Releasing the Laity to their Priesthood
By The Rev. Hannah King
Before moving to Virginia to join the staff at Truro Anglican Church, my husband and I served with an apartment ministry in downtown Dallas, Texas. We were residents in a high-rise there and hosted regular events to help the residents get to know each other and make friends. None of the programming we ran was officially “religious,” but through the ministry of caring for our neighbors and showing them hospitality, many came to trust us as their token “Christian” friends. We began to feel as if we were the unofficial chaplains of the neighborhood.
Simultaneously, we interned with a local Anglican parish that was warm, hospitable, and invitational. They held regular events to reach out to the community, from pub nights to meals out together at restaurants to Alpha. However, what my husband and I learned is that the only people from our neighborhood who accepted our invitations to join us at any of these church functions were ones who had spent a considerable time coming to know us—and trust us—apart from church. Even in the Bible belt, it seemed, invitational church programs were not enough to draw people into the life of the parish. Even there, the secret ingredient to church growth was good, old-fashioned, relationships.
As Christians, we want to see our churches thrive, and we want them to be attractive places where people discover new life. But sometimes we fall prey to the idea that to accomplish this means to put on bigger events, better music, or more programs. Sometimes we fall prey to the idea that our parishioners’ primary call is to function as cogs in the wheel of these church programs so that professional clergy or church staff can “evangelize” or “disciple” the people that attend.
To be clear: programs—and clergy—are necessary and important. But we must not forget that programs have no life apart from the relationships that animate and sustain them and that the former should exist to support the latter, not the other way around. And we must not forget that our parishioners’ primary call is not to support the clergy but to be supported by the clergy and released as priests to the world, gospel ministers in their own right.
As we seek to shepherd and disciple those in our care, let us ask ourselves what they need to become better “priests” to the world and how we can support them. How can we help them to grow confident in their call and their ability to reach out to their neighbors and co-workers with the hope of the gospel? How can we encourage them to embrace the slow, messy work of discipleship and to realize that they, in fact, are perfect for the job of walking alongside a younger Christian? How can we equip them in their role as the primary disciple-makers of their children, rather than subtly (or not so subtly) assume this responsibility for them?
To some degree, answers to the above questions will come in the form of programming. But perhaps to some degree the answers will also come in the form of less programming and more encouragement for our parishioners to spend time with their families, in their neighborhoods, and investing in the relationships that God brings into their sphere of influence. There is no formula for discerning the perfect balance to this—which means we get to practice listening to the Holy Spirit in each season of our church’s life.
At Truro where I currently work, we have been challenged to follow the Spirit’s lead into uncharted territory for us as a parish. We recently spent an entire season focusing on and discussing “the art of neighboring,” a ministry each person can embrace wherever he or she lives—and one that encourages the laity to live as expressions of the church in the world, not merely as people who attend church in a building once or twice a week.
To support this important ministry from an institutional standpoint, we actually reduced the amount of programming that the church offers—the most dramatic example being our decision to reduce the number of Alpha courses offered per year from three to two, for the sake of freeing up our parishioners’ time to invest in local relationships for more of the year. For a large congregation that has run Alpha since the 1990’s, this was a big paradigm shift. But less time spent running Alpha courses means more time to host Alpha-like parties in our own homes and neighborhoods. The result? So far we have more pre-registered Alpha guests than we’ve had in the last five years.
We’ve also been on a journey to unveil the power of families, both in terms of their ministry to each other and their ministry to the world around them. Experimenting with a children’s Sunday school format in which parents attend with their kids for worship, discussion, and prayer as a family is one way we are learning as a local church to support the domestic church. Additionally, providing a model for families to minister together by opening their homes to the surrounding community—both churched and un-churched—has become the primary focus of our church’s senior leadership.
At Truro, we are learning that the best way to lead “church” is to give it away—to give away our programs, our volunteers, and our opportunities to do the ministry ourselves—in order that it might grow far beyond us. When we give parents back to their children, families back to their neighborhoods, and friends over to their communities, our own role as leaders doesn’t diminish; rather, it flourishes.
The Rev. Hannah King is the former Director of Local Missions at Truro Anglican Church in Fairfax, Virginia. Before Truro, she earned a Master of Arts in Religion at Redeemer Seminary in Dallas, Texas, alongside her husband and ministry partner, Michael. Having served together in campus ministry in Princeton, New Jersey, apartment ministry in Dallas, and at Truro Anglican, they now share the role of associate rector at Village Church in Greenville, South Carolina.