The bittersweet end of the academic year means waving a fond goodbye to our graduates and wishing them well. It also means a sigh of relief after the rigors of the past months. No more hustling for class, no more grading (well, after the current end-of-term piles are done), and no more nagging.

Nagging is an essential skill for teachers. My writing students had to turn in a portfolio of their revised work by May 6. I reminded them twice a week for three weeks. It was on our Moodle course page. I created a handout with all the details and went over it in class. I sent them an email the Sunday night before it was due. And hallelujah, every last one of them turned in their portfolio on time. The fruit of effective nagging!

Any teacher knows that you need to remind students six ways from Sunday about everything they need to do. Say it out loud (repeatedly), write it down, email them. Even so, some students will forget. Oh, I didn’t know it was due today! they’ll say, wide-eyed. Sure, honey. Where have you been? On another planet? Thank goodness for the students who hear the instructions once, get the thing done, print it out (with a staple, thank you), and turn it in at the beginning of class on the due date. Bless you.

We grownup colleagues need to nag each other, too. Remember that event today? Are you coming? By the way, you owe me comments on that document. I often remark to our department administrator that I’ve raised three children, so I know how to nag. It’s one of my spiritual gifts.

Actually, it’s not. I hate doing it. I hate having to keep track of other people’s responsibilities as well as my own. I hate it when other people have to remind me of my responsibilities. But evidently nagging is part of life, isn’t it? Parents have to do it. So do teachers. Administrative assistants nag their bosses: Your flight is at 4, you should be out the door by now. Bosses nag their underlings: We need that form filled out for tax purposes. Every fall, the Workday app at Calvin will nag us daily until we do our required annual online fire protocol training. There is no way to turn off the emails except to do the training. There are routes to escape from the building but not from Workday.

Of course, these days we deal with constant electronic nagging. No matter how many times you turn off notifications on your phone or block emails, some nag-bot will still find a way to pop into your life unwelcomed. Don’t get me started on Alexa. She is constantly sending notifications: your package has arrived! Yes, I know Alexa. I have it in my hands. Do you want me to set up a morning routine where I update you on the weather and the stock market? Absolutely not, Alexa. Just wake me up when I tell you. That’s it. Can you stop nagging me? Sorry, you’ll have to go to the Alexa app for that.

Nothing about all this seems especially spiritual, except that nagging is a necessary part of church life, too. As church musicians, spouse Ron and I see the inside of all the cat-herding that goes into just the music portion of a worship service. Maria, the longsuffering worship director at church, has had to practice gracious and saintly nagging as part of her job, especially since we musicians have a tendency to be a little casual about showing up on time for rehearsals. (I’m sometimes guilty, I admit.)

In fact, anyone who organizes volunteers for any noble purposes has to learn the spiritual practice of nagging. After all, the normal levers of accountability—money, grades, points—do not apply. All we have is the mild social guilt the nag-ees might feel for not doing what they volunteered to do. If your volunteers are immune to mild guilt, you have nothing on them. Fortunately, Christians are typically conversant with guilt, so it’s possible we are slightly more responsive to gentle nagging. It’s all for the Lord, you know.

Spouse Ron is now occupying simultaneously the top four nagging-intensive professions: parent, teacher, pastor/worship leader, and organizer. That last role comes with working for Christian conservation organization A Rocha USA as part of his vocational mix. A Rocha’s church partners program gathers cohorts of churches and helps them integrate creation care more deeply into their discipleship. A Rocha offers resources and training to the cohort churches as well as what Ron terms “gentle accountability.” Each church devises a small project to be completed by a certain date. And then the nagging—I mean gentle accountability—begins.

Hey, you said you were going to do a thing.
How is that thing going?
Have you done the thing?
Is there a way I can help you do the thing?
What resources do you need to do the thing?
We said we were going to have a meeting to talk about the things.
Are you able to attend the meeting to talk about the things?

Even when you are dealing with lovely people who are probably above-average responsible, these same lovely people have a million things going and need a little prompt now and then. We all do.

Person-to-person nagging in church-y spaces becomes a spiritual practice not only because, you know, we do it for the Lord, but because it requires self-control. In particular, one must calibrate the amount of frustration you allow into the communication. If I, as the nagger, reveal a little frustration, will that make the nag-ee more likely to do get the thing done or show up for the event? Who is my audience here and what rhetorical strategy will work? Spiritual nagging thus requires relationship. Do I know what’s going on in the nag-ee’s life right now? Maybe there are reasons the person needs reminders or encouragement. What kind of capacity does this person have for guilt-inducing admonitions?

Properly spiritualized nagging also requires self-knowledge. As the nagger, how justified is my anxiety or frustration? Is this about my ego, my perfectionism, my need to check tasks off my list? How willing am I to see this thing in perspective and maybe let some balls drop? Is it OK if the thing is just okay and not fantastic? Can I give people the agency to do this their way? If God calls us not to be effective but to be faithful, then is nagging a part of my calling in this situation or not? Where is the intersection of faithfulness and getting the thing done right?

Goodness, this gets deep fast. We have arrived at the bottom-line question of trust. In all our well-meaning endeavors, we have to trust God to bring about the outcome and remember that everything does not depend on us and our diligence in herding the cats. I think of the parable of the growing seed in Mark 4:26-29. A farmer sows seed and then time passes. In the parable, the farmer does not even water or weed. Nevertheless, the “automatic earth” brings forth the growth, we don’t know how. No nagging required. Then again, that’s soil and seed, not those complicated people in charge of pulling off the fund-raising event or whatever.

On the other hand, the Bible does seem to sanctify nagging, at least nagging God in prayer. What is the importunate widow in Luke 18 but a holy nagger of the Lord? I bet she was also a parent, a teacher, a church volunteer coordinator, or a community organizer. Maybe all four. At any rate, nagging was definitely her spiritual gift.