On Spying...

The pastors at BCP have been reading through Eugene Peterson's book, Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work. As is typical with Peterson, this book is full of gems (or stones, i guess) that are well worth taking the time to ponder. One that has been bouncing around in my head is this quote: "The pastor is God's spy searching out ways of grace." In this context Peterson is describing how we help one another find God's story of grace within our own life stories. But I've been thinking about this notion of "spying" in terms of living and ministering in the city.

I like the word "spying" because it suggests that finding God's grace, or seeing Him at work, is not always obvious. It takes a careful look and a sensitive ear to uncover what God is up to in our own lives and in the lives of others. And when this is set in context of a specific place, either a city or a particular neighborhood, the spying gets even more challenging, because when we commit ourselves to a few city blocks we limit the field in which we can spy. After all, the broader the boundary the more we can roam, the farther we can wander in search of some obvious evidence of God's grace at work. If we can't see any evidence on this street or the next, there's always the next neighborhood, the next place to continue the search. But that isn't what a spy does. A spy commits to a place and then begins the work of understanding their specific culture and context and undertakes the slow and sometimes tedious work of gathering evidence.

This is the challenge and the beauty of "limiting" ourselves to specific places as we think about ministry and specifically planting churches. The challenge is staying put and digging in and gathering evidence of God's work and simply taking the time to do it. These are basic challenges of patience and faith. The beauty is in discovering that the very thing we are hoping to see, the reason we "spy", is actually there. That God is at work on our streets, on the sidewalks, in the lives of our neighbors and we actually don't need to go very far to see this evidence. We just need to get better at being spys.

Chris Hildebrand