AGORA XXI: BLOG OF THE COMMUNITY OF SAINT PAUL

REFLECTION

TEAM WORK IN THE CHURCH 

(Thoughts about the readings for the 29^th Sunday in Ordinary Time)

This Sunday’s second reading is from the letter of Saint Paul to the Thessalonians (1 Thes 1:1-5b). Did you know that this letter is the most ancient New Testament writing we have? Yes, among the letters of Saint Paul we have in the New Testament, 1^st Thessalonians is dated to be the oldest. And because Paul wrote before the evangelists, this letter is the first New Testament writing that mentions Jesus.

It is very interesting to note that at the beginning of the letter, the initial greeting is not made by Paul alone. Silvanus and Timothy together with Paul are the senders of this letter to the church in Thessalonica. I found this to be a great teaching for our Church today. In our time personal achievement is so overemphasized; here you have a “team” working for the Church at its origins. Every time we think about the letters of Paul we think of them as coming from one single author. Well, it may be that Paul wrote them from his own hand and the letter was composed mostly by his words, but the greeting of 1^st Thessalonians suggests an interesting nuance. Paul was part of a team, and although he might have been the leader, he was evangelizing along with others. If you read the rest of the letter you would notice that he uses the pronoun we instead of I.  This letter was the message of a team of leaders, which together were founding churches for the glory of God.

How do we understand this in our reality today? How do we work in the Church? We should aim to work as a team, and enjoy our faith as one team too. Actually that is the meaning of Church: we are an assembly that is constituted by many. It may be that for society we are “individuals,” but for God we are a family, a Church. Society will expect for us to be individuals; that is the presumption of Caesar’s tax law: each one ought to pay. But for God we are a family; a community of brothers and sisters that help each other and whose problems and loads are shared, not individualized. Let us then give to God what he expects from us, to be a community and to serve others; and let us follow the example of Paul, Silvanus and Timothy and leave behind any personal merit. 

José Mario Nieto