Passim

For those with a poor education, the title is the Latin word for “here and there” and is typically used in footnoting. It allows you to reference someone else’s material without having to nail down multiple citations when you pick up bits and pieces scattered across several pages. It all fits together if the author knows what they’re doing. It’s an accepted practice in academia but archaic. It’s not that I’m vain enough to think readers are all that interested in my personal life, but that I’ve already gotten enough queries that I feel I can save us all some time.

I got tired of chasing vendors that claimed to accept PayPal and simply transferred the money to my bank. Now I can order the parts for our car and be reasonably sure it will go through and we’ll actually get them. I’ll be switching to a vendor who has shown no tendency to make promises they won’t keep. I’ve lived with enough of that already, thank you.

It’s been relative isolation for almost a decade as my faith went through some clarification and I reexamined all I thought I knew about religion and ministry. I have spent my whole adult life, since age 16, pursuing a vocational calling to gospel ministry and have been consistently denied any opportunity. All kinds of failed promises others made to me litter that “career.” At one time I was pretty bitter about it, but no longer. I rather doubt God could have gotten through to me with such force and clarity had I managed to work in the existing system. I did manage to engage a lot of volunteer work while doing other stuff to get paid, and my volunteer ministry efforts were richly rewarding.

All the while, I lived with a confusion, hung between what the system told me versus the radical departure my heart was demanding of me. I’ll spare you the tales of internal agony. What matters is that I’m on the threshold of yet a new assay into the ministry. The difficulty is that this is blazing a new trail. At the same time, I assert it’s the ancient track long neglected, which makes it seem new to everyone around me. We can’t forget that the word “radical” means lopping off the current mess and trying to grow a fresh crop off the original roots (another Latin word we stole: radix).

For the past few years I’ve been writing about the roots. You can chase that parable as far as you like, but it sure seems like an entirely different plant than what has grown up over the last two millennia of Church History. I keep trying to make sure we don’t allow any of the current failed crop to clutter the effort. For example, several different kinds of church made this big deal of bugging visitors and new members about whether they were “born again.” While that term does seem to figure large in Jesus’ ministry (John 3), I have always been quite certain they gave it a meaning different than Jesus did. It’s the wrong question and the wrong approach altogether. About the only useful thing you can tell me when you consider whether to join in my work is whether you are devoted to God. Tell me, and then show me.

Because any church or ministry is of necessity a human activity, we can’t pretend it is somehow made sacred by the assurance that all the folks involved have made the proper rite of passage, because that’s pretty much what those conversion counseling sessions amount to. They pretend it means a genuine change in Eternity, and somehow their pretense makes it all better. Let’s dispense with that silliness. There is no way one person can prove to another that they are citizens of Heaven, but it’s not too hard to evince a genuine interest in how God wants us to live here.

It’s issues like this that capture a lot of my time and contemplation as I make one more effort to work full time in the gospel ministry. So much of this is new to me that I’m having a tough time explaining it. How do you suppose God plans to bring our teaching to the attention of the world? And if not the world, then some portion of the world He intends to call into this work? So far we have a thinly scattered group of individuals positioned around the world who are at least aware of this stuff. When and how do we see it turn into genuine face-to-face fellowship on the ground? Much as I like the virtual world, we all know that this is not the way to test our faith and make it real. It has a place, but the virtual fellowship cannot substitute for the closeness that requires physical proximity.

If you are bringing some portion of this radically different approach to religion into your existing church fellowship, great. Tell us about it, please. People need to know how this works on the ground. Until I can report to you the actual events in meat space, it all remains no more than a sweet story of nice theories. I’m trying to come out of the isolation because my heart tells me it’s time to go to work. If you need more time, fine. You must obey your own heart. Mine says I need to get back to work touching lives on the ground.