Getting To Know You

            Well, we’re moved in, sort of.  I’m sitting here amidst a lot of boxes, some opened, some not.  Much of our stuff is in the garage, because we can’t use our basement right now because it has water in it.  That’s right, we left flooding in the North Sioux area only to find a flooded basement here.  God definitely has a sense of humor.

            Despite that, here I am, the leader of the Wheatland Parish.  Not.  I may be a leader by title, but that’s all.  It’s pretty hard to call yourself the leader of a church when you’re still trying to figure out where the rest room is.  Nobody can just walk into a church, or any organization, and think they’re automatically going to be the leader.  The authority that makes one a leader is something that has to be earned over time.  It’s not something that comes just from a title.

            That’s a good thing.  After all, it would be the height of arrogance for me to walk in to this parish and immediately start telling people what needs to be done around here.  There are good people in all three churches of the parish. They’ve already doing a lot of things in the parish.  I assume that, right now, the people of the Wheatland Parish know a whole lot more about how to do ministry here than I do. 

I’ll have ideas and opinions, of course, and as time goes by I’ll share some of those ideas and opinions.  More importantly, though, I’ll want to know the ideas and opinions of the people of the parish, because that’s where the best ideas usually come from.  In a church, ideas that work tend to come from the bottom up, not from the top down.

There are a lot of reasons for that, but one of the biggest is that for an idea to work, it has to be something that a lot of people believe in.  No idea, no matter how brilliant or creative it may be, will work unless it is an idea that the people of the parish can commit to.  Note that I said “commit to”.  I used that term for a reason.  It’s one thing to support an idea, but it’s another to commit to it.  There are things that can get done with the support of the people of the parish, but for an idea to really work and make an impact for God, ideas need to have the commitment of the people of the parish.

Then, too, it’s not like we’re not starting from scratch here.  The churches of the Wheatland Parish have been around for quite a while.  They’re already in ministry here.  They’re doing a lot of things to reach out to people.  They’re trying hard to show God’s love and spread God’s word.  I don’t know what all those things are yet—as I said, I just got here—but I’m looking forward to finding out.

As I wrote recently, one of the joys of moving is that you find out there are good people wherever you go.  We’re looking forward to getting to know the good people of the Wheatland Parish and joining them in ministry to this area.  Together, we can build on the things the churches of this parish are already doing, try to think of new things we can do, and move forward to do God’s work for the people in and around Gettysburg, Onida, and Agar.