Calling

John Nelson

Coordinator of Internship Program, Church of All Nations

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October 15, 2010

Calling Congregations into the Way of Unknowing

During the closing worship of the 2010 FTE Calling Congregations Conference, Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor named what she saw as the central irony of the conference—“it’s about calling leaders to a church that no longer exists… at least not in the way that most of us have known it. Or to put it another way, it’s about calling leaders to a church that is being born again in surprising forms that no one has entirely figured out yet." Throughout the course of the conference we explored various VocationCARE practices that might help renew the church, only to have the virtue of “unknowing” highlighted at the end. How do we relate to this ever-present tension – between risking answers and embracing ignorance, or acting with conviction and letting go of control?

We grapple with this question on a regular basis in our Residential Pastoral Internship Program at Church of All Nations, a PC(USA) congregation with people from over twenty-five nations and no ethnic majority. How do you confidently lead a diverse and always-changing congregation without squelching the wind of the Spirit that blows where it will? How does the leader become a catalyst for an ongoing congregational transformation that is beyond his or her capacity to control, rather than a barrier to all that is surprising and new? There are no easy answers to these questions, but we have shied away from focusing on methods and techniques and instead turned our attention to the nurturing of faith, hope, and love in these young leaders. 

One of the primary ways that we do this is by leading our interns to embrace the sort of unknowing that Barbara Brown Taylor pointed to – to know that they do not know. We have found that the need to know is one of the primary barriers to discipleship and pastoral formation. Secure knowledge may work in an already established institution where the pastor serves as a manager of what is, but building community out of a dying, changing, unpredictable church requires ongoing teachability, discernment, courage, and faith. The leader must have a high capacity for risk and failure, a quickness to confess and take responsibility, and the ability to learn new things through the experience. This is not a passive agnosticism, but an active unknowing that risks moving forward confidently in the midst of uncertainty by clinging to the same assurance that Jacob received from God: “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go” (Gen. 28:15). 

This sort of deep trust in God does not come easy, especially in an individualistic and alienated culture where the self serves as the final authority. To counter this, we invite our interns to commit to the program without a timeline or an end that they control, but to instead submit to the guidance and discernment of our particular local church. They are called to live intimately with a cohort they do not choose, and are expected to relate to the church for a season outside of their areas of giftedness. They take the ancient vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, learning to depend on the community to meet all their needs. In other words, they are to make themselves completely vulnerable before the congregation, letting go of all areas in their life they are accustomed to controlling – their future, relationships, formulas for success, appearance before others, possessions, etc. Their only recourse is to trust God in and through the community around them.

It is here that the Vocation CARE practices lifted up by FTE at the conference have been so helpful. Creating spaces for vocational exploration, asking self-awakening questions, reflecting theologically, and establishing ministry opportunities are not primarily about doing or knowing anything – instead, they describe an orientation or a way of life together that embraces unknowing. To draw from the work of Peter Block highlighted in the  Conference “Leadership, Presence, and Practice” module, the leader convenes the space where we ask questions, suspend judgment, and listen to one another, and then discern together where the Spirit is leading us corporately and individually. This is the sort of culture FTE is helping us to nurture in our internship program and congregation as a whole – living in the tension of not knowing the right answers or next steps, but moving forward together anyway in faith, hope, and love, waiting actively for God to again surprise us and open the way.