I’ve had a unique Advent experience this year. In the past I’ve written blog posts and preached sermons in which I leveraged the themes of Advent for whatever agenda I thought I was supposed to be pushing. It’s a season of waiting, so patience is an easy, evergreen message. But it’s also a season of wrestling with the desperate longing of the Old Testament prophets and the revolutionary zeal of Mary’s Magnificat. It’s a season when we dare to hope that God can somehow be born into our godforsaken world that doesn’t seem like its problems could be any more impossible.
I’ve tried to feel all the things I thought I was supposed to feel for Advent and I tried to preach sermons that would help other people feel the things they’re supposed to feel.
But this is the first Advent I have spent inside the womb of God. What I mean is that my future is completely uncertain in a way that I’ve never experienced before.
NOLA Wesley
The Rev. Morgan Guyton, shown with some of the students he has served at the NOLA Wesley Foundation, is giving up expectations this Advent. (Photo Courtesy of Morgan Guyton).
I know I am not returning to my current ministry placement in campus ministry at the NOLA Wesley Foundation next July, but I have no idea where I’m going next. Moreover, I don’t know what I’m called to do next. The only thing I know for sure is what I’ve been doing hasn’t been working. And that’s one of the hardest truths I have ever faced.
The last time I made a ministry move, I had a very clear sense of calling. I needed to save the over-programmed helicopter parents from becoming over-programmed helicopter parents by reaching them in college before they got into their careers, got married, and had babies. I thought if I could just expose them to the real gospel (which I understood clearly), then I could save the world from American suburbia by creating an army of young woke Christian mystics who would turn the world into their monastery.
Campus ministry has kicked my ass. There’s really no other way to say it. We’ve had a lot of good moments. Every time I say something self-pitying about my failures on social media, some student I didn’t think I knew sends me a five paragraph message about how I impacted their life. But it hasn’t worked the way I thought it would and most of the relationships and initiatives that I thought would result in major breakthroughs didn’t materialize how I wanted.
There have been many gifts that have come from getting my ass kicked. It has utterly wrecked my notion that I have any ability to control other peoples’ behavior. I used to treat ministry like a sociology experiment that I could entrepreneur my way into winning. It took me six fall semesters to understand that there is no perfect formula for corralling generation Z into Christian community through outreach events, chocolate-chip cookie deliveries, or first-time coffee dates. The only painful hypothesis I’m left with is that my anxiety (and lack of trust in God?) was at least part of what kept things from sticking.
The best result of getting body-slammed by the Holy Spirit is that I somehow lost my need to become a famous pastor, and that’s perhaps the greatest miracle I have experienced in my life. A few years ago, I did a ritual at the Wild Goose Festival that was based on Revelation [2:17]. Each of us was given a white stone and we were invited to write a “new name” God wanted to give us. Somehow in that space, God said, “You’re not a hero; you’re a healer,” so that’s what I wrote on a rock I still carry around with me in my backpack. It took me a few more months to stop caring that none of the Rob Bell tier bloggers read my book or invited me onto their podcasts. But one day it just didn’t matter anymore.
Stanley Hauerwas writes often that the life of the Christian is about learning to live life out of control.
When I wanted to be a famous pastor, nothing gave me greater anxiety than the possibility that I would be assigned to the wrong church, and I would get chewed up and spat out of being in the ministry altogether. Or maybe I would get stuck in the single A minor league churches and I would never get called up to the big leagues (or even double A).
Somehow God took away that fear.That’s why I say this season is like being in God’s womb.
I feel safe somehow, despite the fact that my average weekly worship attendance data doesn’t make a smooth exponential curve upward. My Methodist higher-ups may tell me in March that they just can’t find a place for me. Strangely, that possibility isn’t keeping me awake at night.
The other thing about being in God’s womb is realizing what an infant I am. Three years ago, I released a book that offered twelve major paradigm shifts that I was sure would fix American Christianity. Today, I feel like I barely know Jesus. Jesus knows me intimately, but I don’t know him nearly as well as I thought I did. It’s not so much that I’m distant from God. I’m just kicking and spinning around in a padded room inside of God’s belly. I’m being fed by God and sustained by God but with no more ability to articulate what’s happening than a baby tethered to his mother.
I realize the metaphor doesn’t work because Jesus is the baby waiting to be born at Christmas, and Mary provides the womb, not God. But maybe it’s okay to talk this way because Christianity is all about being reborn over and over again. So that’s the starting point for me this Advent. I get to start over. I don’t know where. I don’t know what God will put in front of me. But God has put my failures behind me. I can learn from them, but God will not let them define me. That’s about as much as I know right now.
The Rev. Morgan Guyton, together with his wife the Rev. Cheryl Guyton, currently serves as co-director of the NOLA Wesley Foundation, the United Methodist campus ministry to Tulane and Loyola universities in New Orleans, La. This post is republished with the author's permission from the blog Crackers and Grape Juice.