Zacharias Mor Nicholovos

Our Mission: To Serve or to Preserve?

At the Christian Family Conference in Austin, TX on July 2, 2004

The term ministry or service most often brings to our minds a liturgical sense. Sometimes it may mean to us a series of actions. However, I think that neither of these is the sense in which we need to understand the ministry of the church.

Church needs to serve the entire humanity, the entire world. As the body of Christ, that is what the church is called for. Our calling is not for a privilege over the rest of the humanity, but for a responsibility. This calling does not make us superior to others. We are the prodigal son, who comes back to the father willing to be a servant.

Service is not just an action we do for a certain goal. On the other hand, it is our very nature to serve. Why did Francis of Assissi call a donkey his brother? Not for anything. It comes from his very being of humility and willingness to serve.

If we serve expecting something in return, we are just like the older brother of the prodigal son. Christ showed us a different way. If we are His followers, we will act like the prodigal son, and not like his older brother.

Let us have a look at our parishes. Does a parish of ours serve the community of people in that city? To me a parish of ours looks like a club. It has its subscribed members, and only they can enjoy the privileges offered by this club. We are not happy to include in our Sunday school the children of the non-members, are we? I remember an incident when an African-American woman happened to come to a parish of ours. She was new in that neighborhood, and just went there on a Sunday morning. The presence of this woman created tremendous confusion in our parish members. That was way beyond what they could handle.

For many of us, church is nothing but our nostalgia. We used to have similar traditions back in India when we were there, and we like to have them here too. We used to go to Qurbana on Sunday mornings, and we just want to continue it. We need to ask ourselves if church means anything more than that to us.

We often blame our children for going to the other churches. Are we, the adults, any better by not doing so? Not really. We are not going to the other churches only because our church satisfies our nostalgia, and we feel uncomfortable in other churches. Our children are inquisitive and have an open mind. They want to find out how others are similar to or different from us. We adults lack such a sense of inquisitiveness or open mind. We just want to satisfy our nostalgia!

When I was taking classes in a university here in the US, a professor once remarked that I look as if I have come straight out of the history page. Although it is an innocent remark, it made me think. Doesn't our church just belong to the history? Does it have any relevance today?

We often claim to serve the humanity by preserving our faith and tradition. Let us think for a moment! What do we preserve? Something alive and dynamic need not be preserved. We need to preserve only the dead or dying things. When we claim that we are preserving our faith, we are indirectly admitting that ours is a dead or dying movement. Now the question we need to ask ourselves is this: do we want to be alive or dead? If we want to be alive, we need to turn from preserving to serving. The choice is ours!

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