Liturgy for the Labors of Community
Every Moment Holy
“May our love and our labors now echo your love and your labors, O Lord. Let all that we do here, in these our brief lives, in this our brief moment to love, in this the work you have ordained for this community, flower in winsome and beautiful foretaste of greater glories yet to come. O Spirit of God, now shape our hearts. O Spirit of God, now guide our hands. O Spirit of God, now build Your kingdom among us. Amen.”
When I was working in higher education, conversations around vision and culture were common topics. We would discuss “tone setting” and “vision casting” as often as we discussed the local game or the new special at our favorite restaurant. It was common for our office to focus on casting the vision for our team on why we do what we do.
As I thought through how I wanted to cast the vision to my team, I thought through how to communicate that the work we do is integrated into our lives because it is all-encompassing–
It is compassion integrated with accountability
It is tenacity integrated with grace
It is faith integrated into our work
When I thought through our vision of why we do what we do and how we go about this work, I looked for a shared language and I landed on this liturgy–the “Liturgy for the Labors of Community” from Every Moment Holy. It became the liturgy–the prayer–that I read repeatedly. I would read it to myself before I trained my team and then I would read it to my team. I would even come back to it periodically throughout the semester to realign our focus.
It became our framework. It encompassed what I needed it to–remembering that all this is by Christ and for Christ’s glory and that our labors, our work, were for the good of our community. It became the shared language for my team to understand integrating faith into our work.
As this became our language, it created the structure for our team that allowed us to keep our focus on serving for the good of our community and for the glory of God.
It created a culture on the team where we did these three things regularly:
Empathetic listening. We would listen with the posture of being willing to be changed by what we just heard. If someone brought a new idea or new insight into the situation, we would add that into the equation instead of dismissing it and pushing forward with our own agenda.
Compassionate accountability. It was a regular practice to speak truth tenderly and integrate compassion into accountability. The primary focus was that the person sitting across from you was an image bearer, Imago Dei, and the words spoken needed to be ones of dignity even in conversations of accountability.
Grit and grace. The pace of our work was fast, the priorities were ever-changing, and the teams involved were constantly in need of attention and direction. It required a level of tenacity and resiliency that without shared language and vision–could easily become a breeding ground for tension and dissension.
The shared language became a shared vision which became a shared culture. For our team, it started with reading a liturgy that reminded us that the work ahead of us was from God and for His glory. It shaped how we went about the work, but more importantly, it reminded us that God is shaping us through the work, as well. My hope and my prayer for your team and mine is this—
May our love and our labors now echo your love and your labors, O Lord.
