In search of faithfulness: My calling to serve God and serve others

*Mark is serving as a Chaplin to our Ethnic Young Adult interns and will be focused on advocacy related to Economic Justice. *

It’s been a long journey from my old home amongst the Appalachian hills of West Virginia to the United Methodist Building on Capitol Hill.

I’ve learned over the years that reflecting on your place, where you’re from and where you are, can reveal the depths of your formation and your motivation, and so, I am going to tell you who I am through the places I’ve been.

I spent my childhood and teenage years growing up in “Almost Heaven” West Virginia. While the mountain state is indeed not heaven, it does reveal a bit of the divine, namely the interconnectedness of God’s creation both natural and human. When the land thrives the people thrive, but when the land is exploited and ravaged for commercial gain, the people suffer with it. In the midst of this ongoing environmental and economic devastation, the people of West Virginia support and care for one another. Because of the people of West Virginia, I view the world through relational not individual eyes.

In South Carolina during my college years, I experienced people’s ability to forget their neighbor and use scripture and the church to oppress and harm others. I was told explicitly by the leaders of my Christian community that I did not belong with them because of who I was. I would need to change to be accepted. This was not the Christianity that I knew. They did not seem to be speaking about the same God that I had come to love, and so I began to want and search for more, more knowledge about scripture, more understanding about my identity, and more examples of what it meant to be faithful.

In my current home of Durham, North Carolina, I began to find answers to these questions. I became a member of a congregation that accepted me as my full self, and I entered into divinity school to live into a call to faithful ministry.

What my recent experiences have taught me, is the same lesson that the people of West Virginia taught me long ago: faithfulness means seeing the other relationally as a child of God.

This same message grounds the work of Church and Society. Every person deserves the goodness of God’s promise of life. Our requirement of faithfulness is to, “do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8 NRSV) These words adorn the walls of the entrance to the United Methodist Building proclaiming their message to every person that walks through the doors.

Our mandate for faithfulness does not come from a constitution, a declaration of independence, or a founding father, but is from God and scripture. We serve God, and we serve each other.