Amen. May It Be So!
Rev. Jacqui Lewis, Ph.D.

See the little baby, lying in a manger, on Christmas morning.
Amen, amen, amen.

See him in the temple, talkin’ to the elders, how they marveled at his wisdom.
Amen, amen, amen

See him in the garden, praying to his Father . . . and he rose on Easter!
Amen, amen, amen.

This spiritual collapses the life of Jesus just like the liturgical seasons do. Wasn’t it just Christmas? Now we are in the season of Lent, and on a forty-day journey to Easter Sunday morning. Whew!

I find myself wanting to s-l-o-w down and reflect about ministry at Middle Church. I am always asking myself, are we being faithful to what God has put before us to do? Are we doing a bold new thing? Are we helping people to grow deep with God and are we taking God’s love out wide into the community?

Are we being faithful to what the congregation has said they hope for? Are we being invitational to the community and to the world? That is, for me, what ministry is.

As I reflect, I think it has been a wonderful year, and a year of change and growth. Scott Cocking joined us as Director of Marketing. He will soon have a title change to Director of Communications, which more aptly captures the way he focuses our mission on telling the story of God’s love to the world in many cultural languages. Morine A. Bowen joined the staff as Minister for Mission, Social Action, and Outreach. She is helping us to respond to the world, the country, and the city in new ways, and to expand the ministries we do already. She staffs the Celebrate Life Meal, for example, and is helping us to imagine how we might get those folk to come to us for more connections, for spiritual food. Brad Motta is Minister for Education and is not only bringing details to Middle School, our adult education program at Middle, but also expanding our Teaching Church Events, in which lay and clergy leaders will come to Middle to learn and share learnings. We hired a new administrator, Nickay Piper, so that Nora can really shift her role to Minister for Strategy, which means she will help with resourcing the vision through the budget, the building, and managing my schedule(!). In the midst of all of that, Heather Juby has been working as Minister for Care, developing Stephen Ministry and MiddleCares. Lutin Tanner, Denise Hurd, Shari Gill, and Claire Nolan are doing youth and children’s ministry. And Freeman Palmer took a new call to work in Newark in a non-profit that addresses the HIV crisis. Annastasia Victory is directing the Jerriese Johnson East Village Gospel Choir and Jonathan Dudley is directing the Middle Church Choir. Amen. May it be so.

More lay leaders are doing their ministry. Danita, Tom, Ellen, Lucille, Deborah, Malia, Dean, Judi, Bruni, Beckett, Bil, Sarah, Petal, Gail, Dennis, Denis, Belinda, Samaris, Russell, Joel, and Kathy are just some of the amazing lay leaders who do wonderful ministry at Middle Church. To name them all would take this whole page! We will be celebrating volunteers in June, but I want to say now that our lay leaders, including eleven of the most incredibly gifted, enormously committed consistory members any pastor could ever want, are ROCKIN’ at Middle Church—teaching, dancing, acting, serving, caring, planning and executing mission trips, packing food, training young folk, creating new ministries, loving each other, going on marches, making aprons, raising funds, sharing their gifts and their tithes and offerings and love and compassion. Amen, May it be so.

That is what ministry is all about. It may be in some places that people think ministry is about a preacher preaching on Sunday morning, some leader doing all the stuff and everyone else just watching and saying, "that is fabulous!" If it were that way when Jesus was training his disciples, what we would have now is 12 piles of dust gathered somewhere in an upper room.

Jesus was in the business of creating ministers—people who would fish for souls. We are in that business at Middle Church. Freeman, Jeannie, Paul, Mary Virginia and others have gone and will go in to the world and take their ministries with them. Peter, Cornelia, John, Leo and Tina will do ministry in the market place. Others will do their ministry in the congregation. We will all do God’s work, together, and make the world a better place. Amen (which means, may it be so.)

Love, Jacqui

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