Catch your breath
Over my decades on staff, I’ve found it helpful to purposefully mark the end of the fiscal year with some days off in late June or early July. Its salutary to close one ministry year and take a deep breath before starting the next. It’s a mental and spiritual practice, akin to the liturgical prayers of Compline before going to bed, in which we entrust to God what has been done for the year, release to God what has not been done, and receive from God the grace of rest and renewal before returning to the work that awaits us in the new ministry year.
I hope each of us will set aside the space to do something like this, at least using the gift of Free Fridays to exhale and inhale with God. We all need to take some time off in July or August (or both) to rest, even if the pandemic makes that tricky.
I am grateful for how the Regional and Focused Ministry Directors are leading and caring for you: attentive supervision, virtual regionals and team meetings, thoughtful communications in this challenging time.
Help for your fall campus work
Mark Washington is leading a Working Group that will propose ideas, resources, and training that will help campus staff be ready for effective ministry this fall under various campus scenarios. A priority focus will be on ideas for NSO at the local level. In addition, information is forthcoming about how local NSO efforts will be supported by the national Online NSO project utilizing marketing and catalytic events to attract new prospective students, including grad students, and channel these contacts to the local staff and areas.
If you are a campus staff worker, look for communication about these resources coming from your Regional Director. There will be links to resources on a “splashdown page” on the GFM Staff website
Reflecting on 1 Peter 5:6-11
This passage struck me this week:
Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you. Discipline yourselves, keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in your faith, for you know that your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering. And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you. To him be the power forever and ever. Amen.
This is a time to posture ourselves in humility before God, who opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. We need his grace—his care, his forgiveness, his strength, his peace.
And we need to practice humility in this time of renewed anguish and protest around racism and injustice in our country, especially if we are White and/or relatively privileged and empowered. The humility of listening, empathizing, self-examination, lament, leaning in, and maybe speaking up even if we feel uncertain or uncomfortable. The humility of “looking not only to our own interests, but to the interests of others.”
We have an Adversary and we struggle against “the rulers, the authorities, the cosmic powers of this present darkness, the spiritual forces of evil” (Eph 6). I’ve been reading the magnificent volume by Fleming Rutledge Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ and this week her chapter on “The Apocalyptic War.” She quotes 1 Peter 5 and affirms that the NT “places us on the field of battle” against “an untiring Enemy.”
The gospel is a message of deliverance from the grip of evil and Death….Reality is about evil, and suffering, and ultimately victory over suffering….Being joined to Christ in his death and resurrection through baptism does not mean being lifted clear of the cosmic battle….The life of the church is lived in the balance between the first advent of Christ and the second. It is a life of affliction for the sake of the gospel.
But then she speaks of hope, “the hope that is beyond human hope because it is grounded in the promise of the future of Jesus Christ.” A bedrock. “Because ‘God is able’—as black church people often say—we are not prisoners of the Powers; rather we are…’prisoners of hope’ (Zech. 9:12)”
Friends, as we in the GFM community, on staff and on campus, press farther down this road of “ethnic reconciliation and justice” (see here for an important InterVarsity paper on this), let’s reflect deeply on this gospel of hope: the God of Love, who sees and hates all injustice, entered our human experience, embodied a liberating shalom, and gave himself to be unjustly tortured and executed, thereby “disarming the powers” and rescuing us from darkness so that we could live joyfully under his leadership, bearing witness in a world desperate for healing and hope.
