THE SPIRIT OF SYNERGY: DIFFERENT MEMBERS. ONE BODY OF CHRIST.

For 20 years, I have been blessed to serve as the pastor of four different churches: small, medium, and large; rural, suburban, and urban; red, blue, and purple; looking backward to the past, looking inward to themselves, looking outward to the community. Each church was made up of people with a variety of gifts. My call was to help them work together to use them for the common good of building up the body of Christ.

I remember a retreat I led with the session of elders for one church. I introduced the theme of the retreat by reading 1 Corinthians 12: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ” (v. 12). Then I continued: “If the ear would say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be?” (vv. 16-17).

I asked people to share the body part with which they identified most based on their spiritual gifts. Some said their ears, others said eyes, some said hands, others feet, and a mouth for one who admitted she had the gift of gab. We all laughed knowingly. I ended with Paul’s final words of call and challenge: “You are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (v. 27).

“How then,” I posed, “do we work together as the body of Christ?” I paired together the ear and the mouth, the eyes and the feet, the head and the heart. They found it challenging to appreciate how their partners’ gifts were just as valuable as their own. They practiced honoring each of the individual parts for the good of the whole body. We talked and listened. We laughed and learned. We bonded and became united in mission. Retreats are good for that.

Once back at the church, our deeper appreciation of how our individual gifts work together for the common good continued to guide us and unite us in mission. Over time, as we learned to work together, we became a stronger church and a healthier body of Christ. That was then. Years after I left, I learned that this church was in crisis. The sense of unity broke down. It went through a time of conflict and division and dwindling membership. Today, it is healing and growing and reimagining life working together as the body of Christ.

Most recently, I served Community Presbyterian Church of Ben Avon, Pa., for nearly a decade. Over the years, we talked and listened. We laughed and learned. We worshiped and worked together. We bonded and became united in our mission: to bring Christ to our community and bring our community to Christ.

Just as everything seemed to be working together for good, I received a call to leave pastoral ministry to come to Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and serve as the director of the Doctor of Ministry Program. It was a hard decision to leave this beloved church, but I came to accept what I understood as God’s call to serve the larger Church. When I told my congregation I was leaving, they were sad, but supportive, because they understood—perhaps better than I did at the time—the meaning of Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 12:4-7:

Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.

It is the same Spirit, the same Lord, the same God, who gives different gifts and calls us to use them in different ways for the common good. The people of Community PC understood that the work of the Seminary supports the work of the Church, which supports the work of the Seminary. Each in its own way, the Church and the Seminary work together for the common good of building up the body of Christ.

In the few months I have been at PTS I have observed a commitment to “collaborative work” and “one Seminary.” And in this one Seminary, I have heard different people talk and listen. People laugh and learn. People worship and work together. People bond and become united in our mission: “Participating in God’s ongoing mission in the world, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary is a community of Christ joining in the Spirit’s work of forming and equipping people for ministries familiar and yet to unfold and communities present and yet to be gathered.”

As I have visited the various Doctor of Ministry cohorts, I have met many different people with many different gifts, all working together for the common good of building up the body of Christ:

• a pie shop owner who welcomes all with radical hospitality

• a financial layperson who is committed to supporting a healthy pastor and church

• a pastor whose project supports Black women’s health through Sabbath-keeping

• a Scottish minister whose church has become a community gathering place to mark the death of loved ones