The Crucifixion of Ministry E-Book

Andrew Purves

• Herausgeber: IVP
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Seitenzahl: 232

Beschreibung

As a pastor, do you ever get the feeling that no matter what you try, nothing much seems to change? That is because the ministries themselves are not redemptive--they are not up to you. Only Jesus' ministry is redemptive. Jesus has to "show up." Theologian Andrew Purves explores at the deepest level the true and essential nature of Christian ministry. He says that the attempt to be an effective minister is a major problem. Ministers are "in the way." He radically claims that ministries need to be crucified. They need to be killed off so that Christ can make them live. Rooting church service in Christ's own continuing ministry, Purves provides a vision for students and practicing clergy to reclaim the vital connection between Christ and participation in his ministry today, even if it means letting Christ put to death the ministries to which pastors cling so closely. A radical appraisal for a critical malady affecting the life of the Christian church written in plain, down-to-earth language.

Leseprobe

The Crucifixion of Ministry

Surrendering Our Ambitions to the Service of Christ

Andrew Purves

www.ivpress.com/books

InterVarsity Press P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426 World Wide Web: www.ivpress.com E-mail: [email protected]

©2007 by Andrew Purves

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press.

InterVarsity Press® is the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA®, a student movement active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, write Public Relations Dept., InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, 6400 Schroeder Rd., P.O. Box 7895, Madison, WI 53707-7895, or visit the IVCF website at www.intervarsity.org .

Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Design: Cindy Kiple

Images: José Carlos Pires Pereira/iStockphoto

ISBN 978-0-8308-7858-1 (digital) ISBN 978-0-8308-3439-6 (print)

Dedicated with respect to the courageous men and women who know something of the crucifixion of their ministries and yet keep the faith.

And with love to Cathy, as always a wonderful wife, a terrific friend and a faithful minister of Jesus Christ, who knows the pain and the hope of the crucifixion of ministry.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1: What’s in a Name?

2: Who Are You, Lord, and What Are You Up To?

3: The Crucifixion of Ministry

4: Getting in on Christ’s Ministry

5: Having Hitched a Ride

Benediction

Case Studies for Reflection

Name Index

Scripture Index

Praise for The Crucifixion of Ministry

About the Author

More Titles from InterVarsity Press

Preface

MY WIFE, CATHY, AND I WERE WALKING on the beach at the end of our vacation. We were musing on our imminent return to work, she to her congregation where she is minister, I to the seminary where I teach. She especially was struggling with the issues of ministry. Among a range of emotions she expressed frustration that no matter what she tried, nothing much seemed to change.

Suddenly, I mean out of the blue, I had the insight that there is little, maybe nothing, we who are ministers of the gospel can do that really changes things. If anything worthwhile is to happen, Jesus has to show up.

The insight was simple; yet it was very significant, even radical. By trade I am a pastoral theologian. I am supposed to know about the theory and theology of ministry. That moment on the beach marked my realization that our ministries themselves are not redemptive. Only the ministry of Jesus is redemptive.

As a professional theologian I sit on the sidelines and observe. I think, I teach and I write. Yet I have learned much from living with a wife who day in and day out works through the frustrations and the joys of ministry. Ministers can’t forgive sinners, raise the dead or bring in the kingdom of God. Neither can we grow congregations, convert sinners or heal the dying. Cathy’s pain has taught me that Jesus has to show up and do what he has promised to do.

Walking on the beach I was suddenly aware that our attempt to be effective ministers is a major problem. We are in the way. Our strategies, action plans, pastoral resources and entrepreneurial church revitalization techniques have become not the solution but the problem. Our ministries need to be crucified. They need to be killed off.

What if Jesus showed up? That’s our only hope. Our people don’t need us; they need Jesus. Our job is to bear witness to him, trusting that he continues to be the One who forgives, blesses, heals, renews, instructs and bring life out of death.

This book reworks some of the ground covered in my Reconstructing Pastoral Theology: A Christological Foundation (Westminster John Knox, 2004), though in a nontechnical manner. It also includes entirely new material. I have pushed my thinking far beyond the conclusions of my last book as I have developed the idea of the crucifixion of ministry and as I have outlined the structure of pastoral ministry as bearing witness, interpretation and symbolic action.

My thanks go out to the ministers in various groups and conferences where I spoke over the last couple of years. They told me I was on to something. Working with them is a great blessing for me. To students at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary who have sat in my classes and encouraged me—thank you. And finally, thanks to a terrific company of faculty colleagues. What a privilege to be part of something amazing that God is doing among us.

Introduction

Has God Killed Your Ministry Yet?

THE CRUCIFIXION OF MINISTRY IS GOOD NEWS! My goal in this book is to offer a perspective on ministry and illustrate a practice that liberates ministers from the grind of feeling that “it’s all up to me.” I have two themes:

Conceiving ministry as

our

ministry is the root problem of what ails us in ministry today.

