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Weborg: Life Is Ministry, Not a Career
By Craig Pinley
ROSEMONT, IL (June 28, 2003) - Outgoing North Park Theological Seminary (NPTS)
Professor of Theology C. John Weborg preached at Friday night's Annual
Meeting ordination and commissioning worship service, directing his
audience to the God who created the world and redeemed it.
Eighty-seven individuals were recognized for ordination, commissioning and
transfer of ordination by the Evangelical Covenant Church (ECC). Executive
minister of the Department of the Ordered Ministry, David Kersten, reminded
participants that they also are bound to God and the greater Christian
church. Weborg, as only he could, gave the same reminder, using material
drawn from scripture, psychologists, theologians, tennis players and U.S.
history to prove his point.
Weborg (accompanying photo) has been a professor at NPTS since 1975 and
noted the fact that many of his former students were in the audience en
route to being ordained or commissioned Friday. He joked that he was now
retired and not obliged to answer any more of their theological questions -
then proceeded to exhort attendees to remember that any questions about
their faith could be answered by a God who was willing to suffer his own
son's death and then bring him back again to the ones who did the killing.
"The magnitude of God's grace . . . it will only be understood when we
understand what we did when we killed his son," said Weborg, using his own
words and the words of theologians as he spoke of God's sacrifice. "More
than Jesus died on Good Friday . . . (yet) this offended father did not
hold our deeds against us, but sent his son back to us."
Weborg used I Thessalonians 2:1-3 in reminding those ordained and
commissioned that, like Paul, they were being "set apart to the gospel of
God." Weborg stated that the outward signs of ministry are not what he is
concerned about - those signs can be perceived incorrectly or with bias. He
used the example of wars more than 100 years ago as white people killed off
a large portion of Native Americans, noting that "the whites discussed how
the West was won - the Native Americans discussed how the West was lost."
Instead, Weborg noted that the dedication to our calling and the integrity
of our motives will ultimately set them apart. He admonished candidates to
avoid thinking of their calling like a career and to avoid the petty
competition with other ministers and churches that keep Christians from the
sole mission of leading others to a fuller knowledge of God. He added that
the symbolic stoles that ordained and commissioned people were receiving
could be taken away because it was a calling the church had ratified.
"Integrity and honesty are not the same thing," noted Weborg as he recalled
the words of another professor. "It is not in a right and wrong. It is a
capacity to discern right from wrong, a guide to being guided. And
integrity only comes by periods of long and reflective thinking."
The stoles were a noticeable change in Friday night's ordination and
commissioning service. The stoles were made and designed by Christine
Deichtley of the Evangelical Covenant Church of South Bend. The use of
stoles has a long history dating back to the early centuries of the church.
It is a visual symbol of the yoke of ministry - the Board of the Ordered
Ministry asked lay people to place the stoles on each pastor symbolizing
the role of the whole church in recognizing the pastoral office and in
binding the pastor to the vows of ministry.
According to information provided by the Board of the Ordered Ministry, the
stoles were made specifically for those in each of three categories now
recognized by the ECC: ordination of word and sacrament, ordination to
specialized ministry and commissioning. Adorned on the stoles for the
latter two groups was the symbol of grapes and vine - taken from the words
of Jesus from John 15:5 that reminds ministers "I am the vine and you are
the branches." Pastor Steve Elde of Winnetka Covenant Church in Winnetka,
Illinois, designed the grapes and vine symbol.
A reception following Friday's worship service recognized those who were
ordained and commissioned, along with members of the commission on the
Covenant Book of Worship (a separate listing of those ordained and
commissioned. Among those ordained to specialized ministry are Mark Cairns,
who was commissioned in 1971, and David Cairns, Mark's son, who was
commissioned in 1998. Those ordained to word and sacrament include a
husband and wife, Andrew and Dawn Burnett, co-pastors of Prairie Hills
Covenant Church in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It also includes Matthew
Lundgren, son of Dean Lundgren, ECC vice president of finance; and Jon
Meyer, son of Don Meyer who directs the Department of Communication
(accompanying photo shows Jon Meyer holding his son, Landon, while embraced
by his father.)
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