He probably said it hundreds, maybe thousands of times. It must have been his slogan, his tag line. Still, when Harold Hanson, the Director for International Personnel at ELCA Global Mission at the time of our first interview in October 2000, asked us that question it was unmistakably heartfelt, undeniably sincere. We had been in interviews and meetings for hours, discussing everything from vocation and call to cost of living adjustments to missiology to local schooling options. We planned out our upcoming psychological testing and criminal background checks, call committee interviews and deployment protocols, ordained leader mobility papers and new missionary orientation schedules. It was a long and tiring day, full of many details to digest, names and faces to keep track of, and forms to fill out.
But at the end of the day, when Harold asked that question, “Do you feel like you have been talking with your church?” the question itself served as a reminder that despite all the administrative rigmarole, we were in fact talking with the church. He went even further, reminding us that it was not just any church he was asking about, or “church” in some general or abstract sense, but our church. It also seems important looking back, that he asked it as a question and did not state it as a declaration: “You have been talking with your church today.” He honestly wanted to know if that’s how we had experienced these meetings, as conversations with our church.
Though not ordained, Harold’s question was profoundly pastoral, and communicated to us a very deep sense of godly vocation. His job had lots to do with nuts and bolts, with administrative details, protocols and formalities. Hoops to jump through, we often say. But his question, the way he asked it, and the simple fact that he asked it spoke volumes to us. Embedded in that question was a deep sense of pastoral care, a bottom line of churchmanship (or whatever its non-gender exclusive equivalent may be), and an honest check-in to make sure that he and all of his colleagues not just spoke of or even spoke for the church, but rather that they were the church for us that day.
I often wish that more people shared Harold’s sense of the pastoral nature of the church, that more people in the bureaucracy of the church—the ecclesiocracy, as I like to call it—shared this overriding sense, this bottom line. I don’t mean this in any sort of naïve or “touchy-feely” sort of way, but I wish simply that there were more of a sense of Harold’s recognition that the body of Christ exists in its many members—no matter what expression of the church, what “level,” what office, what task—and more care taken to make sure that that is indeed what people experienced in their encounters with us. What if we heard “Do you feel like you have been talking with your church?” after every annual congregational meeting, after every Synod assembly, after every review or evaluation, after every call interview. What if we asked, “Do you feel like you have been talking with your church?” on more of these occasions?
So much of our administrative work is necessary, if nothing else “for the sake of good order,” as Philip Melanchthon may have put it. We’re called to do that work, as we are called to perform any ministry: honestly, openly, to the best of our ability, in a way that brings glory to God and not to ourselves. It’s hard not to get caught up in the administrative details of what ever it is we’re doing as or for the church that we miss the point—miss the very reason we’re doing any of it. We miss how blessed we are that God has called us—each of us and all of us together—to be the church, to be the body of Christ to one another, and to present to the world around us an image of Christ’s body that is worthy of the name.
Peace and Unity,
Peter
