Thought for the Week: Mobile ministry
Noël Staples reflects on authority and ministry
Holding a mobile phone is a common sight since the first iPhone appeared in 2007, but I’m self-conscious wielding it in Meeting for Worship. Yet in ministry it’s no different from referring to the book of Quaker faith & practice, which may indeed be what I’m doing via Kindle, holding, as it does, Meister Eckhart’s Sermons, Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs, and Brother Lawrence’s The Practice of the Presence of God – to name a few. Or I may ‘Google’ George Herbert’s beautiful poem ‘Love (III)’.
Lectio Divina is well known for encouraging or deepening one’s relationship with God, the Divine, the Spirit and the Light – however one refers to that ineffable experience in still silence.
In 1970, like Jack Nicholson’s character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I had electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which, while kick-starting my recovery, damaged my memory. Now my mobile makes good some loss.
I’ve thought much about how we trace, or understand, our ‘authority’ for our ministry. Looking at our own ‘authority’, it is important to try to understand, or at least recognise, its (diverse) nature. What are one’s spiritual gifts – the skills and abilities that we draw on in ministry? Spoken ministry is only a small part of Quaker ministry. Most of our ‘ministerial’ communication is nonverbal.
As Marshall McLuhan famously noted: ‘The medium is the message’. The ‘ministry of the tea towel’ is just as important as spoken ministry! Everything we do, or are, communicates to all around us – so is, in some sense, ‘ministry’. A ‘minister’ is a servant who acts or speaks for an authority higher, or greater, or possibly just ‘other’ than his or her self. ‘Minister’ and ‘ministry’ derive from the Latin minus, meaning less or lower than, so a minister is simply someone less, or lower than someone/something else. I worry about giving too much spoken ministry, though I’ve only ever been eldered on one occasion for being ‘too intellectual’, and I’m careful to try to get my register right.
How do we know what is our authority for our ministry? We can’t know for certain. However, the more frequent our experience, the deeper our relationship is with the Spirit, the greater our hope can be that it has a pervasive effect in our lives; and, as everything we do, or are, or say, communicates to all around us, the greater our hope can be that our ministry proceeds from the Spirit.
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