Scholar-in-Residence
July 11, 2007
In a collection called The Book of Questions, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda asks "Whom can I ask what I came to make happen in this world?" I encountered this line in 1993 while I was a youth pastor preparing to take a group of North American teens to the Atacama Desert in Chile for their first international mission trip. Emily, then 16, grasped this line and refused to let it go. It became the group's oft-whispered mantra.
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Senior Pastor, Plymouth Congregational Church, Lawrence, KS
July 06, 2007
The longer I have been in ministry, the more I have wondered about "passing on" parish ministry to the next generation. Will the church have an ample supply of pastors for the church's future needs? Where will these pastors come from? As I had been active in my local church as a youth (my grandfather was a Congregational minister) I realized my experience there helped to shape and form my own call to ministry. This experience, coupled with common sense, told me that the local church has been and will continue to be the place that "plants the seed" for people to hear the call to ministry.Our success in raising up future leaders will depend, in part, upon our capability to articulate a radical idea of call - that is, a call shaped by and surrendered to God.
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Regional Director, Calling Congregations
July 01, 2007
Voices and Echoes
Several evocative phrases in our current issue of "Calling" describe the discernment of vocation and the practice of ministry:
- Being formed as a child whose faith "blurred into" the faith of a caring congregation;
- Struggling to "discover our own goodness;"
- Audaciously "bearing the divine presence;"
- Distinguishing voices that invite, confront and encourage from those which diminish or discourage.
They speak of struggles to accept a call that is extraordinary and daring but one that is heard in the context of the everyday lives and practices of a congregation. For it is the congregation that is the trellis to which each of the lives witnessed here was attached in order to flourish.
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Pastor, First Lutheran Church, Plains, MT
May 10, 2007
A call to ministry does not necessarily come like the crow of a rooster,
waking you with a start even before the sun has pushed its way past the
horizon. At least I cannot mark the day and hour of my own call, for
many people over many years have shared in the task of calling me to
ministry. Even now, as a candidate for Ordained Ministry of Word and
Sacrament with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, half-way
through internship with one year of academic studies to go, I still keep
all my senses open to the call that keeps coming, forming me for
leadership in the Christian assembly, where we are gathered, washed, fed
and sent as the Body of Christ for the world. The call started coming
when I was a child...
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Regional Director, Calling Congregations
April 26, 2007
Highlights from "The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens after High School" by Tim Clydesdale (University of Chicago Press, June 2007).Wild parties, late nights, and lots of alcohol, sex, and drugs - many assume these are the things that consume an American teenager's first year after high school. But the reality is quite different.Based on extensive field research and 125 in-depth interviews, "The First Year Out" reports that American teenagers are actually consumed with managing their fairly complex daily lives during the first year after high school. The study explores the ways in which teens navigateshifting relationships with parents, friends and romantic partners and then settle into manageable patterns of substance use and sexual activity.
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Regional Director, Calling Congregations
April 21, 2007
I was born and raised in the Hill District, arguably Pittsburgh's roughest neighborhood. After my father and mother separated, my mother raised me and my two brothers on Chauncey Drive, an inner-city housing project. Growing up, I longed for the affirmation of male approval andso, by the age of 12, I found myself ripping and running the treacherous streets of the Hill District. My friends and I began with sex, alcohol and marijuana, and then moved into grand-theft auto and dealing marijuana and crack-cocaine.During this time, I looked to the streets, television and the music industry to find what it meant to be a man. But I was sliding down a slippery slope. The delusions of sex, drugs, and adrenaline-stimulating events temporarily satisfied an internal longing of my soul with quickfixes, but I was growing numb, even to these things.
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Regional Director, Calling Congregations
April 16, 2007
In July 2001 I became the pastor of an aging African American United Methodist congregation on the south side of Chicago. One of my initial major tasks - as the congregation saw it - was to open our doors to more children and young adults and welcome them into our membership fold. "Easy," I thought, as I resolved to build upon the ministry of the pastor before me.Not so easy, I found out. The surrounding community perceived our membership to be old school, "bourgie" and resistant to change. To be sure, many of our members were old school and resistant to change. Many of the young adults (though not all) who had grown up in the church got tired of trying to introduce new thought and ways of worship into thecongregation, and they left to worship in churches with more contemporary services.
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