As I nursed the morning’s first cup of coffee, and paged through a recent issue of The New Yorker, I was struck by an article exploring the malaise many college students feel at their prospects of finding their way into a professional field. Economic instability, socio-political upheaval, and the looming specter of AI foment a nagging unease about their vocational trajectory.
While I read this, I heard an echo of this same anxiety about the future among my colleagues in the Church.
And I thought about Ryan.
Our congregation will ordain him this weekend; and after serving over the last few years as a seminarian and a church planting resident, we’ll lay hands on him in the name of Father, Son, and Spirit, ordain him as a pastor, and commission him to convene a new church community among the towns to our immediate north.
Ryan’s a smart, gifted guy. He could do other things. Why do this?
I pause over this whenever I participate in an ordination service. The decline of religious participation in West is well-documented; the Church’s sundry scandals and shortcomings painfully apparent. And anyone who’s spent time around pastoral life knows that those looking for an stress-free career with easy hours and lucrative pay should apply elsewhere. My friends who live their lives outside the walls of the Church ask me this same question, too: “why did you decide to go into Church work?!” From their vantage point, the Church doesn’t exactly seem like a “growth industry.”
Becoming a pastor — to say nothing of starting a new church ! — can feel like signing up to open a Blockbuster Video location in 2026.
So why do it?
Breakfast for Failures
When we gather to consecrate Ryan for pastoral life, I’ll preach on Jesus’ seaside encounter with his disciples, and his calling of Peter to leadership in John 21. Three times in the chapter, John tells the reader that the risen Jesus “appeared,” “showed himself,” “revealed himself.” Repetition, of course, is biblical literature’s way of underlining a text’s meaning, and this theme is woven all through the Fourth Gospel’s narrative tapestry. The crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth is the invisible Creator’s way of disclosing himself, coming to us, speaking to us.
Christians dare to say that when God, once and for all, intended to show the creation what God is really like, God did it through a human being.
This is the Almighty’s strange way of working.
What’s more, the way that God intends to bring the good news of Christ to the corners of a ravaged creation also seems to be. . . people. The theologian and global Church leader Lesslie Newbigin once observed, in a lecture, that Jesus of Nazareth, alone among the founding figures of the world’s major faiths, didn’t leave behind a book, but a community.
And I love the picture John 21 paints of this community and her leaders. Jesus appears to disciples who, weeks after Easter morning, have already lost the plot and returned to their former life. He prepares a meal for Peter, and with the charcoal aroma of his catastrophic failure in the air, rehabilitates and commissions him.
This is the kind of God Jesus reveals: One who fills hungry stomachs, opens blind eyes, forgives the unforgivable, lays down his life for his friends. The sort of God who (as my old mentor Fred often says) shows up to make breakfast for failures.
That’s good news worth spending your life announcing.
Whenever I’m at an ordination, I recall the words of the commitment I made at my own:
“Trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ for strength, I pledge my life to preach and teach the good news of salvation in Christ, to build up and equip the church for mission in the world, to free the enslaved, to relive the oppressed, to comfort the afflicted, and to walk humbly with God.”
I don’t care what the demographic trends say: for those the risen Jesus calls, there’s no other work worth doing like this.
3 Responses
You bet, and God bless Ryan, who has the mystery, burden, and joy of the Call.
Amen….and Amen
Jared,
Thank you for these words. They are inspiring and helpful to remember the point, to return to the call of Christ.
I would offer a few thoughts of my own.
Claiming the crazy busyness of ministry is something I do, because I feel the need to do everything, all at once, to be the kind of man that I thought Jesus called me to be, all so that I might save some (as Paul taught me). I’ve started to wonder if that represents the culture more than Jesus. I’ve started to wonder if it’s my way of seeking a form of works righteousness. If I save a bit more than “some” then am I worthy? Am I enough? Will I be able to stand before Christ with confidence in my own goodness, because I was a busy pastor, getting things done for the church? I know that’s not what you mean, but your words reminded me of my own struggle. I’m on sabbatical now, trying to think about what it means to slow down enough to simply write and spend time with Jen.
Another thought, I came across a recent study about AI and companies. It revealed (admittedly correlation more than direct causation), that companies that went full adaptation with AI were hiring more people. It seems the more you try to implement this new technology, the more you need people, especially more young people who are native with this technology. The less a company adapted or implemented the tech., the less they hired and even let people go. I don’t know exactly what this means, but I think it might reveal something of what you said, “People make the difference. A community of people will not be easily dismissed.” or something like that.
I’ve been working on trying to implement AI in my own work. I know I maybe shouldn’t, but in some ways it has helped. Let me offer two examples.
In my work as Clerk, I’ve been convinced that Notebook LM from Google helps. It only uses what I put into it, so I load up the BCO and Constitutional Theology and a few polity books (thank you Dan Meeter), our Classis bylaws, a few other things I need, and then ask it whatever I need and where it found it. You’d be surprised how quickly I can find answers to my BCO questions and explanations for the “why” from end notes and other materials. It’s been helpful.
A second interesting way of playing with it is fun. I write a sermon, edit it, do all my things, and then load it into a few models and ask it to have John Calvin or Karl Barth or any number of theologians evaluate the sermon and provide feedback. I don’t use theologians that I don’t know fairly well, and I always ask for the locations it takes from to do the evaluation, but it’s interesting. It can help. Another fun one is I load the sermon into the LM and ask it to tell me what a person returning to the church might trip up on, what is the insider language that will cause someone to stumble. What would a nonbeliever think?
Is it perfect, no of course not, but it gives me shoes I can’t step in.
For fun, it sometimes tells me trinitarian language is a hurdle. I’m not going to remove that. It will tell me that using “sin” can be off putting, yup, not going to remove it either. Anyway, those are some thoughts.
I wrote too much … again.
Thanks Jared!