• Posts Tagged ‘Prayer’

    UMC Candidacy Questions: Most Formative Experience

    by  • February 16, 2012 • Personal, Theology • 2 Comments

    As a part of the candidacy process for ordination in the United Methodist Church one is required to type up and submit answers to a number of different questions and prompts. As I approach my meeting with the District Committee on Ordained Ministry on Thursday, February 23, I will be posting a few of my responses here. The first of these responses follows, below.

    ¶ 311.2.a.i: What is the most formative experience of your Christian life?

    I could answer this question by talking about my church growing up, or the amazing and encouraging friends that God has blessed me with, or my experience in seminary and how it was probably exactly what I needed right when I needed it – all are wonderful gifts from God. But I think at this point I’d like to say that the most formative experience of my Christian life has been my current job as director of youth ministries at Aldersgate UMC in Santa Fe, TX.

    This charge is strengthening my faith. I loved seminary, but writing an exegetical paper on a passage from Isaiah (for instance) is much easier to me than convincing a roomful of skeptical 9th graders that God has done something dramatic and beautiful -— even exciting -— for us and for our world, and that God wants us to participate in the continuation of that drama, beauty and excitement that he’s still doing today. It’s not that I don’t already have faith, or that I don’t already believe these things that I teach. I most certainly do. But the exercise of having to explain my faith and why I’m so excited about it, and having to do so in different words and from different angles, has been deeply formative for me. It’s as if my mouth having to form the gospel is teaching my heart all over again how to love it. Having to explain why the good news is so good enhances and enlivens that goodness for me. Talking about how exciting God’s reign is has made God’s reign even more exciting.

    Further, being at Aldersgate encourages me to pray. There’s nothing that has encouraged prayer more consistently and humbly in my life than my being responsible for the spiritual formation of this small band of young people. Jesus claims that there’s a lot at stake here. Evidently messing this up might end worse for me than if I had a millstone tied around my neck at the bottom of the sea. But I’m also humbled and driven to prayer by the simple fact that I love these teens that I get to work with, and I care deeply for the families with whom I interact. And so I give thanks often, and I intercede on their behalf. What a gift!

    Lastly, my time at Aldersgate continues to grow my love for Christ’s church. Churches are messy. Sometimes we fight or bicker. Sometimes we spend way to much time talking about things that are really just silly distractions. And sometimes we do a terrible job of loving each other, not to mention our neighbors and our enemies. But sometimes the church gets it. Sometimes we catch a vision, if only a fleeting one, of God’s mercy and grace, and sometimes we even act on that vision. Sometimes we live out our allegiance to God’s Reign instead of trying to fortify our own reigns. Sometimes, if just for a moment, the church lives into her calling by really and truly worshipping God, and by really and truly living into God’s mission for which he’s sending us out into the world. Church is messy, sure. But by a miracle of grace God nurtures and shapes these messy bodies into what will become his bride. Aldersgate can be messy. And yet somehow God still manages to offer us his Sanctifying grace. And that has been deeply formative for me.

    St. Mom: Monica, “Thy Handmaid”

    by  • March 29, 2010 • Theology • 0 Comments

    I’ve recently been revisiting Augustine’s Confessions. In doing so, one thing I noticed is Monica’s role in the story.

    One could pretty easily make the argument that Augustine understands his conversion to Christianity as being the result of his mother, Monica’s (“Thy handmaid”) prayers. It seems God’s sovereignty and providence go to work to save him in conversation with Monica’s faithfulness in prayer.

    Furthermore, Book 9, located at the very end of the narrative segment of the work, is mostly a retrospective on Monica’s life in the context of narrating the circumstances of her death, offering accounts of her faithfulness not only in prayer for the conversion of her son, but also, for instance, in her transformation (by an almost explicit Yoderian revolutionary subordination!) of her prone-to-rage husband.

    Augustine writes to confess his own sins, but the positive example that he biographically points to because of its power to point to Christ is not his own transformed saintly life as much as it is the sustained saintliness of his mother, St. Monica.

    Herbert McCabe on Prayer

    by  • October 6, 2009 • Theology • 2 Comments

    I’ve been reading a bit of Catholic theologian Herbert McCabe’s writings lately. His style is always very engaging, sometimes humorous, and once in awhile profound.

    I’ve also been thinking a bit about prayer lately, mostly by flipping through von Balthasar’s Prayer (sidebar: does anybody know any non-Catholic books on prayer that I would like? Bonus points if the book is Barthian, Anabaptist or Wesleyan). The following quotes are from McCabe’s short essay on prayer in God Matters.

    All prayer is going to have to take its meaning and point from the sacrifice of Christ; we shall simply have to scrap all the metaphors about the allpowerful kindly father up there whom we can sometimes get through to and draw his attention to what we happen to need; we shall really have to get back to the traditional view that all providence is in Christ, that predestination is the predestination of Christ – that no one comes to the Father except through Christ. (217)

    The crucifixion says that the coming of the kingdom is not to be an achievement of Jesus but a gratuitous act of the Father’s love. The kingdom is to come as a gift… Gift is an expression of an exchange of love. To believe in the resurrection, to believe in God, is to believe that the resolution of the tragedy of the human condition comes as gift, as an act of love encompassing mankind. The crucifixion/resurrection is the archetypal exchange of prayer and answer to prayer. (219, emphasis mine)

    God is not first of all our creator or any kind of maker, he is love, and his life is not like the life of the worker or artist but of lovers wasting time with each other uselessly. It is into this worthless activity that we enter in prayer. This, in the end, is what makes sense of it. (225)

    Rabbit, Run

    by  • October 5, 2009 • Theology • 0 Comments

    I got this from Shedden:

    Do you think this is your job, to meddle in these people’s lives? I know what they teach you at seminary now: this psychology and that. But I don’t agree with it. You think now your job is to be an unpaid doctor, to run around and plug up holes and make everything smooth. I don’t think that. I don’t think that’s your job…. I say you don’t know what your role is or you’d be home locked in prayer…. In running back and forth you run away from the duty given you by God, to make your faith powerful…. When on Sunday morning, then, when you go out before their faces, we must walk up not worn out with misery but full of Christ, hot with Christ, on fire: burn them with the force of our belief. This is why they come; why else would they pay us? Anything else we can do and say anyone can do and say. They have doctors and lawyers for that…. Make no mistake. Now I’m serious. Make no mistake. There is nothing but Christ for us. All the rest, all this decency and busyness, is nothing. It is Devil’s work.

    - John Updike, Rabbit, Run