It’s orientation week at Concordia Seminary. One theme new students are hearing about ministry is to be out of the office and with people, not only with Sunday worshippers but also out and visible in the community.
A co-worker told me her sister had fallen out of the habit of church attendance. When a house guest wanted to go to church, the sister went with. Their Sunday experience was a good one. Sometime later the lapsed church-goer bumped into the pastor at a store. He was dressed in casual, summer clothes. He remembered her name and visited with her…but not about church. It was simply a genuine, “how are you?” conversation, no sales pitch for going to church. That convinced the woman to start going to church again.
“Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies…. So the Christian, too, belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered life but in the thick of foes. There is his commission, his work. ‘The Kingdom is to be in the midst of your enemies. And he who will not suffer this does not want to be of the Kingdom of Christ; he wants to be among friends, to sit among roses and lilies, not with the bad people but the devout people. O you blasphemers and betrayers of Christ! If Christ had done what you are doing who would ever have been spared?’” (Martin Luther in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Life Together,” 17-18).
I’ve heard of “country club” congregations where the pastor’s priority is in office and church but not out with people. David Reid, once a chaplain at Edinburgh, described such a pastor. “His gospel would be chaste, pure, and untrammeled with the world, that is quite true, but how out of touch with things that matter. When asked how he liked his new parson, an old Scot said that he supposed he was all right, in the main, but six days he was invisible and the seventh day he was incomprehensible. It just won’t work to shut ourselves off on these tight little islands. (Carlyle Marney in For All the Saints, II, 776)
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