Ministry should be understood as a sharing in the continuing ministry of Jesus Christ, for wherever Christ is, there is the church and her ministry.

I intend for my writing to be readily accessible to busy, tired, somewhat depressed, midcareer and fed-up ministers who can’t carry the load of ministry any longer. I hope that some selfstyled successful ministers will also read it and find a wholly new way to be in ministry.

What God Is Up To

I begin where ministry must always begin, with the practice of God. By that I mean what God is up to. The practice of God is not an easy concept. The most important point is this: God is an actor in our present experience. We would not know God otherwise. Do I believe that Jesus is the living, reigning and acting Lord? Everything hinges on a positive answer.

The question involves an either-or. Here is the either: If Jesus is properly understood to be nothing more than a continuing moral influence, then it is up to us to actualize and achieve everything in faith, life and ministry. Jesus becomes powerless and is of little help. Like a fossil trapped in amber, Jesus is locked into an abstract and theoretical theological system. He is an idea which we must somehow incarnate as best we can to make him and his cause effective today. Having given us a moral code and ministerial imperatives, he now sits on the sidelines of the cosmos, arms folded, waiting for us to do something. The best we can hope for is a cheerleader Christ. He cheers us on when we do well, but he is not involved in the game.

Get Jesus wrong by consigning him to be only metaphorically alive as a continuing moral influence, and what is left? A ministry experience that inevitably bounces between guilt and burnout. We labor under the weight of the ministerial imperative: do it. But we soon discover we can’t do it at all.

Now here is the or: Jesus is God active in the life of the world, in our personal lives and in ministry at every turn. The issue is not How does Jesus get in on our ministries? Instead, because he is the living and reigning Lord, the issue is now What is he up to, and how do I hitch a ride on whatever he is up to?

Where Christ Is, There Is the Church

We find the answers in the classical Christian doctrines of our participation through union with Christ in his vicarious humanity and ministry. Everything is cast back on to him, onto God who is present for us by the Spirit, onto Jesus Christ who is the same yesterday, today and forever. Because ministry is what Jesus does, ministry is properly understood as gospel rather than law and as grace rather than obligation.

The first and central question in thinking about ministry is Who is Jesus Christ and what is he up to? The answer leads to the second question: How do we get in on Jesus’ ministry? This is my way of restating a very old doctrine. It is thought to have been stated first by Ignatius of Antioch from the end of the first Christian century at the close of the apostolic age: Where Christ is, there is the church (ubi Christus, ibi ecclesia). We can also mimic how the twentieth century Swiss theologian Karl Barth said it: It is not Jesus Christ who needs our ministries; it is our ministries that need Jesus Christ. So my dictum is Wherever Christ is present in ministry, there my ministry may be found. It is the implication for ministry in Jesus’ words, “Apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).

Displaced Ministry

Exploring these issues will bring us to the difficult awareness that our ministries must be displaced by the ministry of Jesus. Displacement is more than relinquishment. Displacement is not an invitation to let Jesus take over by letting him in on our territory. Rather, we must be bumped aside firmly, perhaps mortifyingly. Otherwise we will never let go of our grip on our ministries. We are too attached to them and to their payoff, even if at times the payoff is negative.

Displacement literally means the death of our ministries. All that we think we should do and can do and are doing in ministry must be put to death. Why? Because too often our ministries are in the way. Even when we conduct them from the best spiritual, therapeutic and moral motives, they are not redemptive. Only the ministry of Jesus is redemptive.

Crucifixion: Good News

I call the process of displacement “the crucifixion of ministry” because in Christian thought crucifixion carries the concept of redemption. The crucifixion of Jesus is staggering good news of our salvation. The crucifixion of ministry by the process of painful displacement by the ministry of Jesus is staggering good news for ministers and for the people among whom we minister. The crucifixion of ministry is the ground for the redemption of our ministries. For us, the ministers, it is the source of hope, joy and peace in our service.

None of this should come as a surprise. Jesus told us to take up our cross daily—to die daily—and follow him (Luke 9:23). Paul writes of being crucified with Christ (Galatians 2:19). Why would our ministries not be included in that crucifixion?

The Christian theology of baptism reminds us that as we have died with Christ, so also we will be raised with Christ (Romans 6:4; Colossians 2:12). Paul sums up all Christian living this way: “You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). We should expect that our ministries too should die, even be killed, that they may be raised with Christ.

You Just Nailed Me!

When I speak at conferences about the crucifixion of ministry, ministers often approach me afterward and say, “You just nailed me!” It is an especially appropriate response to the idea of the crucifixion of ministry! I find, however, that seminary students rarely internalize and appropriate the lesson of the crucifixion of ministry and the theology behind it. Perhaps we have to be bashed about in ministry for a while before we learn that the crucifixion of ministry is God’s gift.

