Becoming a People of Wisdom
It’s been an amazing week of discovery, learning, and fellowship at Senior VBS. I am so grateful to this congregation for taking this crazy idea of mine and running with it.
Our lay leaders have been tremendous in helping get this program off the ground, and although I can only speak for myself, I think we all had a lot of fun.
The main theme of our time together was discernment of call, a theme I preached about to the whole congregation last week and what I wrote about in my newsletter article this week.
I’ve been hitting that theme so hard because today is Welcoming Sunday, when we sign up for all the ministries we’re going to take part in for the next year.
I wanted us to spend this conscious time in spiritual reflection on vocation and call because as one of our lay leaders, Nicole Seiler, I think, said, the actual day of Welcoming Sunday is no time to be in discernment.
It’s a crowded, happy, festive day, with ice cream and conversation and noise and kids running around. It’s fabulous, but it’s not a time for deep reflection on your vocation in ministry.
That needs to come before Welcoming Sunday, and I hope over the last couple of weeks we’ve provided you with the tools, including the Ministry Guide, to have that conversation with God and your family about your call to ministry this year.
So we talked a lot about vocation at Senior VBS, and about how to build holistic practices of health and sustainability that make us able to answer our call. We talked about health, law, finances, grief and loss, caregiving—the full spectrum of life that affects us as ministers of the gospel.
But the Holy Spirit loves to throw me a curve ball now and then, and I felt deeply led as I began the program on Sunday to include another strand of reflection for which I had done no preparation at all.
And that theme was this: what does it mean to be an elder? Continue reading