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inquiry

Pastoral leadership that shapes thought

Bethel student John Miller’s summer of ministry leads him to liturgy, prayer and “one of the great prophets of our time.”

by Mayeken Kehr

When Bethel campus pastor Dale Schrag asked where he would like to spend the summer through the Ministry Inquiry Program (MIP), John Miller responded that neither demography nor geography mattered.

He was interested, he said, in “pastoral leadership that carefully shapes thought.” That was all Schrag needed to hear in order to place Miller, a senior from Partridge, with Kent McDougal and Mike Gulker, pastors at Christ Community Church in Des Moines, Iowa.

The Ministry Inquiry Program is jointly administered by Mennonite Church USA and the MC USA-affiliated colleges, intended to help college-age young adults consider pastoral ministry as a vocation. Students are placed in Mennonite congregations although they do not have to be Mennonite to participate in MIP. Bethel College has had at least one student in MIP every year since the program began, at Bethel, in 1987.

Miller’s MIP placement, Christ Community Church (CCC), formed about 20 years ago as a result of a split from an evangelical mega-church, he explains. Members of CCC – after reading and studying theologians like John Howard Yoder, a Mennonite – found themselves aligning with Anabaptist-Mennonite theology. In 2004, CCC was granted membership in Mennonite Church USA. The congregation’s history and lack of so-called cradle Mennonites make CCC unique.

“It’s a Mennonite church with a high-church liturgy – a style of worship that goes back to the first millennium of Christianity,” says Miller.

That worship experience is what he says he misses most.

“I think it had a drastic influence on how I think about the nature of church,” he says, “in the sense that I came away from this summer with the idea that the church’s primary function is to be a worshiping community.

“I contrast this with the therapeutic model of church which puts people at the center of the story, instead of God,” he continues. “Very horizontal – almost like a social club – instead of a vertical worshiping experience.

“With the therapeutic model, the focus is on people. Then as people in society change, the church must change in order to be relevant. The tendency is that in the church’s attempt to be relevant, it completely culturally assimilates and becomes completely irrelevant.”

Miller’s MIP experience was also distinctive because he shared it with another MIP student, Caleb Detweiler from Goshen (Ind.) College.

“As a Mennonite, entering into that and examining liturgical theology, it was helpful to have another Mennonite person to bounce ideas off of,” says Miller.

Sharing the experience with Detweiler was a “fantastic” benefit of MIP, Miller says. McDougal and Gulker gave the two MIPers thick theological reading.

“It was good to have someone else there so you didn’t have to be at the top of your game in your conversations,” Miller says. “[Caleb]’s a great guy. He was in SALT the same year I was.” (SALT is the Serve and Learn Together program of Mennonite Central Committee.)

Miller’s SALT experience prepared him for less-traditional pastoral work while he was in Des Moines. After Lutheran Support Services there lost funding for its refugee program, CCC decided to help. Representing his smaller house church from within the congregation, Miller served as a contact person for a refugee family from Eritrea.

“My overseas experience was very helpful when I was involved with the refugee families,” he says. “In fact, I think it was because of the difficulty that I experienced living as a foreigner living in a foreign country – out of that experience that I could empathize with these families and ask to be a part of that work in the church.”

He assisted the family with logistics and transportation – taking them to school, medical appointments and church. One major task was making their home – infested with mold – livable. But hearing the family’s story was the highlight for Miller.

As a result of the political dispute between Eritrea and Ethiopia, the father of the family had been forcibly removed from his home after witnessing the murder of family members. He was sent to a refugee camp, where he met his wife. They had three children, one of whom is deaf, and lived in the camp for eight years before being granted refugee status in the United States.

Apart from working in the Des Moines area, Miller also traveled as a result of his MIP placement. His first trip was to the Ecclesia project in Chicago where he experienced the summer’s biggest surprise.

During a discussion session, Miller spotted theologian Stanley Hauerwas and several students sitting at a table. When he saw there was an empty chair, Miller eagerly joined that group.

“We listened to a plenary speech and then discussed it. I didn’t say a single word in the discussion, but just listened. I was fairly awestruck because I think [Hauerwas] is one of the greatest prophets of our time,” Miller says.

Later in the summer, Miller traveled to the annual gathering of Mennonite Church USA’s Central Plains Conference, held this year in Mountain Lake, Minn. This gave Miller a different view of the church – at the conference level.

“It kind of opened up the broader and institutional reality of the church in ways that are interesting and unfamiliar to me,” says Miller.

Spiritually, one of the most significant outcomes of MIP for Miller was an emphasis on prayer.

“Learning that I didn’t and still don’t know how to pray was very significant,” he says. “I had the assumption that if I prayed sincerely and spontaneously, then that was what prayer came down to. I think that it does to a degree and that’s significant and incredibly important. But I also think there’s something to be learned from the disciples who said, ‘Jesus, teach us how to pray.’ They didn’t have the assumption that they knew how to pray.”

Miller says he has no immediate intention to become a pastor. He continues to focus on prayer, leading fellow Bethel students weekly in praying the Divine Office from a Catholic prayer book.

MIP certainly left an impression on Miller.

“It was wonderful,” he says. “It was wonderful and intense and utterly fascinating. I did not really want to leave them. I left feeling very much like a part of Kent McDougal’s family.”

Maya Kehr, Goshen, Ind., will graduate from Bethel in December 2010 with majors in English and Spanish and secondary education teaching certification. She did the Ministry Inquiry Program in 2009 at Belmont Mennonite Church, Elkhart, Ind.