The Art of Camping

So onto the last of Hugh's obstacles to tentmaker ministry.

The living out of the priest’s office seems often to drift from the ontological and inspirational to the functional and tired. Of course there are exceptions, but many parish clergy drift towards becoming museum attendants: preserving the artefacts, discouraging innovation and preferring well behaved visitors who admire the exhibits.

This seems to be saying, using a parody from the epistle, "when I was a theological student I had high hopes but now that I am a minister I have to put away visionary concepts and become a routine religious." How often have I heard ministers say, they didn't teach me this in College, when faced with some functional aspect of organisation.

Just last week, I popped into Hugh's Church of St James whilst passing through London and was heartened to see within this Wren masterpiece, 2 men of the road, asleep on pews, keeping warm from the winter chill, whilst city people where at prayer, and musicians where getting ready for an evening concert of classical music. Truly this was a glimpse of an ontological church at work and I define ontology - the study of the nature being.

For me, this is the essence of tentmaker ministry - the incarnational ministry of being and has much to say about the ministry of the institutional church. What is clear, is that the institutional church has great problems with what is often viewed as this maverick ministry. Whilst it holds theoretically high theology of ministry, the church seems lack the ability to express this through praxis.

Such practice is surely only determined through a physical, emotional and spiritual presence within a given context, what we might call the principles of incarnational ministry where

• Incarnational ministry has to be transparent where the benefit of our actions are free of suspect intention and allows others to discover the source of such goodness is the Word made flesh in us.
• Incarnational ministry is vulnerable in that it cannot and should not inoculate itself from the hurt of those it is helping
• Incarnational ministry is what someone has called an applied agape truly being WITH the people and truly vulnerable.
• Incarnational ministry embraces the culture without succumbing to it.
• Incarnational ministry is always willing to take on itself the suffering of the oppressed.

Lesslie Newbigin said, ''The word without the deed is empty. The deed without the word is mute.''

In this context, Hauerwas and Willimon comment that the pastor’s job description is "not the sustenance of a service club within a generally Christian culture, but the survival of a colony within an alien society" (Hauerwas 1989, 115). The authors assert that all Christians are "ordained through baptism," and that there is therefore no "specialness" about pastors. All leaders in a local congregation have the responsibility of building up the congregation. In a society that "corrupts and co-opts Christians" the unique role of the pastor is to help the congregation gather the resources necessary to be the colony of God’s righteousness (Hauerwas, Resident Aliens (1989) 139).