A Matter of Diversity
The mission that the Lord gave to the church is to go into all the world, make disciples, baptize, and teach. How do I fit into the mission of the Church? What is my role, my responsibility? St. Paul speaks of the Church as the Body of Christ. A body has many parts, each with a different function. Each part is important and contributes to the well-being and functioning of the body. Each of us is important to the Body of Christ.
While stationed in Newfoundland, I worked with a Seabee Petty Officer First Class. He was a hard worker, knew his job from one end to the other, and he was good with people. He was so good with people that I used him on at least one occasion to deal with an extremely sensitive situation. But to move from Petty Officer First Class to Chief Petty Officer, he had to take a Navy-wide examination and appear before a board. One problem. He couldn’t take a test. He just flat couldn’t do it. When he sat down with the test booklet in front of him, he froze. Everything that he knew disappeared faster than a snowman in Miami. The Navy provided him with manuals. His wife tutored him. His Lieutenant tutored him. Nothing worked. He was so good, so skilled at so many things, but there was this one thing that he couldn’t do.
People are different. There is a great diversity in the human race. God doesn’t use a cookie cutter in turning out human beings. He took something from a father and something from a mother, each of which is a combination of a whole string of ancestors and came up with a distinctive individual. It’s really true, you are unique just like everybody else. And each one of these individuals has a different combination of motor skills, intellectual abilities, and emotional aptitudes. Each one of us brings a different skill set to the table. One of our daughters pointed out that when she called home from college if she wanted help in dealing with a problem she asked to speak to her Dad. If she wanted someone to say “poor sweet baby,” she asked to speak to her Mom.
It is exceptionally important that we have this incredible spectrum of talents and abilities for our community, for our world to function. We need people who can grow food and people who can raise livestock. We need people who can make clothes, teach children or adults, manipulate columns of numbers, deal with crisis situations, diagnose medical problems, write or interpret contracts, and all of the other things that are necessary for the health and well being of our community.
If that is true in the out there world, why wouldn’t it be true within the church? Look around, some of us are more traditionally built than others. Some have more hair than others. Some of us are older than others. We are not alike as people, so why should we be alike as Christians? The Holy Spirit doesn’t turn out Christians on the assembly line, and it is a good thing, because the church, like the world needs all sorts of skills, talents, and abilities.
St. Paul uses the body as an example. The body is integrated. The various parts have various functions. Eyes are for seeing. Ears are for hearing. We need legs to walk and an opposable thumb to grasp things. Our insides are arranged to pump blood, supply oxygen, digest food, sort and store an incredible amount of information, strain out toxins, and many other things. If something goes wrong with one part, it affects the whole. I know what a gallbladder attack feels like, and I can assure you that it puts everything on hold. If someone loses an arm or a leg, or becomes blind or deaf, we speak of them as handicapped—they can learn to work around it, but they can’t function as well as they could if the part was present and working.
St. Paul speaks of the church as a functional body. No, St. Paul goes even further than that. He speaks of the church as the Body of Christ. How are we a part of this Body of Christ? Here we stand between Christmas and Easter. God sent his Son into this world for our sake. We are the reason for the season. We are the sinners that the Lord was born to redeem. We are the ones for whom he suffered and died and rose from the dead. Both Christmas and Easter are meant for us. We were linked to both the Lord’s death and resurrection through baptism. And through that baptism we became a functioning part of the Body of Christ.
The Body of Christ, this church, is the instrument through which the Lord carries out his mission throughout the world: disciples, baptizes, and teaches. Let’s change the perspective a bit. Rather than directing the command to each of us as an individual, what if the Lord was directing it to the church, to this Body of which we are a part? Then the question becomes, how do we organize ourselves to carry out this mission?
St. Paul has an answer for that. In this church, this Body of Christ, individuals have different functions. They bring different skills, talents, and abilities to the table. St. Paul begins to tick them off on his fingers. First there are apostles, those who are sent to proclaim the risen Christ. Don’t mention it to St. Louis, but the Bible has both boy apostles and girl apostles. Second there are prophets, those charged with speaking the message of God. Third, there are teachers. Teachers are important, both to help us to understand what God is saying to us and to understand the world in which he has placed us. Then there are gifts of healing, some by direct divine intervention and some through the hands of doctors and surgeons and nurses. There are some who are involved in various forms of assistance—those who help care for others—like making a phone call to check on a member, or calling on someone who is homebound. St. Paul even mentions those who serve in various leadership positions. All of these are different talents, skills, abilities—skill sets that people bring to the table to assist the Body of Christ in carrying out the mission which God has given it. This is how, together, we reach out into all the world, and especially the world that God has placed so handily on our doorstep.
The question is how do you and I fit into this Body of Christ? What is our part? What do we bring to the table that will serve our Lord and assist in caring for each other? What part of God’s church is your responsibility? Maybe what I’m trying to say is “what part of the church is yours?”
But what about my Petty Officer? He really had all of the requisite skills for promotion and would function admirably as a leader. There was no question in my mind that he could pass the board with flying colors. There was one thing in the way. When he opened the test booklet, his mind went blank. Wait, there may be a way. A designated officer could ask him each of the questions verbally and let him give the answer which would be duly recorded. Care would have to be taken, it had to be fair. The officer could not indicate by inflection or body language which answer should be chosen, but the test could be administered in a way that he could deal with it.
How do we help each other, free each other up, to identify that area, that responsibility in which we can best serve? How do we help each other to discover where our talents lie and can best be used in the Lord’s mission? One of the problems that we create within the church is that we burn people out. If someone is willing to do a job, we keep him or her in that position until he or she doesn’t want to do it anymore. I served in a church when three or four successive school board chairman left the congregation at the end of their term. How do we create understudies, so that the next person can learn and grow and be prepared to step into a position when it is time for the current person to move on to something else? How do we help people to overcome obstacles so that they can serve their Lord joyously?
Isn’t that what the Psalmist said: Restore unto me the joy of Thy salvation?