The theology of the vicarious humanity and ministry of Christ, which is the theological foundation for much of my argument, is not difficult to grasp at a cognitive level, but it is difficult to internalize so that it begins to deeply and redemptively form our ministry. A former Doctor of Ministry student wrote to me that “I find it easy to talk a good game about how Christ is the one sanctifying us, but more often than I care to admit, in practice I minister like a Pelagian.” The truth of Christ in our stead must convert us in heart and mind, seeping deeply into our ministerial souls, until it reorders our homiletical and pastoral practice according to the ministry of the living, acting and reigning Lord Jesus.

A Dull Christmas Eve

Cathy, my wife, is minister of a small urban Presbyterian congregation in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I was sitting with my adult children during a moderately dull Christmas Eve service. The attendance was rather poor. The choir seemed a bit off and unenergetic. At the beginning of the sermon a couple of under-fives got free from their parents and began to noisily roam the pews, which was charming but made it hard to concentrate on what Cathy was saying.

Later that night I confessed to Cathy that I had really struggled with my annoyance at small congregations. I recall thinking, “I bet my friend Craig Barnes at Shadyside [a large, prosperous city congregation] is putting on a great show tonight.” Then a truth dawned on me! I had spent part of the day writing this chapter, and in the evening I had already forgotten what I had written.

I came into the Christmas Eve service demanding excellence in musical and homiletical performance. My attitude was What will they do to give me a Christmas Eve spiritual high? With a prideful sense of entitlement I had focused on the ministry of the musicians and the preacher. I realized with sadness that I had looked at the finger rather than at what the finger was pointing to, the ministry of God with and for us. The service was not about the choir’s performance, the quality of the sermon (which actually was very good) or the meditative calm of the sanctuary. It was about the celebration of the birth of Emmanuel, who in the Spirit was present there with us. And I had missed it!

Christ’s Ministry in Our Place

We have to move away from thinking about ministry and all its attendant strategies, programs and processes, and think rather of Christ’s ministry in our place and what it means that we are connected to him. The form and content of our ministry will then take an explicitly christological content and shape. The change is hard for us because it means that ministry is no longer about us and our skills. It is now about the real presence of Jesus Christ, whenever and wherever in his gracious freedom and love he is Emmanuel, God with us. The actuality of his ministry is what makes our ministry possible.

Today we are living and serving through a very difficult time. It is difficult because of the decline of the huge intellectual experiment called the Enlightenment, the emergence of postmodernity and the breakdown of all the great systems of thought that characterized the modern age. In that context my goal is to affirm and explore for the practice of ministry the radically converting truth spoken by John the Baptist, “He [Jesus] must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30).

Clergy Burnout

What is happening to us, we who are the ministers of Jesus Christ? Many of us are professionally, spiritually and financially depressed. The figures produced by studies only serve to quantify what we have bitterly experienced for ourselves. Something is very wrong, and the costs—personal, spiritual, familial and financial, as well as congregational—are terrifying.

For example, one respected study concluded that around 40 percent of Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod clergy suffer from mild to severe burnout. From my experience teaching doctor of ministry students for a quarter of a century, I believe the same experience is common across all denominations. Our stress levels are at a medically significant level. Denominational health insurance agencies report that medical costs for clergy are higher than for any other professional group!

Another report, a summary of which was written by Michael Jinkins of Austin Theological Seminary and published by the respected Alban Institute in 2002, is poignantly titled “Great Expectations: Sobering Realities.” Of the study’s sample group, 62 percent of ministers have little spiritual life! Excessive demands on time, conflicts within congregations and between ministers and members, loss of personal spiritual life and loneliness account for a deep malaise within our professional and personal lives.

Each of the following stories is true, although appropriately disguised. Jack, a nationally known minister in a prestigious suburban congregation, told me that although it never actually happened, he could hear in his mind the heavy steps of the personnel committee marching down the hall to his office to tell him it’s time to go. Paranoid? Maybe. But it led to an unhappy, anxious ministry. Then there is Jean, my former student, who came weeping to my front door one evening, unable to take any longer the relentless refusal of the leaders of her small rural congregation to participate in any kind of Christian formation and education. “They want a chaplain, not a minister,” she complained to me. Bob’s ministry is nearly hamstrung over issues between him and a leading family in his congregation concerning war with Iraq, the national flag in the sanctuary and on church grounds, “God Bless America” days (even Mother’s Day!) and the congregation’s right to sing national songs. There is Tony, who can’t cope with the stress of a wife with severe diabetes, three young children and a salary which does not enable him to pay off his $40,000 college and seminary debt. Finally there is Mary, reduced to quivering anxiety over the local denominational pressure to “go missional,” leading to worship wars in her congregation and terrific conflict with the choir and organist. She feels that the word from denominational authorities is “grow your congregation or you’re out.” In an area where new paradigm congregations have exploding memberships, Mary feels depressed and anxious. She feels like a failure, with plummeting confidence in the capacity of the faithful exercise of Word and sacraments to deliver the results demanded.

