This week I have come to the end of 66 Sundays of ministry in three different communities; with only 5 Sundays off across that time.
I’m enormously grateful to have had this period of steady 0.5 work that gave our little household stability in the storms of covid.
Each of these places I served in an intentionally temporary role. I know that ‘intentional interim’ ministry has a specific, limited, technical meaning, and is not the ‘correct’ category for how I was employed – but there is no way of being in a community, charged with the role of opening and facilitating and guiding the conversation of faith with tradition and word and living together, that can be unintentional.
In ‘Supply ministry’, covering the hiatus between properly called and placed ministers through the official denominational system, one is meant to just keep things going – no new initiatives, no changes, just continue the processes that are in place and ‘hold the space’ until the real deal arrives. That’s the theory. But communities are dynamic places of human need and inspiration; the notion that a church would just keep circling in a holding pattern until there was a minister in placement would only work if we held to the theology that the main work of the Spirit took place through the minister. There are denominations like that, but my experience is that the Spirit doesn’t pay much attention to those expectations. Life continues and there is so much to respond to, so much living to do, so much loving to share, the mission of God is constantly working to reconcile all things in love and justice, grace and truth in the suffering and solidarity of Christ in any given moment of the present, and we are ever drawn in to this action and challenged to roll our sleeves up and enrol in peacemaking. So it’s been a fruitful and exciting time.
66 weeks – that’s a lot of churching and *sermoning* (a quarter of those were two in a day) for a woman who steadfastly holds that she doesn’t preach and isn’t called to the shape of ordained congregational ministry. In other words – a big stretch of turning my skills to a role that carries many cultural expectations I am not glad to fill – core adult orientation, building up the church, forming stronger bonds with denominational colleagues and structures than with other local expressions of faith, anachronistic and limited practice of sacraments etc…
Nevertheless, they tell me I have been a gift – and i would expect no less of the Spirit than to take whatever it is we all are and make us gifts to one another. I have had long seasons of ministry embedded in communities, but for the most part my vocation in the past decade has been as a traveller, entering a community, opening my gypsy wagon of wonders to share, bringing colour and music and stories from afar, noticing and naming things, celebrating the goodness I find, offering listening to those who have been overlooked, sometimes speaking or being prophetically uncomfortable, but mostly turning up and loving.
The first community named the gift in this way: ‘You showed us how to be human together again.’ I loved being human with them.
The second community named the gift in this way: ‘You made us feel that our faith mattered – it mattered to you, and it mattered in our community. They do indeed matter deeply to me.
The third community did not name anything. I know they said the same thing i hear everywhere: ‘you’re a breath of fresh air’. I did blow in and blow out again; hopefully not upsetting too much.
I have heard it often over the years – a breath of fresh air. It makes me wonder. I know I’m different. I know I’ve not been formed in the way ordained ministers are formed. I’ve been formed in ministry by being with children and young people. By listening to and challenged by their questions, taking their wrestling and delighting seriously. By turning to the arts and embodied practices to express theology alongside and sometimes ahead of words. By letting imagination and love lead, leaving apologetics and persuasion on the shelf for others to use. By reading and critiquing classics of theology through the lens of those young inquirers, rather than through the scholarly commentary traditions.
If people experience a breath of fresh air, I wonder whether this says less about me and more about how tightly closed the windows and doors of the church are.
How firmly sealed the boundaries of community are – how much we are all breathing one another’s air.
In scripture, the Spirit is as breath. Sometimes as intimate as inhalation and exhalation, sometimes as wild and impersonal as a weather warning.
This is the end of this season for me, and i have hung up my ministry boots to reflect and regroup. My son has moved out and is no longer dependent on my income, so this is a moment I can risk a little more unpredictability. If I go backwards I only have to myself to consider in how to address that.
Covid complexities in schools have opened an invitation to go back to my secondary teaching trade with plenty of CRT work to pay the bills while I figure out if there is anything to salvage from the vocation I thought I had heard so clearly so many years ago.
Perhaps I am too old – though I hear Sarah and Elizabeth chuckle at that.
Perhaps I am too broken – though I see Ruth and Hagar raise their eyebrows at me.
Perhaps I am too outraged – though a syro-phonecian woman and Jael roll their eyes and sigh.
Perhaps I lack the resources – but Elijah’s ravens circle overhead with noisy caws of God’s promise of sustaining provision.
Over five years since the great undoing of marriage and employment and home, the tough passage of many unexpected heartaches and hurdles, and the long road of steps towards healing and many more still needed, this is a moment of – dare I whisper the words? – settledness.
I’ve replanted the veggie patch. I can’t plant trees here, because of the landlord’s caveats for building on the block, but I have potted up some native wattles in large pots to grow strong roots and thrive; a venture of hope that come Guling they will bless me with soft golden bursts of joy.
Elizabeth Waldron Anstice
multivocality 