Volunteer or Disciple

Dear Fellow Followers of the Way:
After Kathy’s sermon on Sunday, I have been pondering the difference between volunteers and disciples. As I have read the various call stories of the disciples, they were all hand picked by Jesus and they made radical shifts in life letting go of an old life to follow Jesus. They didn’t volunteer to be a follower of Jesus, they were chosen.

If they had volunteered, they would have always had a choice. As a volunteer you choose the organization and how deeply involved you want to be. How much money and time will you commit? What is your level of commitment? The other element of volunteering is that you always have a way out. You can choose not to help just as easily as you can choose to help.

Discipleship doesn’t give you that easy way out. You have been chosen, it was not your initiative to be involved. We have been called to a lifelong relationship with God and with our fellow disciples. It is a life that is to be shared without reservation, a life of giving ourselves up for others. We have to learn to be dependent not on ourselves but on God.

Just as Jesus served the disciples, he told them that they had to learn to be the servants of others. He commanded them to love one another just as he had loved them. He drew them in to a new way of being and we too are called to a new way of being. As Jesus calls to the crowd and to the disciples to “take up their cross and follow” and he calls to us as well.

I agree with Kathy that the church is a group of disciples and not volunteers. We have been hand picked; we don’t have a way out. And when you have no way out, you need to go in further. I leave you with part of the lyrics from Garth Brooks The River

Too many times we stand aside, and let the waters slip away
‘til what we put off ‘til tomorrow has now become today
So don’t you sit upon the shoreline and say you’re satisfied
Choose to chance the rapids and dare to dance the tide.

As we continue this journey through Lent, I invite you to look for ways to go in further and deeper. You are a disciple and not a volunteer, take up your cross and follow Jesus.
Grace, mercy and peace,
Karen