In 2017 our parish brought in Rev. Dr. Russ Parker to lead a parish weekend. While the weekend and the teaching were wonderful and blessed us all, it was the preliminary to the weekend that was my own motive for bringing Russ over from the UK. Russ has written many books and one of them Healing Wounded History had been an essential element in moving the congregation in healing, renewal and growth. But it was one of his more recent books, Rediscovering the Ministry of Blessing, that had started us on the path towards the weekend.
Russ did three sessions on blessing in the midst of our primary weekend focus on The Wild Spirit. One session was a lunch for clergy and ministry leaders, a second followed that evening for the general public on the subject of blessing and a third session on a Saturday morning for parents and godparents on How to bless your children no matter how old they are. All the sessions were professionally videoed, and rather than describe them you can find them on the YouTube channel of Trinity Episcopal Church.
There was one conversation that was not caught on video between Russ and a pastor from an evangelical church. The pastor questioned whether he had authority to bless on God’s behalf. He could pray that God would bless someone, but to say “I bless you…” on behalf of God seemed presumptuous in the extreme. I didn’t overhear the rest of the conversation, but the pastor’s question was an eye opener for me. After all, I am an Episcopal priest and we bless anything and pretty much everything that is offered. We bless bread and wine in Holy Communion and the congregation at the close of that liturgy. We bless pets and crosses and rosaries (yes, some Episcopalians use rosaries) and icons and houses and holy water and holy oil. That’s part of our job. That’s part of the authority imparted to us at our ordination. And here was a pastor questioning his authority to bless.
It wasn’t a huge leap to connect the pastor’s problem with the blank looks I saw on the faces of our congregation whenever I encouraged parents, and particularly fathers, to bless their children. Oddly enough, I’d articulated the problem to that congregation in a sermon. However, as is all too often the case, even though I was the one speaking, I wasn’t the one listening. I was explaining why I thought my father had never blessed me as a child (so far as I knew). He didn’t know he could. Therefore, he didn’t know he should. And had he known either, he probably didn’t know how. As I described that situation there was a quiet voice speaking in the dim recesses of my consciousness, that this would be an ideal time to start teaching the congregation how to bless. I did follow up on that with one course, but it was “one and done.”
Within six months of Russ’s visit, I felt it was time to retire and I left my parish work (with mixed feelings of relief and loss) and my parish community (with deep regret). In the months since my departure the absence of the normal pressures of parish ministry has cleared away much of the foggy thinking of the last few years. With the clarity that only comes with hindsight I think my failure to follow up with teaching people how to bless was my greatest error in leadership during the 15 years I served that parish.
There are two reasons why I give that failure to launch that ignoble status. The first is that the ministry of blessing is a concrete expression of the priesthood of Christ that belongs to all who are in Christ. The “priesthood of all believers” needs to be more than just shorthand for the direct access to the Father through Jesus. The model of our ministry is incarnation – the spiritual God acting to save a material creature through embracing the material reality of our creaturely existence. A priesthood that fails to engage material reality, whatever else it may be, is not the priesthood of Christ. In prior years I had both preached and taught in the congregation on our status as priests. But in the time we explored the ministry of blessing, I failed to make the connection between priesthood and blessing.
The second reason was forgetting a phrase I learned from the late Canon David Watson: the meeting place is the learning place for the marketplace. I haven’t quoted that for a long time because when I did I got the same blank looks mentioned above. I think part of the problem was the concept that the primary workplace of the Body of Christ was not inside the congregation but in the midst of the world in which we work the other six days of the week.
In the context of blessing, applying Watson’s dictum meant that we learned how to how exercise our God-given authority to bless within our church so that we could bless in our homes, our workplaces and every other venue of our lives. When we learn that we can bless and how we bless we do so for the sake of others. Archbishop William Temple noted “The Church is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members.” One of the key benefits we offer is that of being blessed by God.
Finally, as Russ Parker noted in his talks and his book, blessing is more than kind or encouraging words. The words are ours, but the work is God’s. Go back and follow the link above to Russ’s talks. It will open up a new vista of ministry and mission for the local church.
The Apprentice Priest 