Middle class lockdown prophet Joe Bageant links to a hefty review of The False Gospel of Work by Eugene McCarraher. Among the book’s bold claims:
- The work ethic’s boss is Mammon.
- We have a triune birthright: rest, product, and pleasure in work.
- Talking about consumerism is a way of not talking about capitalism.
- “Productivity” is a nihilistic ideal and a sinful waste of talent.
- “Efficiency” is an obsession posing as a virtue and a perversion of our discovery and creation of beauty in work.
- Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Catholic subsidiarity and universal socialism have proven quite productive and efficient.
- It isn’t about the means of production so much as the ends of productions.
- God’s own rhythm of work and rest is an ethic of play.
A People So Bold and Boy in the Bands have each responded to my recent salvo on what ministry is and ain’t. Some further thoughts:
1. Ministry is not a profession. The professions—law, medicine, and psychology, most typically—are necessarily self-serving guilds. By credentialing and policing their members, they preserve the power to control public access to the services they offer. Government serves as a check on this power, threatening encroachment if the professions do not deliver quality and safety.
2. Ministers do not serve guilds, and they do not serve the general public. They serve communities of faith, or, more specifically, congregations. Communities of faith are ekklesia, not the public. Communities of faith serve to incarnate the promise of the Blessed Community, not the Powers-That-Be.
3. Buddhist traditions teach upaya, that the means of reaching enlightenment are a matter of expedience: whatever gets you across the river to Enlightment is okay if it doesn’t cause further suffering. Ordained ministry is a matter of upaya. It is only useful insofar as it helps faith communities incarnate the Blessed Community. Faith communities do not exist to serve ordained ministry; ordained ministry exists to serve faith communities communities. Click to continue reading “Follow up: The gifts and graces for ministry”
It’s no secret here that I grew up in the crossfire between free range charismatics and institutional Methodist bureaucracy, so it should come as little surprise that I have strong feelings about seminary, denominational credentialing and ministry.
One half of my church life taught me that anyone with the gifts and graces for ministry was a minister and that we are all called to be ministers. The other half taught me that ministry was something conferred by graduate professional degrees and power hungry old men with black robes. Perhaps you see where I’m going with this.
The vast majority of ministry I’ve received has been from nonordained ministers. I’ve received ministry from ordained ministers too. But it had precious little to do with their seminary education or traditional mainline ordination. They are ministers to me because they ministered to me. They did not insist upon tag and title. Click to continue reading “The gifts and graces for ministry”
It’s almost here. Minimum order of one million units required. A model for grown ups is not yet in the works.
Who are we bloggers accountable to? I imagine two families of accountability models when it comes to blogs.
Professional models: Journalism vs. tabloid gossip. Academia vs. plagiarism. Footnotes, cited sources, and the lack thereof. Attribution and cheating.
Personal models: Named vs. pen named. “In relationship” vs. hyper-individualist. “This is really me” vs. “I’m just playing a game here.” Who is the blogger behind the blog? Do bloggers have to be accountable to readers and other bloggers? And, if so, how should bloggers be held accountable? And to what?
I’m going to go with Aristotle on this one—always a good place for a start in ethics—and propose that there is a golden mean of blog accountability between the extremes on either end. Click to continue reading “Blogging, accountability, and improv comedy”
