for Revd Marion Millin

delivered by Revd Dr Bill Loader at Manning Uniting Church, 29 March, 1998

Marion,

You are to be ordained a Deacon in the Church of God. In the Uniting Church to be a deacon is to be a pioneer in an ancient form of ministry revived and redefined. Much that you will do will also be done by other orders of ministry within the Church. You are a Deacon, bound together within the overlapping roles exercised by many ministries within the Church and giving distinctive expression to the ministry to which God calls us all.

You are called to lead in service, to alert us to care, to disturb us by opening new vistas of solidarity and compassion. As we respond to the Word you will hold possibilities before us. You will help us give shape to our caring and our ministries. You will lead us willingly or reluctantly to the face of change, to the boundaries where we must decide to risk, to the bridges we can cross.

You will slip and slide your away across streams densely thicketed with ambiguity. You will sometimes fall and lift yourself drenched from the stream. You will come before arms scratched by the undergrowth and asking for prayer, leading in prayer and calling for action.

At other times you will race across fallen logs and dare quickly into new terrain with clear vision and great confidence. It will be easy to follow. Sometimes the bridge will be broad with room for all of us to follow comfortably arm in arm many abreast into the obvious. Sometimes you will invite us to slip and slide with you across full running streams or you will lead us to the people who sleep under the bridge, to the dark places, the inconvenient hovels eked out in the hollows of poverty beneath our wealthy structures.

Sometimes your work will be invisible, at least to those above on the wide bridge. it will be lonely and unattended. Sometimes your caring will be plain and undramatic, sitting, listening, taking time, expensive time, to hear two minutes of pain over two hours. Your mind will protest about limitations of time and space, about the people you must pass by or never reach. You will face the choice to add to the world’s pain your own refusal to accept your limitations and humanity or acknowledge your own need for space and time and caring,

There will be room to be a hero and heroine. There will be the buzz of danger, the excitement of adventure, the indulgence of being needed. But you are not called to adventure world. You are not even called to serve as a lone individual. You are called to live, to live in the compassion and grace of Christ which will have room for you to rise and to fall, to need and share the life that gives you life. Your rest will be as important as your work, your prayer as your action, your being nourished as your nourishing.

You are not alone. Yours is a ministry within ministries. yours is a ministry within Christ’s ministry Yours is a ministry within the compassion of God which will send you out and call you back and send you out and call you back, the rhythm of the breathing of the Spirit.

May God’s Spirit rest upon you for this task, Christ’s love lead you to cross bridges, and God the source of all life nurse your soul.

Marion, deacon, minister, servant, crosser of bridges, we rejoice in your ministry.

In the name of Christ. Amen.