This week I officially begin my Mentored Ministry for my divinity education at Mars Hill Graduate School.  For the next 8 months I will be working as the Narrator at a church plant in the Northgate community of Seattle.

I am incredibly grateful that I get to have such an opportunity.  Rob Gillgrist, the pastor as well as a collegue and friend is truly a mentor of mine.  His grace, strength, and chameleon use of language are attributes that I hope to learn a little something about.  Also, being that it is a church plant many of the ’systems’ are open-ended, or not developed, and so it will be fun to help narrate such a formative and forming church.

But you may be asking the question, a narrater?  What in the world does a narrator do?  For a brief snipit of this let me quote answers.com — “A person who tells a story; in literature, the voice that an author takes on to tell a story. This voice can have a personality quite different from the author’s.”

“Ok, that’s great Joel, definitions are good, but it is only a definition, what are you going to be doing?”

Well, I’m glad you asked.  Right now, and this is destined to change, I will be listening to the story that is unfolding at Wits’ End Church as well as the Northgate community.  I will then be crafting these scenes into a story, and a language, that will hopefully skew the ’seen’ just enough so that something of the ‘unseen’ can be felt and seen.

peace

Joel