Secular or Religious or Spiritual or What?

As usual Greg is on his toes and caught me again with something that he knows I don't truly accept. That is the separation of secular and religious. Yet on Sunday I fell into the trap that I work so hard to break down.

As many of you already know I consider my work as a counselor as "secular ministry" as opposed to what we call "ministry" in the context of the church. So I said in the post on Sunday: What a calling it is to follow Him in the non-religious world.

Well, here's what Greg said:

I haven't explored this in a rigorous way, but I often think that what is implied in Jesus' message is that healing the sick, etc. IS religious, that there is no separation between religious and secular, and that those separations, if indeed they do exist, collapse with loving action...

Caught. Busted. Of course it's religious, spiritual, God-centered. It is so difficult to find language to overcome other language that doesn't make sense when that other language has become so entrenched in our cultural.

We have set up a false and possibly heretical concept of clergy versus lay people. Or the idea of professional clergy who do the ministry of the church. Or church versus secular; spiritual versus the non-spiritual; body versus soul.

Sadly I don't expect The Church to recognize what I do as part of its ministry. Not the way it recognizes the ministry of the clergy. I'm not sure it should. But what often are the most amazing acts of ministry are those found in the highways and by-ways of life where God is at work in the ways God always works- in loving actions.

So I stand corrected and reminded. Until we can break down the separation that we have made between the world and God; of the world of matter and the world of the spirit, we will be a much poorer people.