 Covenant Discipleship has helped me grow spiritually, understand what it means to be a United Methodist, and it has enlivened my ministry. But as a pastor, there are some particular considerations for using the four-fold Covenant Discipleship model of accountability to acts of compassion, justice, worship, and devotion. As clergy, it is easy to see how helpful it is to grow and balance these four areas in our pastoral work. But if we are accountable only in our public work, we have missed something.
Take the Covenant Discipleship cross with its four arms and draw three concentric circles in it. Call the inner circle "self," the second one "family," and the outer circle "public" or "ministry." Now place your "acts of" items within those three circles. Are all the acts public? Do any involve family? Do they include the private self?
As a pastor, I found it easy to use my work to fill my accountability items. Compassion -- I visited someone in the hospital. Justice -- I served on a nonprofit board. Worship -- I lead worship every week. Devotion -- we all pray and lead devotions at meetings. But the call to follow Jesus goes deeper than our public work. How compassionate are we at home, or in the grocery store when we are in a hurry and no one knows we are clergy? Do we participate with our children in acts of justice? Do we pray with them? What are our private devotions? How do we worship when we aren't the one with the microphone?
This sort of reflection may be helpful for laypeople as well, but maybe it works in reverse. Justice may be easier privately, even though in the understanding of Covenant Discipleship there is always a public aspect to it, but how do you participate in justice at work? How does compassion find its way in your workplace? Public devotions or worship in the workplace may not be appropriate, but are you putting that part of yourself aside when you work?
The thing is, we can't really follow Jesus with only part of ourselves. As clergy, we can't just follow Jesus professionally and leave the secret parts of our hearts behind. If we are called to love God with all our hearts, all our soul, all our minds, and all our strength, then I suspect we also have to follow God with all our time, with all the corners of our lives. Clergy sometimes feel so much pressure to be perfect professionally they have no energy to tend to their private lives. But as we offer ourselves to Christ in this process of discipleship, we find that Christ claims every part of our life. And as we bring all of our life to the way of Jesus, we discover that we must live fully in all of it. As we offer the whole of ourselves to Christ, we will discover that we are becoming more wholly ourselves in Christ.
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The Rev. Michelle M. Hargrave is pastor of Fairmount Avenue United Methodist Church in St. Paul, MN. You may read her blog at http://33namesofgrace.blogspot.com/.)
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