Last month, my husband and I were fired from a successful 30-year-long music ministry at our beloved little college chapel. The chapel is in the neighborhood of the “starter” home we bought in 1994, and I walk past it several times a day, stopping to say prayers at the Mary statue out front, taking its sweet picture from multiple angles, and giving over so many concerns to Jesus and his Mother — concerns about friends, our community, our country, Church, and world.
Inside the doors of that chapel, we raised our kids along with dozens of other families while my husband, Tim, and I served in the music ministry each week. He played guitar and I sang. That time was precious to us, and we will carry those memories forever, but ironically, music ministry was never anything we set out to do. Rather, it was a calling God placed before us through a cascade of circumstances just about three decades ago. We had met in a college choir and both loved singing, but in what we now consider a prompting of the Holy Spirit, Tim became suddenly interested in learning the guitar in his early 30s. He practiced a couple hours a day with our babies playing at his feet.
The opening for taking over an existing music ministry fell quite literally in our laps as we sat at mass one day and heard the call. During our three decades of ministry, we stewarded this gift the best we could both at the chapel and elsewhere, never quite knowing where it would take us. Sometimes, this is how ministries happen, and the longer we live, the more we can see these synchronicities and how the Hand of God moves us to where we need to be.
Author Frederick Buechner said of vocation, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” This is absolutely true of our music ministry at that little chapel. There was so much meaning, connection with God’s people, and deep, deep gladness, but that doesn’t mean it was without challenge over our 30 years.
Shake-ups in faith communities happen for all kinds of reasons: changes in leadership, trends toward clericalism, politicization, abuse, Christian nationalism, or shifts in church culture. You might have experienced this kind of “church hurt” in your own life or in the lives of friends or family. If this is a familiar story to you, then you know the pain that comes with it.
As for us, our ministry came to an end at a meeting we were called to with just a few days’ notice. We were not told the subject matter of the meeting in advance, but it felt ominous to me. I had recently called for more stringent safety in our college chapel after the news of a priest leaving the priesthood to marry a girl he’d ministered to in our community when she was a student and later hired for her first job out of college. This priest had been problematic when he was with us. Frequently alone with girls in his convertible which was against any accepted safety standards, politicizing the pulpit and his social media accounts, and now marrying a girl with a huge age gap in what to me was a clear case of grooming. Our pastor, like many in our clericalist system, did not respond well to suggestions to address the lax safety standards, but we were told the cause of our firing was a shift away from guitar toward organ with no option for me to continue singing with any instrument. The meeting was contentious, filled with subtext, and the subsequent fallout was the cause of weeks of deep anger on the part of my husband and I who were left without a ministry, community, or church home.
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It may have been something I learned in our cursillo retreat ministry, or in the many hours I’ve spent in faith deconstruction and reconstruction, reading, meditation, or studying the Gospel with fresh eyes, but along the way I’ve learned a central truth that has been a guiding force for me in this circumstance. The truth is that no ministry that any Christian undertakes, whether it be music ministry, lectoring, priesthood, or the office of the pope himself, belongs to the person who ministers. Rather ministry is a gift given by God for the benefit of his people. We took this responsibility very seriously and anyone who attended the chapel over that time would have noticed us praying before each Mass. The prayer we prayed each week is simple and it brought us a long, long way:
“Lord, let it be you in me that they hear and see. Help us get out of the way.”
We know that God was faithful to answer this prayer because so often, we felt God sing through us in the songs that we prayerfully picked to align with God’s word in a given week. We also know that God was faithful to that prayer because we have heard from so many community members over these 30 years just how much our ministry has mattered to them and to their families.
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Though this experience is deeply personal, there are elements of it that are universal; about the nature of work and ministry, about how we in the Body of Christ are called to show up for each other and the wider world, and about the power of music to reach the deepest parts of us. But the idea that resonates the most for me today is one I wish more Christians, both lay and clergy, would understand and embody:
Whatever work or ministry we’re given by God is one we give back to him and his people. It is never ours. Inside or outside of church walls, in any ordinary circumstance on any given day, let it be God in us that others see and hear. In our case, as this ministry door closed, we prayerfully discerned our next steps and in the goodness of God, quickly found a new home for our ministry in which we feel supported and fully welcome. How it came together is nothing less than God’s Providence. As we move forward, we will never take ministry or what we learned for granted but will carry this knowledge with us in an even deeper way, hopefully allowing God to work in and through and even for us in His kindness, and always praying to get out of the way. We pray that the Body of Christ can do the same.