MASTERING CEREMONIES
Public occasions put pastors center stage--where, ironically, they can't be seen.
Eugene H. Peterson
April 1, 1987
In today's increasingly secular society, the only personal contact many people will have with a pastor is some public occasion: a wedding, funeral, baby dedication or baptism, an awards ceremony. These settings, where clergy are front and center, offer unique opportunities to minister, but as the following article points out, the pastor is most effective remembering where the spotlight will shine.
This article is taken from an upcoming volume in THE LEADERSHIP LIBRARY: Weddings, Funerals, and Special Events.
Most pastoral work takes place in obscurity, deciphering grace in the shadows, blowing on the embers of a hard-used life.
Pastors stay with their people week in and week out, year after year, to proclaim and guide, encourage and instruct as God works his purposes (gloriously, it will eventually turn out) in the meandering and disturbingly inconstant lives that compose our congregations.
This necessarily means taking seriously, and in faith, the dull routines of life. It means witnessing to the transcendent in the fog and rain. It means living hopefully among people who from time to time get flickering glimpses of the Glory but then live through long stretches of unaccountable grayness. This is hard work and not conspicuously glamorous.
But there are frequent interruptions in this work in which the significance blazes all of itself. The bush burns and is not quenched. Our work is done for us, or so it seems, by the event. We do nothing to get these occasions together: no prayer meeting, no strategic planning, no committee work, no altar call. They are given-redolent with meaning and almost always, even among unbelievers, a sense of reverence. These interruptions of the ordinary become occasions of ceremony and celebration: ...
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