(Arent’t We All) A Work in Progress
by Jarrett McLaughlin
Last week, the session at my Church had the privilege of examining a young woman who was seeking our endorsement for Inquirer status within the Presbytery. While some may see this as a burdensome requirement of Presbyterian polity, I like to think of it as one of the great privileges of the call process, for both the individual pursuing ordination as well as the Church offering its endorsement. For the Church it is an occasion for celebration – one of your own is beginning an important journey of discernment as to the shape of the calling God has placed on her life. For the individual, with any confidence in the connection between yourself and the Church of your membership, this is perhaps the place where you can be the most honest with yourself and with others concerning the state of your readiness for ministry. After the Session comes the seminaries and the divinity schools who will put a grade on your best efforts at ministry and theological articulation, not to mention the Presbytery Committees who will read your initial attempts at sermon-writing and your earliest constructions of a faith statement and offer their critical feedback. All of this is important and helpful, but it is also frightening and intimidating, which gives the home Church an opportunity to be a place of grace for inquirers and candidates for ministry.
The young woman we briefly examined and happily endorsed for Inquirer status took avail of such grace in her paperwork, particularly when she confessed “I am a work in progress. I am a student – still exploring, still learning about God, about myself, about the world around me, and the relationships between each of these.” I was glad that the Church could be a place where she could feel comfortable expressing her incompleteness as a disciple. I should like to believe that we all could identify with that feeling, even if we count our time in the ministry by decades rather than years. As I imagine this young woman’s journey ahead, I know she will meet those who will encourage that sense of humility just as surely as she will meet those who will make her feel inadequate for it and for every tiny misstep she might make as she learns about her place in this strange and God-given calling.
I am reminded of a time when I was exploring my own call to ministry. My story is one of constantly pushing myself into new arenas of ministry as a challenge, which was in a sense my own way of asking for an endorsement of what I took to be a call to ministry. Through my college years, I challenged my call by applying for internships at churches in places wholly unfamiliar to me. I worked in Chattanooga, TN, I worked in Allentown, PA…all the while seeking validation of my call to ministry. One summer, this North Carolina native decided to really step out and apply for a youth-ministry internship in Colorado. I remember filling out the unusually large application and wondering at the scope of the questions they were asking. The one question that still persists in my memory today went something like this: “Describe briefly your beliefs about God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Bible, Sin, Forgiveness, the Church, and the resurrection of the dead.”
I don’t remember what I wrote in response to that question, nor do I remember what I wrote for the other eight essays, but what I do remember as a young man of 20 years old is the phone call I received declining my application. I remember with clarity how the pastor at this Church hastily explained that the beliefs I expressed did not line up well with those of the Church. I was too young to recognize it at the time, but I had just been subjected to my first litmus test, and I was found lacking.
Since that time, I have had the burden of having to choose one applicant over another for a sought after opportunity and so I understand the need for criteria, but it seems strange to me that my best attempts at articulating my beliefs at the age of 20 became the reason why I was not chosen. While I was disappointed at the time for missing out on what was to me another chance to test my call to ministry, ten years later I am a bit disappointed that this Church used an unspecified orthodoxy to separate the wheat from the chaff. I am disappointed that this Church would not let itself be a place for shaping the “work-in-progress” that I was at the time, and that I continue to be.
I am reminded of a certain disciple of Jesus who, in the days after the resurrection, heard a crazy report from his fellow disciples that the Lord had risen. In response to this unbelievable news, he said “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” These words earned him the title of “Doubting Thomas,” which may carry some measure of judgment in it, but it seems to me that Jesus does not judge Thomas. A week later, Jesus comes to Thomas and gives him exactly what he needed in order to believe. Jesus tells him “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” Jesus does not strip Thomas of his disciple status, but rather treats him like the work-in-progress that he was, still seeing the faithful disciple that he would be one day. Jesus does what it takes in order to form faith within Thomas.
Young adults are supposed to doubt…it is developmentally appropriate for them to do so. Young adults are works-in-progress, and if we’re honest with ourselves, no matter what age we are and no matter how long we’ve been in the Church, we are all works-in-progress – mixtures of deep faith as well as doubt. I wonder if the Church might take a clue from Jesus, though, and stop treating one another with the expectation that we should have faith all figured out by the end of adolescence. I wonder if, instead, we might own the fact that we are all works-in-progress, and expect that Jesus would work with us and through us to form faith within the most doubtful of individuals.