Faith Shaping Ministry

Foreword

I have pondered what attracts so many young adults in the United States to the Icelandic band Sigur Rós. Their songs regularly stretch over the ten-minute mark, clearly far beyond the supposed attention span of the new media generation. Sometimes described simultaneously as post-rock and post-classical, they frustrate attempts at labels in an era of microcategories fitted to every taste. And to top it off, they mostly sing in Icelandic, a language spoken by few people anywhere outside of their small North Atlantic island home. Not that it helps much when they don’t sing in Icelandic. For those songs, they sing in a made-up vocalization they’ve named Vonlenska, which translates to Hopelandic. Yet against all conventional assumptions about what will connect, Sigur Rós connects profoundly. Their music, one young blogger said, is like bringing heaven to earth.

Similar ponderings arise when I consider why so many people with fragile and broken connections to religion find themselves (sometimes surprisingly) drawn into Phinney Ridge Lutheran Church in Seattle. Not a church to keep the service neatly under one hour, and steadfastly opposed to having Sunday school concurrent with worship, they clearly missed the memo about people not putting up with this any longer. A self-described traditional church but with emergent sensibilities, hosting great choral works and unabashed liturgical worship but with a barista whipping up lattes to take into the pews, Phinney Ridge confounds efforts to pigeonhole within a market niche. They steadfastly speak in the language of word and sacrament, of lectionary and life, of Christ’s invitation to die and be born anew. They do not make accessible translations to meet people at their level of understanding but rather make of themselves accessible translations of the Gospel to each stranger who comes. Yet against all conventional wisdom about what makes churches hip and attractive, Phinney Ridge connects profoundly. In their life together, as one teen said, You can dress and act like who you really are—a child of God.

A common thread: both Sigur Rós and Phinney Ridge offer us more. In a culture saturated with spin and glitter, jaded eyes see shallow a mile away. Many people are on the lookout for places with a depth able to cope with the real longings and hopes within us. So more—and also depth. I can imagine lead singer Jón Þór Birgisson, aka Jónsi, or lead pastor Paul Hoffman, asking someone new to their respective arts: Welcome. How deep would you like to go? In the case of Phinney Ridge, the awful and freeing truth is this: deep enough to die. Drowning is not the most obvious marketing ploy for a church looking not only to survive but to thrive, but there you have it. Churches are tempted to simply say, Come all you who are thirsty. Come to the waters of life. Such invitations are not fully honest. Phinney Ridge could legitimately begin a billboard campaign saying: Come, all you who seek God, and die. Yet for the fullness of their God-given good news to be translated, the rest of the invitation must be said. Come, all you who seek God, and die, so you may be born anew to the life that really is life.

Reading this lovely book is like catching a vision of the life that really is life. And it is a primer in ways to participate with God in living the life we come to know in Christ Jesus, offered through the Spirit in baptism. The ripples of baptismal water, Paul argues, wash over every aspect of congregational life. In response to congregational decline and increasing secularity in the culture, Phinney Ridge decided against novel programs and instead, in a thorough and intentional way, followed the pattern of the faithful stretching all the way back to the fourth century of Christianity. Called the catechumenate or, at Phinney Ridge, The WAY, this intentional welcoming of newcomers to baptism and life in Christian community has formed faith for newcomer and old-timer alike. Some might well argue that those ancient Christians who began the catechumenate did so because they faced missional challenges in a pluralistic and sometimes hostile culture—dynamics quite similar to the contemporary post-Christian context in the United States!

But a warning before you dive in: don’t read this wonderful, moving, simple yet deep book by yourself. No one person can turn a ship around; it takes the whole crew. Gather a group from your congregation and commit to reading and conversation together. Faith Shaping Ministry is an awesome—and practical—depiction of shared lay and clergy leadership that declares, Renewal of life and ministry in your congregation is not only possible, but God’s dream for you.

For you, but not only for you. For those you do not yet know, as well. For those who have not yet visited your church, but for whom you pray. Near the heart of the book, Paul describes the worry many have in turning the church upside down for people who aren’t even present (yet) and who might (when they come) change things! In answer to these worries, we hear perhaps the most beautiful and powerful argument for engaging in the baptismal renewal Faith Shaping Ministry calls for:

People come week in and week out seeking something of which they are not quite certain. But they will recognize the presence of Christ—the genuine, healing, welcoming presence of Christ—as we offer it as best as our gifts allow in an intentional and thoughtful way. God’s people deserve such a welcome. God’s people are called to offer such a welcome, one to another.

