Faith Works 3-14-20

Faith Works 3-14-20

Jeff Gill

 

From docents to curators

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If you are getting a purely voluntary education from a person who isn't giving you a grade or a certificate of completion, you may be listening to a docent.

 

Last week I was talking about non-formal education, or "interpretation" such as what a park ranger or historic guide might provide for a natural or cultural resource. Docent is the standard term these days for a volunteer, but trained guide. A teacher is normally doing more formal education, with curriculum standards and outcome measurements.

 

As a preacher, I'm a bit more like a docent than a teacher, even more of a wilderness ranger than a professor. No one is legally required to attend services or sermons, and I don't give the worshipers grades (though some give me grades on the message afterwards!), so faith gatherings are more of a non-formal educational experience than a class in holiness.

 

And frankly, influenced by my wife's experience with the National Park Service, I see some very close comparisons in parish ministry and park rangering. It's a common frustration of natural resource interpreters that the overwhelming majority of visitors to a state or national park will never get more than a few hundred yards from the visitor center. Guests of great parks rarely venture into the backcountry, but even to get people to walk out of sight of the parking lots is the great challenge of interpretation.

 

If you're following my metaphor at all here, I'd say that if I'm a park ranger, and the church is the visitor center, the vast natural resource I'm here to interpret is God. The experience of the Divine. Spiritual realities, directly experienced. That's the acreage beyond the parking lot, the tangible sense of contact with the actual Place Around Us: going out for yourself to know God, and be known.

 

Instead, most people stick to the visitor center, where the restrooms are clearly marked, the gift shop is reassuring, and the little path around the manicured garden behind with some nice views suitable for easy picture taking is enough of a hike . . . then back in the car, honey, we've gotta go!

I'm that ranger at the information desk who hopes in our static displays inside and campfire talks on the forest edge that we are telling enough of a story about the marvels and wonders and glories beyond the familiar to tempt more than a few to venture out on their own.

 

The Bible itself, God's Word in the scriptural record, is much the same: people trot from John 3:16 to Romans 8, take a quick peek over the edge of Revelation 21 into Genesis 1, then head back to the gift shop past Luke 2, and leave so much unexplored. The well-trodden paths are within the resource we rangers are here to interpret, it's true, but if you are hurrying past them on your way to lunch, you're like visitors to the Grand Canyon who stand at the scenic overlook facing each other comparing hotel room prices as the sun sets and the shadows race across the spires. The familiar needs you to approach it occasionally from a different direction, but if you're always on your way to the visitor center and back to the car, you'll only see even the core truths from a single angle of perspective.

 

What I love, as a minister, is when someone comes up to me excited and wanting some, well, interpretation to illuminate their path, because they just discovered Micah. Or they read Jonah beyond the whole whale thing (itself often glossed into a Pinocchio-like episode), and marvel at the ending God speaks to that prophet's tale. Or a whole group of people come to you and say "we want you to help us understand what's going on in Acts."

 

Like a docent or a ranger, a curator is a title with a formal meaning that's gaining some new applications. A curator is responsible, whether in a museum or some other cultural institution, for curating, or selecting wisely an assortment of themes and artifacts to invite us into understanding a story. Conversations can be curated, and even our media consumption might benefit from a curator's eye and ear, helping us select what we consume with discernment.

 

If you can see the usefulness of what I'm thinking about ministry being kind of a park ranger, I'd love to explore the idea of pastoral work as comparable to being a sort of curator. Next week?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he has visited quite a few national parks, but not enough. Tell him about when you got away from the parking lot at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.