I decided to become a pastor for several reasons.  The first is that the work really matched up well with my skills, experience, and interests.  In other words, I felt I had the gifts needed for this type of ministry.  I started off as a church musician, then added youth and missions work.  Gradually I became more and more a general pastor.  What led me to decide to be a pastor and to sense God's call in this way for my life, was a desire to help other people - perhaps to ease some of the suffering in the world.

What I have discovered in thirty years as a pastor is that the work of ministry usually involves clarity and commitment even more than caring.  The action of love includes being clear with each other and about ourselves.  Loving the world means living a commitment to ease the suffering of poverty, illness, and isolation.  It means working to change the world at a systemic level away from promoting dependence and oppression and toward promoting health and creativity.  It means doing these things while staying in our own skin - resisting the temptation to demonize others AND resisting the temptation to borrow our sense of identity and self-worth from the causes we endorse.  To love in this way is a challenging task and is best done in community.

Churches have the potential to be the kind of communities that help each of us embrace God's love while also motivating us to take on the challenges of realizing the dream Jesus articulated.  Our faith communities have the potential to awaken us, and guide us to invest our passions for social justice in effective and loving ways.  Faith communities are most successful doing this when they work together so that the work is not a way of calling attention to one church's great program, but a way of calling attention to God's work in the world through people.

Kansas City is a place where many faith communities have decided to work together to realize the dream we share to "let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever flowing stream."  (Amos 5:24)  This cooperative effort is called The Metro Organization for Racial and Economic Equity (MORE²).  The task to help government, business, and communities of faith work together can be tedious, frustrating, and endless.  Efforts to organize such work within churches can also seem tedious, frustrating, and endless.  But working cooperatively is the best chance we have to be faithful to that vision of Jesus:  

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, ¹⁹to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

I am thankful that the congregation I serve has a passion for social justice and for peacemaking.  Most faith communities share this passion.  We are members of MORE² and are working to use that membership effectively.  Let me encourage you as you are reading this to renew your own commitment to work for justice and peace, to do so in cooperation with other people, and to seek the guidance and support of a faith community.  The best way to experience God's love yourself is to love someone else.

Thanks for continuing to bless me as we are on the journey together.

--Jack Price

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