IntotheMystery: Some Thoughts on the Transition into Ministry and Beyond

Over the Weekend

Cara — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:25:36 +0000

I am going to cheat on my first post! What a crime! I am going to share what my husband and I did last weekend.

It was still really cold and miserable and we were both suffering from the long winter up here in the Midwest. Neither of these two Southerners were cut out for January and February this year. Anyhow, I digress.

T (my husband) had been away for work all week and so we hadn’t spent much time together. We needed a little adventure, but as its not hiking weather yet, and we had a limited amount of time what with other commitments. So I planned a surprise date on Saturday morning.

I told T we had to get up at a reasonable hour, put on whatever kind of street clothes and comfy shoes. First we went to breakfast at a cute little place in our neighborhood that neither of us had found the time to try out yet and then we went to the Indianapolis Children’s Museum! It was the perfect way to get out of the house, to go exploring and to stay warm while the winter was still going strong!

We had a great time, it allowed us to still be able to talk and connect, but still be able to disconnect from our week and work and take our brains somewhere else for a while. Plus I learned that herbivore dinosaurs come on round eggs and carnivore dinosaurs come in long rice shaped eggs.

New Weekly Post: Over the “Weekend”

Cara — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:01:53 +0000

In the church world, we don’t really get “weekends” or at least like the rest of the nine to five, Monday through Friday corporate crowd does. Instead we get the ever illusive “day off.” A floating or consistent day that you take off in addition to Saturdays. I won’t take a stab at how well ministers do at protecting this day and actually taking, but I have heard rumors that we don’t do that well.

So as part of my overhaul of Into the Mystery, I will be starting a weekly feature called “Over the Weekend” to celebrate the gift of concentrated time spent cultivating our whole selves and re-charging from the blessed work of ministry. Our “Over the Weekend” posts will feature what my husband and I did over the weekend to disconnect, reconnect and reenergize. Also, Into the Mystery will be taking submissions from you all about what you do over the weekend/on your day off as well. It will be part accountability and part celebration.

some thoughts

Cara — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 20:47:10 +0000

My desire to write, to create, to give something meaningful and significant has not changed. But I have really wrestled these past months with how one dimensional my writing and most of the writing out there for ministers really is. We are holy people, but we are wholly people. We dress, we eat, we laugh, we play, we make exercise, we make friends, we cry, we celebrate the big and the small. And I have been out here in silence wrestling with how to change this blog to really reflect the wholeness and fullness of life in ministry, because really there are so many tiny things that go into what it means to have a deep and effective ministry, but to call them tiny would underestimate their significance. Because I really believe that in this new wave of whatever the church, our culture, even this world is becoming, we are in the process of discovering how large, how significant, how richly the small pieces affect the whole, in fact all those small things we do, choose, celebrate and experience might be the whole, the holy of who we are.

In Process

Cara — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:38:03 +0000

So clearly, I have been a little out of the loop as of late. There have been tons of transitions around the church as of late that have required a bit more of my time than expected.

However, I have also been in the midst of re-thinking my blog–how its second year might differ from the first, the way the second year of ministry is drastically different from the first. I am looking forward to rolling out a new design and format soon–but this is a crock pot project, however I think it is nearing time to roll out the new ideas.

Stay tuned…

the week

Cara — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 15:45:48 +0000

It’s Holy Week. Most of you I imagine already know this truth, you have been posting in various electronic media your sermon writing, Children’s moment searching, liturgical organizing woes. As for me I am hammering out two sermons for tomorrow–yep! Who would have thought that for a new assoicate on a staff of 4 other very capable ministers I would preach twice in Holy Week. But everyone’s gotta pull thier weight with 9 services, one 3 hour prayer vigil with 6 mini services in it (yep that’s 15 services and 10 sermons to be written), and all the other things Lent entails like launching the pubilcity for the follow up series and small groups, finding voluteers for the influx of children we will have on Easter, etc.

But I know that in the midst of such a crazy week, that like Advent, I will be touch by the beauty and blessing of doing ministry and I look forward to sharing that with you.

prison break, part 2

Cara — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:34:18 +0000

I am not sure that I have the words to communicate in any elegant way what its like to preach at prison. I have done it once a quarter now for nearly a year, but if I could write something it would say something like this.

I would talk about how when I preach at the prison it always leaves me with a swirl of emotions. It is heart breaking to meet, hear the stories of and the hopes of a group of people who are virtually forgotten in our culture. None of the men I meet want to come back to prison once they are released, they have pictures of thier wives and children tucked into the pages of thier Bibles, they want to find work on the outside and be providers for thier family. But that road is hard, especially in this economic climate. I mean how many of you reading would hire a know prisoner to do work in your office or home or neighborhood when you could hire someone who was out of work and hadn’t committed a crime?

I would also talk about how inspired I am by the men I meet at the prison. They read and know the scripture probably better than most of my classmates from seminary, including myself. And although they use much different language to express thier faith that I do, thier sense of hope is powerful in the face of so much uncertainty and reason for fear.

And I would tell you that my preaching is getting better, I even had a few men tell me I gave, “a good message” rather than “a good speech.”

weeding

Cara — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 02:48:36 +0000

We always had a garden growing up. My dad tilled it each spring and then my mom would plant neat little rows of cucumbers, squash, tomatoes and strawberries. These are wonderful ways to spend April and May early mornings on into the warm, sun kissed afternoons. My brother and I were assigned a part in the gardening system very early, maybe at five or six. We were in charge of the most glamorous part–weeding. I remember that first summer my mom would sit out there in the early morning as the sun began to lift the morning dew off the grass and would answer the call, “Mom! Is this a plant or a weed?!” As we clutched the leaves of the plant in our tiny fingers, roots dangling in the air above our heads. We were trying to learn the difference between the two and in those early stages of the garden it could be hard to our little, unpracticed eyes.

