Ministry is

• a quality of relationship between and among human beings that beckons forth hidden possibilities;
• inviting people into deeper, more constant, more reverent relationship with the world and with one another;
• carrying forward a long heritage of hope and liberation that has dignified and informed the human venture over many centuries;
• being present with, to, and for others in their terrors and torments; in their grief, misery and pain; knowing that those feelings are our feelings, too;
• celebrating the triumphs of the human spirit, the miracles of birth and life, the wonders of devotion and sacrifice;
• witnessing to life-enhancing values;
• speaking truth to power;
• speaking for human dignity and equity, for compassion and aspiration;
• believing in life in the presence of death;
• struggling for human responsibility against principalities and structures that ignore humaneness and become instruments of death.

It is all these and much, much more than all of them, present in the wordless, the unspoken, the ineffable.

It is speaking and living the highest we know and living with the knowledge that it is never as deep, or as wide or a high as we wish.

Whenever there is a meeting that summons us to our better selves, wherever

• our lostness is found,
• our fragments are united,
• our wounds begin healing,
• our spines stiffen and
• our muscles grow strong for the task,

there is ministry.