Circuit Writer

This is my column for The Tahlequah Christian for the week of January 17-23, 2010.

If you’ve heard me say this once, the odds are good that you’ve heard me say it many times: words are important. And if you’ve had this discussion with me before, you know that it’s not a question of using words with a poetic flourish or that speak ideas in sophisticated or elegant ways, but that the very use of even simple words carries with it great meaning. This is especially the case for us when we are talking about matters of faith.

In his book entitled Recreating the Church, former General Minister and President of the Disciples of Christ Richard Hamm wrote about the difference between the idea of installation and commissioning. He was referring to the act of installing officers, a longstanding practice within our Disciples tradition (along with many other church traditions as well). Looking at the metaphor of installing something, he begged the question whether this is what we as Christians really want to be doing. He argued that to install something implies an understanding of interchangeable parts, where a piece is installed to perform a certain function but can be later removed or uninstalled in order to put something different in its place. Thinking about leadership within the church, he raised what I think is an important question: are the people we call to leadership really just cogs that can be interchangeably placed within the machine that is our church?

If this is starting to sound impersonal to you, then you’re not alone. Hamm and I both agree that we should talk about the leadership within the congregation differently. He proposes the language of commissioning. Drawing from the metaphor of how one might commission a newly constructed ship to sail the seas, we are invited to commission Christians (not just “leaders,” I might add) for a journey of ministry that will carry them to new and amazing places upon the waters of life. You might have also caught the implication of the metaphor. A ship is commissioned for a lifetime of service, just as we are called to a lifetime of faithful ministry.

On January 31, I want to invite each and every one of you to explore this a little further as we share in a service of commissioning for our congregational leadership for the upcoming year. This will not simply be a service of offering our blessing to those who will serve the church for 2010, but will be time for exploring the commissioning and calling that each one of us has received from God to be faithful people in the lives we lead. So I hope you’ll join us for worship that Sunday morning, not to mark the interchanging of installable parts in our church system, but to celebrate the commissioning and calling to leadership that we share as sisters and brothers in Christ.

Yours on the journey,

Clint