The Daily Five: Necessary for Healthy Living

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

            Please do not laugh at what I am about to tell you.  I was reading The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church:  2008 as a personal devotional exercise.  Seriously, paragraph 340 concentrates on “Responsibilities and Duties of Elders and Licensed Pastors”.  That means I was re-reading the section about the activities of a person called to make disciples of Jesus Christ as an ordained clergyperson in the United Methodist Church.  The list is long, even onerous.  Under four major headings (of “Word, Sacrament, Order, and Service”) one finds a listing of 36 specific or sub-specific items.  Here is one that received my attention:  “To build the body of Christ as a caring and giving community, extending the ministry of Christ to the world”.

            Since the time of St. Augustine, the pastor held the primary responsibility of building the community of faith within a local congregation.  The pastor served as a shepherd guiding the community toward those things for building community and away from those things distracting, even destroying, community.  I hurdled past centuries of sacred thinking from Augustine’s life in the 4th and 5th centuries, and I started meditating on my calling as a pastor as reflected in the Daily Five.

1. How did my pastoral work lend positively toward radical hospitality?
2. When did my pastoral work lead in the area of passionate worship?
3. Where was my spiritual life growing as a result of intentional faith development?
4. Whose life was made better and easier because of my risk-taking mission and service?
5. What measures of extravagant generosity emerged from giving time, money, and skills and abilities?

One point all of us learned in our studies of the Daily Five is that none of these exist in isolation.  For a positive outcome in risk-taking mission, there is a requirement of extravagant generosity matching time, talents, and finances to the mission.  For passionate worship to occur, there must be a visible form of radical hospitality, and there must be an opportunity for intentional faith development that transforms lives.

The Daily Five are like the primary food groups and the essential vitamins a human body requires in order to be healthy.  Why not ask yourself the five questions I named above?  One does not have to be an ordained pastor to apply these questions.  To tell the truth, all five are central practices for living faithfully as a disciple.

Grace and peace,

Rev. Charles Murry