Stewards of God's Delight

""The world is our parish and all her creatures our congregation."" Based on talks given to ordinands in Wales, this book presents the ministry as responding to God's call to be priestly stewards of creation and to participate in the blossoming of the new creation. Clavier engages with Scripture and people such as Augustine, Anselm, Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Julian of Norwich, Lancelot Andrewes, George Herbert, C. S. Lewis, N. T. Wright, and Rowan Williams to portray the whole ministry of God's people as being animated by the generosity, freedom, delight, and love of God. Our understanding of the ministry must break free from managerial philosophy and business know-how to recapture an approach to ministry that seeks to delight in God, neighbors, and all of creation in order to reveal the depth of God's love to a world increasingly immersed in mass consumption. ""Every Christian priest and minister is a gardener, tending God's creation and renewing it to bring forth blooms that radiate forth the creative love of the Trinity. In expounding this thesis so beautifully, Clavier offers an alternative, at once orthodox, Celtic, and ecologically contemporary, to dire visions of ministry as managed sympathy, or else as world-abandoning mission to isolated individuals. Here a return to the cure of souls is demanded, but seen as also the cure of the cosmos. Who could fail to be enthralled by this call?"" --Catherine Pickstock, Professor of Metaphysics and Poetics, Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge ""Stewards of God's Delight offers the church a vision of God's work that is enchanted by the triune God, in conversation with lost portions of the Christian tradition, and engaged with the needs of the world. Mark Clavier's inspirational work delivers the delight that its title promises and invites the reader to live out of God's generosity in new and life-giving ways. Read it for inspiration, vision, and a renewed sense of calling."" --Frederick W. Schmidt, Rueben P. Job Chair in Spiritual Formation, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary ""This book is a Mary to the church's Martha: in it Mark Clavier allows us to break free of the demoralizing distractions of worldly concerns to share his own experience of priestly ministry, inspired and sustained by a rich tradition that encounters God the Creator in a spontaneous delight in his work, his presence in others, and in ourselves. It is a gloriously subversive and liberating read for all God's creatures; not just ordinands!"" --Carol Harrison, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, University of Oxford ""Here is an account of ministry rooted in theology, not pragmatism, in God's gift rather than our plans, in abundance and in joy, not anxious assumptions of scarcity. With an eye on both the tradition and the work of the church today, in Stewards of God's Delight Mark Clavier proves to be a 'scribe trained for the kingdom': a steward who can bring out what is old and new from the treasure entrusted to him."" --Andrew Davison, Starbridge Lecturer in Theology and Natural Sciences, University of Cambridge; Fellow in Theology, Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge Mark Clavier is Acting Principal and Dean of Residential Training at St. Michael's Theological College in Llandaff, Wales, and Lecturer in Theology at Cardiff University. He served for over fifteen years in churches in Maryland, North Carolina and England. He is the author of Rescuing the Church from Consumerism and Eloquent Wisdom: Theology, Cosmology and Delight in the Theology of Augustine of Hippo.