Glandion Carney

Well, what a week. We are all dead, I think. Johnny G and the youth put on a great talent show. They had worked for months and it showed. And then today was the garden. People at work all over the place. We sat back and looked at the calendar and saw that there is something going on at the church every day of the month. At first, I was a little worried, because we are trying hard not to be a “program church.” We’re tryingto make disciples, not keep people “active.” Sometimes there is so much you can do that you just end up doing, and not becoming anything. I think, however, that the activity is generally a sign of doing things that connect us to God and the neighborhood. What had me specifically worried is that we more or less had to kick Gordon and Fran out!!! They were at the church every day one week! Ah, but what they do… it gets after the mission.

And how is all this supposed to work? How does a church have a mission? I don’t mean a mission statement. It is difficult to be a church in the traditional sense of members, because that tends to mean that there is a focus on the people that are already “in.” But as our District Superintendent, Paige, says, “Meat eaters take care of themselves,” by which she means you have to get out and find the lost sheep. She also says, “The Gospel is precious and time is short,” so we move out of the church and into the neighborhood. This is an important piece of being a disciple-making church. Yes, we have Sunday worship. And it is a high and important time.

But so is Wednesday prayer and fasting. And Bible Study. And street evangelism. And scaring atheists in coffee shops. And Monday nights, feeding the hungry and clothing the naked.

In all this, how do we survive? That is, ministry to the least is hard. Living in the middle o fit harder still. And when we asked folks to commit to not just doing ministry to people, but doing it with them, from them (within their midst, but also allowing the poor to determine what the poor need most), this got hard. Frustration. Getting in over our heads. We needed spiritual sustenance to get us through, but everything about our society and even the church tells us that we do it on our own strength.

Enter Glandion Carney. He works with Richard Foster and Dallas Willard. I have known for more than 10 years that I would need to work with Glandion. He gets the inward spiritual development that is desperately needed. But he also gets—because he is a black man from Oakland and, as he says, “a 60s guy”—how that inward spiritual development flows to and sustains a hard-core outward focused life: evangelism and justice.

Glandion is an Anglican priest, ordained in Rwanda for the Anglican Mission in America. This past week was the second retreat he has led with us. We focused on the spiritual disciplines, of course, but with an eye towards writing a “rule,” an agreed-upon way we as a staff will live together. It’s not a vision or a mission statement. It is a path to sustain us, to allow us, as Glandion pushes us, “to do and suffer all things for the sake of the Kingdom of God.”

I think that we have hit our stride in this process. Since Glandion’s first visit in January, we have met regularly for spiritual accountability and encouragement along some very specific lines. And two weeks ago, I think we hit the spot of trust. This past week with Glandion, we blew it wide open: we found what we need to nourish us when we’re worn out, criticized, confused, frustrated, angry at the injustice of the world, the destructive behaviors in the neighborhood, put out with each other.

He comes back in September, and we will continue our work as a staff, but we will be turning our attention to how we bring spiritual development to the church especially to the volunteers who jump right into ministry. Glandion will be coming in the New Year to lead the church in spiritual formation. It’s so easy to get burned out, and if there is anything we have seen, the pace of the work and the intensity drains people, and next thing you know, another soldier is down. May God bless us with the sense of Him that keeps us going!!