The Deacon’s Call, Part 1: Servanthood and Surrender

There’s an organization I like quite a lot called Youth With A Mission, or YWAM. They have a special phrase: “coming in the opposite spirit.”

Here’s what they mean by that: In the face of a culture that, now more than ever, is absolutely fascinated with material accumulation, the exaltation of personal power, and the ends justifying the means, they will be the people whom God has raised up to say: “No. Our values are rooted in an eternal life to which we are completely and entirely indebted. It would be disloyal to the very God who sent His Son to die and rise again for us to buy into that culture, because it is completely antithetical to everything that Jesus stood for.”

A Call to Servanthood
In our culture, then, it has become more important than ever to listen to and order our lives by a deep, deep principle in the life of the gospel, which is the call to servanthood. Because if there’s anything the office of deacon represents to us in terms of the rest of the church, it’s servanthood. And that servanthood is empowered from a source other than your talents and your gifts and your education, and all the other things we—in the church as well as in the world—like to admire.

And so we’re asking God to break in and to do something new. We ask him to intervene from outside of time into this spot in time, so that you as deacons might reflect that eternal life being worked in and through you. We ask this for the sake of we, the body of Christ, who need to be reminded of the servant ministry to which we are all called. And we also ask it for the sake of a group of people out there upon whom God has his hand but who do not yet know that the longing God has placed in their hearts has an answer in what God has shown us in Jesus Christ.

You see, the field, as Jesus says, is the world. It’s not just the nice Episcopalians you know. And a part of the deacon’s call is stepping out into that world, trusting God to bring on your path those people for whom He is already at work. Because God’s doing all kinds of things in the world that may or may not be happening inside the walls of the church.

A Call to Surrender
And deacon, be alert to what God is doing in a way that allows you—as the servant you have been called to be—to step into the flow of what God is doing in another person’s life. Not to get what you want done, but to be a part of what God is doing in their life. And to lift up the name of Jesus, honoring the flow of what God is doing in them.

Yes, the ministry of the deacon is, in fact, a servant ministry, but it’s also a surrendered ministry. What you’re doing, in fact, is yielding the authority of your right to be in control of your life, to set your own boundaries, to set your own course, to determine even how your day is going to go.

I don’t know about you, but I wake up in the morning and I look at my phone to see what’s on the calendar. But I know by now that just because it’s on the calendar doesn’t mean God isn’t going to do something very different. And if I try to hold on to make sure my calendar work gets done, I may actually miss the very thing God wants to accomplish, because His ways are not my ways. My ways are not His ways.

And so we must bend the knee to the flow of His spirit in the world so we have the privilege of somehow being a part, in some small way, of what God is doing in the world. Those sweet, sometimes heartbreaking, occasionally profoundly painful, often-winsome encounters where the Spirit of God begins to move in the most unlikely ways and places, and you know that wherever it is you are—whether you’re in the line at Publix, whether you’re at the feeding station at Christian Service Center, whether you’re sitting down and having coffee—you’re there by divine appointment.

Deacon, you may not look any different from anybody else, but what’s really happening is because you have yielded to him in full surrender, you’re there in that moment saying, “OK, Lord, what would you have me do?” And trusting that God will take even the smallest of actions, like bread, and break them and use them in ways we find astonishing.

These are two aspects of the deacon’s call. Next week, we’ll dig deeper into this topic.

How would you describe the deacon’s call? Share this blog and your response on Twitter and include my username, @revgregbrewer.

(This post is an adaption of Bishop Brewer’s sermon on January 31, 2017, at the Cathedral Church of St. Luke, Orlando, Florida.)

Unless otherwise noted, scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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