Campsite Attendant Wanted

As we continue our journey around Hugh Valentine's tent-maker encampment we come to his powerful indictment regarding the lack of ministry role models.

We lack models of ordained men and women who manage effectively to discharge their duties as priests and who operate in a range of posts, jobs, roles and professions and who see these as being the places they pray, witness and celebrate the link between the transcendent and immanent.

With just a little editing I feel that Hugh's words could be turned into a situations vacant notice.

WANTED men and women who manage to effectively discharge their duties as Ordained ministers, through a range of posts, jobs, roles and professions and see these as places they of prayer, witness and celebration linking the transcendent and immanent.

It is this incarnational nature of tent-maker ministry that seems to be continually placed in the blind spot of the church. From my own experience, the deliberate practice of tent maker ministry makes theological sense as the transcendent pathway meets the immanent highway at street level. G. Ernest Wright’s The Biblical Doctrine of Man in Society, quoted by Stanley Hauerwas in Unleashing the Scripture: Freeing the Bible from Captivity to America, p 26 infurs that such ministry modelling is essential. He writes,

“But no matter how high the doctrine of the church to which a particular confession may adhere in actual practice its congregations are a gathering of individuals who know little of Christian community in the biblical sense and expect little from it. Like secular clubs they meet in their various groups to hear speakers on a variety of topics which are usually unrelated, undigested, and unillumined by Christian faith…The worship of the Church has been heavily influenced by individualistic pietism, concerned largely, not with the social organism, but with the individual’s need of peace, rest and joy in the midst of the storms and billows of life. The self-centeredness of the pietistic search for salvation tends to exclude vigorous concern with community. Hence, the modern Christian searches his Bible not unlike the pagan’s study of his sacred literature, the purpose being to find inspirational, devotional, and moral enlightenment for personal living, and nothing more. The sectarianism of the Churches, and their racial and national cleavages, are further expressions of an individualism which distorts the nature of Christian society and provides excuse for the world’s individualism.”

Hugh's model reverses the paradigm