Follow the friendships

At lunch with a friend recently, I asked him about his first few years in campus ministry. It's been wonderful, he said. "Slow, patient, immensely rewarding. Frustrating. Growing." Like me, my friend's work on campus is of the church-planting kind. We started talking about learnings.

I mentioned my from-time-to-time loneliness. Not the loneliness of physically being alone. Blessedly, I am surrounded by students, colleagues, friends, and a small army of alumni and supporters from local (and increasingly not-so-local) churches. No, the particular loneliness I shared with my friend comes from the commitment to continually challenge my imagination for living on the edges of a missional understanding: being with and for others—especially neighbors, unhooking the ministry of St. Francis House from the predictable ecclesial tropes of guilt, judgment, and the preservation of the institution. "No strings," our students call it.

We haven't mastered "no strings." Indeed, my prayer is that we wouldn't ever master it, so much as it would master us. We aren't there yet, but we are committed to becoming so mastered. We aren't better at this vision than anyone else, but we are beginning to get to a place where we can see that to be committed to this vision will entail not being as committed to other things traditionally associated with the good work of the church. For example, we don't do many meetings, and I don't value conference tables in our space. (Looking ahead to the fall, I think most of the conversations worth having in the life of the Episcopal Center will happen on walks, because it's simply silly to keep meeting here to talk about living life there. Meeting, not meetings.)