban migration. Winnipeg at that time was half the size it is today. We were a rural church. Many of us had grown up in rural towns.

Looking back on the training, most of us were preparing for a world which had already happened in the 1960's rather than for a world which would come crashing down around our heads in the three subsequent decades. We knew there had to be change in the Church, but we did not know the degree to which the world would continue to change, increasing that imperative. We knew that the people we would be dealing with, of every age and stage, and from every walk of life would need help in addressing his or her own particular life-challenge, and that our task would be to help make the gospel relevant to such people in such a changing world. Our training both oriented and equipped us to engage in that heurmineutical task of "applied Christianity in the workaday world". The orientation we were given to ministry was one of community development and personal empowerment, and many of us were drawn to the task specifically for that reason. We grew up on a diet of "ask what you can do for your country" and "the dawning of the age of Aquarius" in our popular culture, some of us picketed jails for better conditions, registered voters in the south, helped draft-dodgers to settle in, ran soup kitchens for youth traveling across the country, helped out in deplorable nursing homes, started half-way homes for prison inmates, ran fresh-air camps for inner city kids and single moms with their little families. The Church encouraged, trained and equipped us to do our task within this larger work-context,and provided us with an outlet not only for the fulfilling of our calling but primarily for the equipping of others to join the team in the larger community development project. Those were heady times.

The hardest part of the thirty-year adjustment for many of us who had been trained in such an atmosphere, was not the increase in degree of challenge. On the contrary, the increasing complexity and pace of life on the prairies and in the bushland of Manitoba and North-West Ontario served only to stir us with its even greater challenges. The hardest part was the dropping away of public support for a task that not only had to be done, but which required even more hands with which to do it. The change seemed to come about 1980 within our church. I had already left parish work to chase down what I then viewed as "a missing piece" in the Church renewal puzzle, but my friends and collogues who remained in that vocational expression, were faced with it head on. One of my friends said later that he believed that his near-fatal illness that year was either brought on or exacerbated by the removal of support and movement of the church focus away from "all the creative instances of life between the institutional fixtures", and a re-trenching and hunkering down to the "bare essentials" of parish life. Emphasis shifted to ecclesiastical and ceremonial priorities, political correctness, and inclusivity in the extreme. The only vestiges of social concern which seemed to be of any import were those of the issues surrounding sexual orientation and sexuality, and even those had overtones of concern for issues which concerned members themselves rather than issues of a more dispassionate nature.

I encountered the full force of these changes when I rejoined the vocational expression of parish work in 1996-7, and the shock was beyond belief. Most of the men who I had been trained with (there were few women at the time, and many of those who were there have long since burned out) had left the organization or had been drummed out unceremoniously. The men who were left were, for the most part hunkered down in silence waiting out their pensions in deference to the needs of their families.

The term which could be used to discribe the above orientation to ministry is "taking hold". It is one of two dominant streams of thought in the scripture. It found ancient expression under the concept of "imitatio Christi", the imitation of Christ. It has found a more modern expression in the t-shirt-slogan-based movement of "WWJD?" (what would Jesus do?). It reflects the social concern of all the writers of both Old and New Testaments, and particularly concerns of the Prophets, gospel writers in their accounts of Christ, and the writers working out of the early New Testament church. Taking hold is not presented in scripture as being a concern just of laity or clergy, but of both. It is not presented as being a marginal issue but as being of central concern. It is not presented as being just a nice activity for us in the here and now, but rather, as being for us of ultimate and eternal concern. It is not presented as being simply of man's involvement, but rather as being of the nature of the very heart of God.

The "taking hold" approach to ministry flows out of a "taking hold" approach to life, just as the "letting go" approach to ministry springs out of a "letting go" approach to life.

navigation