I’ve been thinking about the story of Mary, Martha, and Jesus for some time.  In fact, I made a list of most impactful Scripture references back at the end of August 2023, and the story of two sisters was smack dab in the middle of the list.  The story has stuck with me because of reflecting on life over these last few years (and how I’ve tried to make sense of that time).  The Laban layer got added a couple of months ago as a real reminder of how easy it is for disorder to set in when it comes to things like delight and duty.  Not that they are mutually exclusive, mind you.  But there is a good and proper order for the Christian life, and one is more easy to prioritize than the other.

In many “versions” of the Christian life, intimacy with Jesus is the greatest good.  But the call to do the work of the God’s kingdom also gets a lot of airplay, whether from the pulpit or from whatever missional platform one is attached to.  Which is why this recent Mere Orthodoxy post from Jake Meador has been both interesting and timely.

The post’s title, “Shepherds are not Technicians,” says a lot, though it doesn’t say it all.  Meador uses Harold Senkbeil’s The Care of Souls as the ground floor of the piece.  I read the first couple of chapters of the book when it first came out, but it didn’t grab me enough to keep reading.  I’m glad that Meador found more to work with.  He writes of the key metaphors that Senkbeil uses throughout the book for pastoral ministry: shepherds and sheepdogs and farmers.  Then he makes a move to point out two key ways that contemporary pastors might re-imagine their work as it relates to the “technique” of leading a church.  Meador writes:

… the Christian church is treated in one of two ways:

• as being either a kind of spiritual NGO whose product is demographically tailored programs in a certain kind of lifestyle propagation

• as a kind of political superpac whose effectiveness is built on their capacity to entertain and seize attention and whose output is mobilized culture warriors that effect cultural change through voting and activism.

While I don’t agree with everything that Meador writes as he moves towards his conclusion, I do believe that we can see versions of these approaches to ministry in churches and para-church ministries today.  I’ve been one myself, I fear.  Program directors, show runners, chief motivators, those who manage the volunteer lists for things.  The danger is always there to disorder things, or to make one a simple pre-requisite for the other (be Mary for a while so you can get on with being Martha).  You get good, hard work for a time.  But then you get burnout.  Or you may get a kind of deconversion based on confused or inconsistent priorities.  Either way, you get people who, in the long run, aren’t quite sure what to do with themselves when it comes to the life of faith, of how to be a Mary in a world full of Marthas.

The whole piece by Meador is worth a read.  He writes with some interesting examples in mind.  He writes about religious habitus, which is always something worth personal reflection.  But it’s the danger that Meador points to that connects so powerfully with my thoughts on “the four sisters” these last few posts.  And it’s a danger that thinkers like Andrew Root have been trying to make sense of (but I’ll get to that later).

Mary and Martha and Jesus have a lot to teach us, I think, especially if the Labans in our lives have disordered things in the dark of the night.  I’m sure I’ll come back to them again soon.  But for now, it’s the last weekend before returning from Christmas break, which will bring a real test to me with these thoughts.  The struggle to keep things rightly ordered, you see, is almost never-ending.