The Servant Heart
Arnold Billie is a rural mail carrier in southern New Jersey. For the last quarter century, his daily route has taken him sixty-three miles through two counties and five municipalities. Mr. Billie not only delivers mail, he brings personal service. Anything you can get at the post office, you can get from Mr. Billie—stamps, money orders, and pickup service. All the customer has to do is leave the flag up on the mailbox. One elderly woman has trouble starting her lawn mower, so when she wants to use it, she leaves it by her mailbox and Mr. Billie starts it when he arrives. Who says personal service is no more?
Saved for a Purpose
God did not save you to be a sensation; He saved you to be a servant.
God’s Servants
Archbishop Secker used to say, “God has three sorts of servants in the world: some are slaves, and serve Him from fear; others are hirelings, and serve for wages; and the last are sons, who serve because they love.”
The Servant Church
The life of the one holy Universal Church is determined by the fact that it is the fulfillment of the service as ambassador enjoined upon it.
Where the life of the Church is exhausted in self-serving, it smacks of death; the decisive thing has been forgotten, that this whole life is lived only in the exercise of what we called the Church’s service as ambassador, proclamation, kerygma. A Church that recognizes its commission will neither desire nor be able to petrify in any of its functions, to be the Church for its own sake. There is the “Christ-believing group”; but this group is sent out: “Go and preach the gospel!” It does not say, “Go and celebrate services!” “Go and edify yourselves with the sermon!” “Go and celebrate the Sacraments!” “Go present yourselves in a liturgy, which perhaps repeats the heavenly liturgy!” “Go and devise a theology which may gloriously unfold like the Summa of St Thomas!” Of course, there is nothing to forbid all this; there may exist very good cause to do it all; but nothing, nothing at all for its own sake! In it all the one thing must prevail: “Proclaim the gospel to every creature!” The Church runs like a herald to deliver the message. It is not a snail that carries its little house on its back and is so well off in it that only now and then it sticks out its feelers and then thinks that the “claim of publicity” has been satisfied. No, the Church lives by its commission as herald, it is la compagnie de Dieu.
Where the Church is living, it must ask itself whether it is serving this commission or whether it is a purpose in itself. If the second is the case, then as a rule it begins to smack of the “sacred,” to affect piety, to play the priest and to mumble. Anyone with a keen nose will smell it and find it dreadful! Christianity is not “sacred”; rather there breathes in it the fresh air of the Spirit. Otherwise, it is not Christianity. For it is an out-an-out “worldly” thing open to all humanity: “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to every creature.” –Karl Barth