A Loss of Connection Between Faith and Life

Church members today find it difficult to connect what happens to them on Sunday morning with what happens to them on Monday morning. And most laity are quite comfortable on the periphery because they have never been encouraged to move beyond a mere supportive role in the religious enterprise.

Although an understanding of the "priesthood of all believers" has been a part of the church since Martin Luther (and, with few exceptions, every successive Christian generation since then has sought to make this understanding a part of its practice), we are still struggling to find ways to make it work. At the present, ministry is not something that is understood as involving the whole people of God. It is not seen as an all-encompassing way of life for Christians, regardless of their occupation. And most clergy seem unable to help laity to identify in specific ways how they can link their faith with their work-a-day world.

Forty years ago, Elton Trueblood wrote a book entitled Your Other Vocation. Trueblood sought to convince his readers that the term "laity" should be abolished. With this abolition he urged an enlarging of our understanding of the term ministry, or what he would call "the universal ministry." In the New Testament the term "laity" means all of the people in the early Christian movement, the laos.

Unfortunately, the separation still remains and divides these Christian functions. The pastors/priests/ministers—the "professional" religionists—are viewed as distinctly different from all of the other Christians, the laity. This is a false separation. Our understanding of "professionalism" in ministry lets those who are not "professional religious leaders" off the hook and makes them second-rate citizens in ministry function. The architectural structure of church buildings reinforces this false separation—with pews facing toward the "stage" (altar) and "spectators" (laity) watching "performers" (pastors).

When we gather for worship, we gather to be spiritually "refueled," and thus become more effective in our ministry and in the world. An old Quaker story tells about a visitor coming into the silence of a Friends' meeting for worship and asking the person sitting next to him, "What time does the service begin?" The Quaker's response was, "When the worship is over." Service, or ministry, is everyone's task. If we do not connect our life experience to our biblical faith, we can be highly religious personally without being the Christian ministers God is calling us to be.