The good news is that such a vision is simple, and at hand. It is not easy, of course! But what we need, Paul tells us, God has given us already: Word and water, wine and wheat, font, table, pulpit, prayers and sermon, song and silence. God’s baptismal mystery is there, transforming us from death to life, reconciling a broken world crying out for healing. What we need, I think, are fearless leaders who, like Sigur Rós and Phinney Ridge, risk the question, How deep would you like to go?

The Reverend Dr. Christian Scharen

Acknowledgments

With a profound sense of gratitude to God, I begin these brief notes of thanks with my parents who, against all odds, were diligent in their baptismal promises on my behalf and provided a model of faithful living at home and a committed example of service in church and community. Although my dad died in 1971, his words and actions of faith live on in my memory, and Mom’s example at age ninety-three is still powerful and exceptional. I am so grateful.

From their home to my own, the transition was smooth. I have been blessed by my wife and partner, Donna, whose parallel faith development and life of service has been an inspiration and a joy. Her insights in ministry, many of which are reflected in these pages, have certainly shaped and formed my own.

The congregation of Phinney Ridge Lutheran Church in Seattle is an amazing place to do ministry. With an unceasing sense of commitment and adventure, God’s people in this community of faith have been bold to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus in a new age. At the same time, we have found that the best tools for that shared mission have been the treasures of the church across the centuries: Scripture, word and sacrament, and a historic, yet nuanced, sense of our tradition. It is counterintuitive to think of one’s congregation as emergent and traditional, yet this is exactly how we describe ourselves.

In the preparation of this manuscript, I am grateful to the shared work of these pastoral colleagues: the Reverend Sallie Shippen, the Reverend Nathan Baker-Trinity, and the Reverend John Carlson. I share my gratitude as well with Lois Huseby, one of the most faithful women and careful proofreaders I have ever met. The guidance and nurture of Charlie Collier and Jacob Martin at Wipf and Stock is a precious gift.

Finally, I want to reach out to my partners in ministry over the years, all those with whom I have served and whose collaborative work has formed faith and shaped ministry. To the associates, the interns, the musical, ministry, and office staff persons: I trust you know that our shared work is written between every line. I am particularly grateful to my colleague and associate in ministry for my work at Phinney Ridge, the Reverend Beverly Piro. I am confident that the partnership that we cherish will continue to flourish as we serve the church in new and different ways. Thanks be to God.

Preface

Yes, Really. Living Water

This is the story of how one congregation’s ministry was completely transformed by intentionally choosing to focus on offering new Christians the gift of holy baptism. For the past twenty years, Phinney Ridge Lutheran Church in Seattle has been practicing a version of the ancient church’s pattern of forming new Christians. This pattern has been adapted and nuanced to fit the call to mission that we perceive in our own time, living as we do in one of the most secular cities in North America. Grounded in the conviction that faith comes from hearing, our ancestors in the faith called the process the Catechumenate, a word that has its roots in the Greek catecheo, meaning to resound in the ear.

What we’ve discovered about bringing new Christians to the font is that baptismal water ebbs and flows. So while we at first imagined that we would offer the opportunity to become disciples to people new to Christian faith, what we ended up learning was that by doing this, the ebb of God’s grace came back to us. We who were offering a gift in the name of Jesus were transformed as well. Not only that, now that we’ve been practicing this intentional style of ministry for twenty years, we have a congregation that is immersed in the theology and the wonder of baptismal living. The pattern that Martin Luther urged us to make a pattern of daily life—the pattern of dying to sin and rising to new life that is at the heart of Romans 6—has become evident throughout the various ministries, practices, and programs of congregational life among us.

Building upon the work of the first volume in this series, called simply Faith Forming Faith, this book’s goal is to show how offering baptism and affirmation of baptism to newcomers in our parish as an intentional practice has transformed most, if not all, aspects of our ministry. Like water running over rock, the grounding of our faith and life in the waters of baptism has slowly but irrevocably shaped who we are and how our parish life is organized. And, like water running over rock, the shifts in our community of faith were gradual, every now and then punctuated by a more substantial shift like the kind that comes when rocks are washed about the creek bed after heavy rain.

The thanks for these shifts in practice that have led to joy and vitality belongs to God alone. As we have made an effort to more intentionally focus on the renewing and transformative gifts that stir in the waters of the font, we have rediscovered the gifts that the first Christians handed on to us with such conviction: worship, Scripture study, prayer, and the work of ministry in the world. The act of being dead to self and alive to God in Christ Jesus is the aim. Sin, in its many manifestations among us, holds us back, of course, as it would any community of faith. But here’s the goal: that