Field Work
The highlight—the pinnacle, the zenith, the focus—of my week is Sunday morning. I live for Sundays. Since I am a priest, that probably will not surprise you, but it surprises me a little bit how unequivocally true that is.
In part, that is because I readily admit that not every Sunday is great. Sundays are by far my busiest, most stressful days (especially when the bishop visits). Sometimes the sermon does not quite come together as fully as I want. Sometimes the adult forum falls a little flat. Sometimes parishioners pick Sunday mornings to complain about all the things that are wrong with me and our church. But I still love Sundays. No matter what, they are my deepest joy.
In a way, that surprises me because so many of my favorite moments come on other days. Praying with an anxious person before surgery and seeing in their eyes the relief that comes from knowing and feeling God’s comfort and care is a powerful experience of God’s grace that I rarely get to experience on Sundays. Leading a class in a conversation about a difficult passage of scripture in ways that shape our collective understanding of God’s love is one of my favorite things about being a priest, but a Sunday sermon does not give me the chance to do that. It must wait until a midweek Bible study.
What happens on a Sunday may not feel as dramatic or special, but it is the lifeblood of the Christian community, and I am nourished by it as I seek to nourish you with the riches of God’s grace. Sunday worship is the extraordinary thing we ordinarily do week after week. The pattern is familiar and comfortable—some might say staid and stale. We do not come together each week to do something new—to invent a liturgy that reflects this particular moment in our lives—yet we trust that the timeless liturgies of the church are able to meet the needs of this moment. When our worship is at its best, it provides both a retreat from the world and a nudge back into the world that awaits us.
In a very real way, coming together for worship once a week on Sunday is not enough. Our worship is supposed to equip us for work in the world during the rest of the week. We enshrine that truth in the dismissal that we say at the end of every Eucharist. Among the approved options are “Let us go forth in the name of Christ,” “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord,” and “Let us go forth into the world rejoicing in the power of the Spirit”—each of them sending us out in some form of mission. We also reflect that sentiment in the post-communion prayer, in which we ask God to send us forth to do the work that God has given us to do. Having been fed spiritually with Christ’s body and blood and united with one another and God in the Holy Spirit, we are now ready to go out into the world as disciples of Jesus.
But not everyone wants to experience that pattern of withdrawing from the world in order to be fed and sent back into the world. Some of us would rather skip church altogether, trusting that we can best connect with God and God’s work out in those places where we most profoundly experience God’s presence. Others of us would rather stay in church all the time and leave the messy work of engaging the world to someone else. As disciples of Jesus, however, we are called into both. I sense that the gap between those two groups is widening, and a recent experience with a non-church institution has given me some insights into it.
A few weekends ago, I attended the spring convention of the Audubon Arkansas Society, which is now known as the Arkansas Bird Alliance (ARBA). We met in Fort Smith for a few days. The conventions are a mixture of guided field trips, insightful lectures, and relaxed socialization with a little bit of organizational business thrown in. For most of us, getting out into the field with other experienced birders is the highlight of the convention, but the lectures are also wonderfully formative.
In the lectures, I learned about crane behavior, the rapid spread of Limpkins and its implications for climate change, and the importance of preserving habitat as a spiritual practice. All three of those were fascinating and helped me be a more-informed birder and amateur ecologist, yet attendance at the lectures was demographically more narrow than the field trips. In fact, participation in the convention as a whole seemed more attractive to older, more established birders than their younger counterparts.
Here in Fayetteville, I often connect with birders my age or younger, and all of them express an interest in habitat conservation and ecological education. I can imagine most of them enjoying every aspect of convention, but only one of those younger birders took part. Interestingly and perhaps coincidentally, two young local birders, who did not participate in convention activities, crossed paths with one of the field trips, indicating that they, too, saw value in that particular outing even if they did not find value in the institutional gathering. Of course, several of the long-established birders were at the convention, and I get the impression that they would not miss it for anything.
Having assumed a leadership role in ARBA at this last convention, I am now acutely aware of the need to attract birders of all ages to its gatherings, and I wonder what it would take to convince someone to take part—not just in the field trips but also in the lectures, social gatherings, and even the business sessions. How do we convince someone to come in from the field long enough to learn something new and help build up the community of birders?
When the work out in the world is more clearly empowered by the work done within the institution, people are drawn to both. Those who love Sunday-morning worship or convention meetings go out into the field with renewed enthusiasm when they know that what takes place when the group gathers is direct fuel for what awaits them out there. And those who would rather stay in the field all the time are more interested in joining the assembly when they realize that the body that comes together does so in order to support each other in field work.
Still, institutions change. A church that exists only for itself and not for the community around it can only stay alive as long as those who value the institution for its own sake are willing to show up and support it. Likewise, a society of birders that loses touch with the thrill of finding a bird will never be able to motivate its members to come together and advocate for the preservation of habitats or educate a new generation of birders. If we look around and see that the only people showing up are the ones who have been present for generations, something needs to give. We need to recapture that spark that reconnects the body with its mission.
If you find yourself more excited about coming to church than doing God’s work in the world, that is okay. Sunday mornings are my favorite part of our life together, too. But don’t come to church and think that you have finished the work of faithfulness for the week. How is Holy Communion feeding you for the work that awaits you in the world.
Likewise, if you spend more time doing holy work in the community than gathering with the assembled body, that is okay, too. But do not underestimate the value of being nourished by the body of Christ among the body of Christ. If you have lost touch with the community in worship there’s a good chance your efforts have lost with the one who has called you into that work in the first place. Come back and be fed so that you can return to that work.
For all of us, following Jesus is about returning and going forth—being fed and doing work. We do not have to keep doing those things the way we always have, and maybe we need to pay more attention to those people who are not always with us in both. Maybe they can help us remember why we do what we do in the first place, which I trust will help us do it better.
Yours faithfully,
Evan D. Garner
