Kirkepiscatoid

That it may please thee to send forth laborers into thy
harvest, and to draw all mankind into thy kingdom,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

Oh, sigh...evangelism.

I am not good at evangelism, at least in the “pop religious culture” sense. I think I have only invited one person to church in all the time I’ve been at Trinity, and that was in a passing comment in my blog.

But then I got to thinking. Maybe my blog is “evangelism,” just not by design.

Maybe my thinking thoughts out loud and being self-revealing (at least to the degree I care to publicly) about my own internal joys and struggles with this “God that I’ll never figure out, but keep plugging away at anyway,” free people to think their own thoughts, or jiggle little wires in their own brain. But I’ll be the first to tell you that when I am blogging, I am not even intending to harvest anything or draw anyone anywhere. It’s like “they can read it if they want.”

I always do the big “Huh?” when Fran of FranIAm will comment now and then, and call a post of mine a “homily.” I have no formal training in homiletics, save a “fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants” sense of “How clergy put a sermon together,” forged by listening to a few good sermons of late and a lifetime of really bad ones. I only know the rudiments of formal expository writing. So I go, “Huh? Homily? Where? Who? Me?...Uh...ok, thanks.”

It tags onto another big “Huh?”. I have been told, in the last couple years, by some really varied and strange and not-so-strange sources, that I have a gift of expression, and it really weirds me out when they use the phrase, “gift of preaching.” I suppose it weirds me out b/c I probably still have a very rigid view, that people who are A)“called to preach” are also B)“called to ordination,” and I am pretty sure at this point in my life I have zero, zip, nada, of the latter. It took me sixteen years to feel “called” to my profession as it is, and it was a hell of a struggle those sixteen years I did NOT feel called, because I kept wondering things like “Why did I choose to do this? Who was the idiot who let me into medical school? Did I just choose ‘job security in a helping profession’ and really screw up here?”

So I have to admit, I find it sort of hard in this “gift of expression” thing to buy “A” when I do not have “B”. But I also realize I am probably being too rigid, and maybe too self-deprecating. I tend to think of myself as a person far more comfortable with the scientific method than the realm of philosophy. Religious thought is something, save a couple required college courses, that I have no formal training. As a person who had to do formal training for my own profession, I put a lot of stock in formal training.

But I probably discount the fact I had a biology EDUCATION undergraduate degree, a B.S.E., with 24 hours of professional education and educational psychology, and that because I was trained to learn to teach others, well, yeah, I probably can teach myself a little, too.

Can one have “A” without “B?” Part of me says, “yeah,” but another part of me says, “How?” That is that little scientist in my brain kicking in. But I also realize a huge part of my personal spiritual journey has been learning to accept things I cannot prove....to be able to accept things like “transfiguration,” and “incarnation,” and “resurrection” in a sense that does not HAVE to be proven by witnessing an actual physical act or accepting a shady historical concept. You all have heard me go on and on about my struggles with “the Resurrection” and my own doubts about that in terms of every “I” dotted and every “t” crossed...yet there was the day it didn’t matter any more about the “how” and I began to concentrate on the outcome, and the details began to matter less and less, and I could feel myself growing more and more in my own faith.

So maybe part of my growth is to accept the possibility of a “preaching gift”, at least through my blog, or composition of prayers that I’ve shared with friends. I have finally started listening to the good Rev. Dr. TELP, who has told me in several ways to "get over myself" (including telling me "Get over yourself!", ha) and decided to let some things flow with the possibility this gift can be of value to others, not just my little circle of real friends and blog friends.

What all this makes me realize is “evangelism” is far more daunting than inviting people to church and sticking fliers in their doors!