c. 2003 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.)

(UNDATED) Building a stone wall from rocks stirred up in construction turns out to be hot, dirty work, but satisfying.

It feels clever to dig out mower-eating rocks from our future lawn and to convert them into something useful. I tell my sons working alongside me that this is how their ancestors made farmable land in New Haven Colony.

Carrying the stones is one of those repetitive chores that free the mind to think about other things. As I cross the land, I begin to know its contours and to make it my home. Assembling stones is like working a jigsaw puzzle, except that the materials are forgiving.

In time, stones start their march across the ground. Various sizes, colors and textures soon form a whole, as seen from a distance.

As is usual with me, I start the work and then do the research. It turns out my intuition _ mix the sizes, take care in fitting stones into crevices, test stability, work up to the large _ is close to the mark.

Most satisfying is doing this work as a family. Today we are like the family farmers way back in our heritage: mutually dependent, each contributing according to ability and strength.

I think this is the way Jesus envisioned ministry. Disciples working together, deriving sustenance from the land, doing what each could, trying to fit human diversity into something new and life-giving.

Instead, Christians re-created the priestly caste of the Old Testament, with an ordained class of trained experts operating in strict hierarchy as “ministers,” and everyone else rendered an audience, eventually an employer class and when-it-is-convenient partners in church work.

When clergy have the upper hand, they order the laity about. When laity have the upper hand, they treat clergy as hired hands.

We developed a taste for uniformity and perfection. Our stone walls had to be just so, as if only properly trained and credentialed experts could tackle the important work, as if willingness and a good heart weren’t enough. Memberships, in turn, became monochromatic, as only certain “stones” were considered worthy.

This might overstate reality, but not by much. Consider mass defections from ordained employment, constant conflict in congregational leadership over who gets to tell the other what to do, and inconsistency in energy and performance. Consider attendance hovering around 20 percent in America, and single digits in Europe, where the priestly caste is more entrenched.

Consider our concern for proper equipment _ technology, clever leave-behinds for calls, training classes that promote ministry as requiring expertise, electronic gear that rivals rock shows.

Consider the loneliness of modern ministers, ordained or lay, as they prepare in solitude, serve in solitude, bear the congregation’s pressure in solitude. Consider the burnout rate among clergy, as well as among lay leaders who vow, “Never again.”

But then consider the times when we do it Jesus’ way. Working side by side at church suppers and bazaars, building houses in teams, doing missionary work in teams, putting on renewal events in teams, handling crises in impromptu teams, laughing and crying together, deriving sustenance not from expertise but from each other _ this is when joy is found, and this is when we accomplish something. .

Jesus sent his disciples out in pairs, because his model for ministry wasn’t the paid expert driving alone to work, but the unsure deriving strength from each other.

Jesus sent them out unequipped, because gear can be a crutch, tending to gear can be a substitute for tending souls, and purchasing gear provides escape from the harder work of servanthood.

Jesus told them to engage with the people as hosts, friends, colleagues and recipients of ministry. Not as employers, not as a “market” to be tapped, not as an “army” for whatever cause, not as the unwashed needing noblesse oblige, but as friends. If friendship wasn’t returned, move on, he said, because healing can’t be compelled.

Our ineffective models for ministry are deeply ingrained _ priestly caste, hierarchy grounded in expertise, some paid to give and others paying to receive, another expression of the market economy. They even have the weight of church law behind them. But they aren’t working. Jesus gave us a better way.

KRE END EHRICH