I am getting ready to teach in the spring semester at Fordham, and one of my courses is a graduate class called Theology of Ministry. Every year I feel the impossibility of saying something with solidity about a topic that is deeply elusive. So many ministries are worthy of study in their explicit and implicit theologies (that is, their ways of construing God and God-related materials). I do not find it easier to create theological maps as I get older. In my eleventh year of teaching college, I find myself more implicated in the complexity than ever before, and helping students to sit within how complex it is to know what construals of God-related materials are, and where they may be found in ministerial practice, is a cavern toward which I am endlessly digging. I revise my courses, sometimes dramatically, every time I teach them.

One constant is that I try to work from a basic assertion in each course that we revisit multiple times to test its adequacy. For my Theology of Ministry course, I will open the course by suggesting, and eventually arguing, that theologies of ministry have typically been ways of constituting a “public” rationale for ministry, prioritizing pastoral action, and specifying the formation of pastoral workers. As such, theologies of ministry show by what appeals Christian churches seek to articulate their labor.

The danger of working from such assertions-definitions-theses is that we can think that clarifying them will help us identify what “true” ministry is. But ministerial material is as much discovered as invented, as much intuited as deduced. Which puts me in mind of music’s ministerial role, so much of which is “found” inductively in people’s everyday lives, apart from any theological deduction. So while we will be testing my thesis (and their own theses) and thinking deductively throughout the semester, we will also be noticing our own inductive notions about ministry — where we have found ourselves grateful for a ministerial action in an unexpected time or place and surprised by the redefinition it brings.

Has music ever helped you work through the loss of someone close to you? This clip from the rock musical “Passing Strange” has spoken to many people, including me. I particularly identify with the way that the main character, “The Pilgrim,” has rock music close to the center of his life and has to live with what rock culture can and cannot do for his losses (“I’ll live in vans crammed with guitars / I’ll sleep on floors and play in bars / I’ll dance to my own metronome, ’till chaos feels like home / [...] up and down from town to town, tour van wheels go round and round / every night play rock and roll, get fucked up after the show / in the morning lock and load and then leave”).

Here is the clip:

Everyone has a sense of what “good news” is for them, what helps them take the next step in their spiritual life alone and with others, and a lot of people are taking “good news” inductively through their favorite music. That is music performing a ministerial function. Making that more explicit with respect to the question of God or God-related materials “makes” it theological.

Does any music minister to you?

Tommy Beaudoin, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

1 Comment »

1. 

   This helps make a lot of things make sense, and the words about discovering deeper and deeper complexities and the impossibilities of norming a crystallized understanding of ministry speak to my own mix of awe and frustration.

   As for music -
   When I was younger, I used to listen to sad or angry music to help me feel like I wasn’t crazy or alone – if the lyricist could be saying what I was feeling, it seemed to justify my experience, tell me it was alright to be upset and I wasn’t alone in being someone struggling with whatever I thought I was struggling with. Certainly, this had a ministerial and good news aspect to it: I was being comforted, reassured, justified that I was allowed to be me and to be where I was with my feelings.
   There have also been times where explicitly religious music has come to me at just the right time to say just the right thing, and although at times it has motivated me to greater confidence, forgiveness, or attempts at prayer, its effect would be better captured as providing me reassurance as well – not only that I was in an acceptable place experiencing acceptable emotions, but that I was in an acceptable place with the universe and whatever the mysterious and frustratingly elusive force behind it all is. Certainly, however, this does not occur every time I hear religious music, which often I turn off.
   Lately, I have been having more of a dark night of the soul with music – none has seemed really to inspire any emotion in me except for a distracted awareness of noise. The times when I have been able to take refuge in music are when I need momentum – to keep repeating a musical flourish and the words of a refrain to myself in order to keep myself moving forward while faced with a monotonous task or a frustrating project. And yet, of course, there is something ministerial about that providing and sustaining of productive momentum as well.

   What it all comes down to is that for ME, music as ministry is just like you described ministry as ministry – there isn’t any static formula for it, but rather I “have found myself grateful for a ministerial action in an unexpected time or place and surprised by the redefinition (or encouragement) it brings.”

   Comment by Peter Sanneman — January 12, 2012 @ 11:56 pm

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