Where the Spirit Calls

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Where the Spirit Calls

At a recent meeting we were invited to reflect on two questions: What is your faith experience of being called to leadership? What are the three challenges facing your Province at this time? Challenging questions, but ones that led to some fruitful reflection.

My first response is that this is a call to deep trust in the invitation of the community and the Spirit and an attitude and spirit of dependence on God’s love and grace. It is also an invitation to reflect deeply on the gifts God has given me and how I am called to use those gifts in this ministry of leadership.

There is also a call to deep sense and realization that leadership within the Province is ministry. In the past, I was involved in pastoral ministry in parishes and missions along with diocesan leadership. It was easy (and perhaps too convenient) to see the pastoral work as ministry and leadership as something else, but not necessarily ministry. It is far too easy to make that distinction, especially when one’s whole life has been primarily in pastoral ministry. That becomes the whole focus and the sole definition of ministry. However, this is a call to ministry to my brother Oblates as well as the Associates. A different kind of ministry, but ministry nonetheless.

With that realization came the insight that the ministry of leadership has to be pastoral. The superior is to be the “pastor” of the community, to care for the spiritual welfare of the members as well as their physical welfare and the practical business of the Province. I am aware that I need to be constantly aware of the pastoral dimension of leadership and be open to listen, to spend time with the members and to care for them.

As I leave parish ministry and move full time into the ministry of leadership I am aware that there will be many challenges ahead. It would be easy enough to get caught up in the day to day routines, in the administrative details, in the “office” work and become isolated from the members of the community. There will be times when decisions are not well received, or when some action is opposed, when it will be difficult to see the light ahead through the gloom of a particular situation. In all of this, I need to be mindful of the call to trust, to be dependant on God’s graces and the care of my brothers in community and to be a person of prayer.

Looking ahead, I fall back on St. Paul’s advice to the Romans: “Rejoice in hope, be patient in trial, persevere in prayer” (Rom. 12:12). This particular sentence is part of a longer passage, beginning with verse 9 that I find to be a guide for living discipleship, and perhaps even more pointedly now, a guide for fulfilling the role of leadership.

By Richard Beaudette, OMI