commitment

Our midweek lunch-time services started up again today.

There wouldn't have been more than maybe 20 there, but the weather had a bit to do with that!

One of our regular worshippers then is still stuck out in France - travel's not been easy.

Another is stuck in the hospital after falling and breaking a bone.

We're working our way through the 'Songs of Ascent' - and are nearing the end at last! Psalm 132 today - one of the longer 'songs of ascent'.

It's about commitment basically. Ours (the first part of the psalm) and the Lord's (the second part).

The theme is pretty important. But I fear the notion is rather going out of vogue. Certainly in society at large. And because we all breathe in the air of contemporary life, it's less and less in evidence within the church of Christ.

People are often quite ready for short-term work. Some months, or a couple of years, perhaps. But the notion of giving oneself to a lifetime of service in some particular place is neither that attractive nor, today, that common.

David's concern in the vow that he made was essentially this - I won't rest at all until I've restored the Word of God to its central place in the life of God's people today.

That was his undertaking. It's also, in a slightly different context, and in a slightly different sense (spiritual rather than physical) - it's also the concern and commitment that I've sought to make.

That may well be the work of a lifetime, or more. And it involves a radical, costly commitment.

It was a vow that David made. Not a fad that he followed as long as it all felt good.

I remember reading, years ago, a book by Eugene Peterson called Under the Unpredictable Plant. It was a book about the prophet Jonah and his topsy-turvy ministry in Nineveh.

I like Peterson's books. Invariably they're hugely helpful, and this one was no exception.

And one of the things I was struck by in this book was in the very first chapter, where he's discussing the prophet's buying his ticket to Tarshish (which had a certain appeal as a western mediterranean resort): mainly to get out of his having to go to Nineveh (which didn't appeal at all).

This is what he wrote -

"Every time a pastor abandons one congregation for another out of boredom or anger or restlessness, the pastoral vocation of all of us is vitiated.

When I began my pastoral ministry in my present congregation, I determined to stay there for my entire ministry. I was thirty years old. There was nothing particularly attractive about the place; indeed, there was nothing but a cornfield there at the time. But I had been reading St Benedict and was pondering a radical innovation he had introduced that struck me as exceedingly wise. In the community of monks to which he was abbot he added to the three standard evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience, a fourth: he added the vow of stability."

He works through the logic of this with stark realism -

"The congregation is not a job site to be abandoned when a better offer comes along."

And a little bit later on he rounds this whole section off with the following statement -

"The norm for pastoral work is stability. Twenty-, thirty-, and forty-year-long pastorates should be typical among us (as they once were) and not exceptional. Far too many pastors change parishes out of adolescent boredom, not as a consequence of mature wisdom. When this happens, neither pastors nor congregations have access to the conditions that are hospitable to maturity in the faith."

If I'm going to see the Word of God restored to its rightful place at the centre of the church's life, that's going to be a long-term thing. I was speaking to someone today who said that a congregation probably needed 50 years of gospel ministry before they were able to think the way they should. 50 years!

We have to be in this thing for the long haul. Commitment.

Or the vow of stability, as good old Benedict put it all those many years ago.