Last week while I was at the conference with my team, I took a break to hit the treadmill in the hotel fitness center. I decided I would call a dear friend who I had been missing lately and get her to catch me up on her life while I was chugging along at a pace that would generously be called a slow jog.

As I began my cool down I was sharing with her that I was at a conference with a team that I coach and how great the experience had been and how energized and full of great ideas everyone was after hearing the speakers and sitting in workshops. But I also shared that now I was a bit nervous becuase it was my job to guide them through the process of figuring out what good ideas could be done now, using the momentum of our good energy, what should wait for the right time in the calendar year or for a communication campaign, what should be shared with the larger visioning team and what might need to wait like a seed in the ground for a bit longer germination period.

“Well,” my friend said, “I know you will be great at that, because you are really good at helping people think through things, asking the right questions and getting a plan together. I think that’s one of your strengths.” I appreciated my friends words but I was a little surpries she saw this in me. And again it made me think of a congregation member I respect that once told me. “I have learned in my life that the things I thought I was great at, I am not so hot at and the things I thought I wasn’t very good at, I am actually really good at doing. You just discover things about yourself all the time.”

Which brings me back to my family garden clutching that plant up over my head tring to figure out the difference between what needed to be tossed into the compost pile to be something different, and what needed to be gently tucked back into the ground to lay deep roots and bear fruit for a season. I am still learning to weed.

new resources

Cara — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 02:11:15 +0000

Hey all! I have added some new resources to the website. Over on the left hand side fo the page you will see there is a tool bar, which now features a link to a list of books on the Transition into Ministry. Some I have read, some are sitting in that mounting pile of books that is slowly over-taking the space next to my night stand and some are just other resources on the topic that people have recomended over the past year or so.

If you have read any of these or want to offer your two cents on any of them, please feel free to leave a comment or e-mail me your thoughts.

prison break

Cara — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 01:49:29 +0000

Our church leads worship at the medium security men’s prison on the fouth Sunday of the month and tomorrow is my turn to preach. Its funny every time I go I get the same two comments. “Gosh, I didn’t know I was shaking the preacher’s hand when I came in the door” (I guess they don’t see too many 20 something female ministers at the men’s prison or in thier churches on the outside). Or they say, “Good speech,” because even though I like preaching and I like the challenge of preaching at the prison, I have yet to master preaching to an audience who for the most part come from either the black church or evangelical tradition. When they say “good speach” I feel sorry for them that they came to hear a sermon and instead got a girl from the suburbs of Oklahoma giving a speach. Likes its not bad enough that they are in prison but its like the feeling you get when you reach into your coat pocket and think for a brief second that you are going to find a long, lost $20 bill but instead find a crumpled parking ticket. It doesn’t really bug me and sometimes I think it might even be a compliment in some twisted way, but it is interesting that those are basically the only two comments I get. So we will see if tomorrow brings a new surprise. I will keep you posted.

goldielocks and the three workshops

Cara — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 23:05:40 +0000

So I am still at the Children’s Ministry conference abosorbing and processing and engaging. Yesterday we were in large session with big name speakers all day and night but today we did all of our breakout sessions, each focusing on various topics. We as a team sat down and decided together which workshops we would attend months ago trying to each attend something we were passionate about and each hit one of the areas that would best serve the team’s collective knowledge and needs, but I digress.

So today was workshop day. And I have to say no matter who puts on the conference I am always a little tentative about workshops. Its like Forrest Gump says, “you never know what you are going to get.”

My first workshop was on Spiritual Formation in Toddlers and the speaker began by confessing that she doesn’t actually do ministry with toddlers or infants, she works with pre-schoolers, but that her area of academic research is in the area of toddlers. Well, as someone who has quite recently left academia I can both understand the “do as I say, not as I practice” attitude, but I also know that there are people who are faithfully connecting thier research to their practice in community. So I cringed. She had great theory and it was helpful, foundational work, but when it came to practical questions on how to do what she was talking about she either dismissed the question or gave an answer that talked about something she did know.

My next workshop was on Effective Ways for Leaders to Connect with Kids and was led not by an academician, but by a practicioner that had probably never done formal training for his ministry. But he was exciting and engaging and his ideas were practical, clearly communicated and spoke to the real issues of connecting kids and adults. There was an acronym with 5 easy ways to create a path to meaningful connection. But the scriptures he used were out of context and the theology did not have much depth. Like a puddle in the parking lot after a morning rain right before the sun comes out. And it left me a little distracted despite the colorful power point and the cool video clips.

Sometimes learning after you get out of school has some of the same struggles that course work did and I am left to feel like Goldielocks going from bed to bed laying my dainty head on the pillow only to declare “this bed is too hard” or “this bed is too soft.” Only instead my exclamations sound a little more like, “this workshop is too theory based and has shallow or vague application” or “this workshop is too practical and doesn’t deeply engage God’s work in our work.” But what the truth is that we don’t ever find the perfect bed, we make the perfect bed. That’s what we were supposed to be training our minds and our hearts to do while in school. So while I am here and probably as I look forward to a career of these events I will try not to be less hard, but to withhold judgement until I have done the hard work of minister as theologian to translate.