Theology Wars

Then there is war on the larger front. Theological debates and denominational politics often display levels of intensifying toxicity that mirror the style and tone of national politics. Organized theological caucuses within denominations significantly drain ministerial energies. There is nowhere to hide from the battles over homosexuality and ordination, inclusive language, the Trinity, Christology, missional or justice agendas, contemporary or traditional worship and so on. So-called mainline pastors minister in the midst of doubt that the major denominations will hold together much longer. All sense of a shared history and a common theological and worship identity are breaking down. For many ministers, the trend of declining membership hits home at the congregational level with an accompanying sense of failure.

Ministry is just not much fun anymore. Of course ministry has always been difficult. Weariness is par for the course. Spiritual embattlement is to be expected. We are not in it for the money. The social status of ministers is low and likely to remain so. I am told that on one sociologist’s ranking we are just below a factory foreman. That may not be so bad, but we once held professional status equal to the professions of law and medicine. We are tired, often overworked, usually overstressed and underpaid, theologically confused, often ill-educated for the tasks before us, bored and probably guilty for feeling that way.

Whatever the reasons, national figures show that around one-third of ordained persons leave the ministry after five years, never to return.

It’s that bad! The rest of us continue to drag ourselves out of bed in the morning and labor on.

Flawed Education

While I recognize the danger of sweeping generalizations, it appears that something has gone very wrong in the education, nurture and employment expectations of ministers. Those of us in theological education go round and round discussing what to do about it. Year after year we hear the stories of pain from our Doctor of Ministry students. Candor insists that we have been and are part of the problem, just as we must be part of the solution.

I believe that a broadly liberal theology, especially the dilution of classical Christology and decreased interest in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, have produced a couple of generations of ministers with a theology that fails at the congregational level. The theologians in mainline seminaries have swallowed the bait of accommodation to the dictates of Enlightenment philosophies. The Enlightenment project is now in serious and hopefully terminal decline. As a result, the theological generations who hitched their wagons to its engine are now in disarray.

“Theological reductionism” is a term which means reducing God to fit modern predetermined human categories of experience or rationality. It sometimes known as foundationalism. By either name it does not grow congregations or lead to fulfillment in ministry. Read John Hick’s book The Metaphor of God Incarnate: Christology in a Pluralist Age (Westminster John Knox, 2005), and then ask yourself if this is your hope in ministry and your hope for your congregation.

Bumper Sticker Truth

Now I come to tell you what you already know and prayerfully trust to be true. Jesus is the answer. The bumper sticker had it right all along, although I want to spend the rest of this book exploring exactly what it means for ministry.

I believe there is a theological answer for our malaise and disappointment in ministry. The answer has to do with our understanding of God and how we connect to whatever God is up to. My concern is not with complex academic concepts and arguments but with the real and actual practice of God. If theology is talk about God, I will not be content to only talk about talk about God. I want to dare to talk about God. I will put into words what I think God is up to and what it means for our ministries when we share in the actions of God.

A Summary

The ministry of Jesus is the ministry of God. That is what most of our creedal and confessional language concerning Jesus Christ is about.

Jesus’ ministry is not merely a past influence that reaches into the present. It is at once historical, present and future.

Wherever Christ is, there is the church. By sharing in the life of Jesus, we thereby share in God’s continuing ministry. This is the doctrine of our union with Christ, which is the principal work of the Holy Spirit. It is Christ, not we, who does the ministry.

In what follows I will develop the doctrines of the vicarious humanity and ministry of Jesus and show their significance for us as ministers of the gospel. Then I will look at an approach to ministry characterized as participation in Christ. When we understand ministry in this ancient way, we will find Jesus’ words true, “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:30).

An Ongoing Crucifixion

Now a word about the book’s title, for it tells much about the journey we are about to take. The accounts given above of experiences in ministry amount to a kind of ongoing crucifixion. Ministry kills us with regard to our ego needs, desire for power and success and the persistent wish to feel competent and in control.

It does not take us long to discover that we cannot heal the sick, raise the dead, calm the demonized, guide the morally afflicted, sober up the alcoholic, make the wife beater loving, calm the anxious, pacify the conflicted, control the intemperate, have answers to all the “Why?” questions, give the teenagers a moral compass and preach magnificent sermons every week, all the while growing the congregation and keeping the members happy. We preach and teach, do the round of pastoral visitations and administer the congregation’s life, while the soreheads more often than not remain soreheaded, the stubborn remain stubborn, the quarrelsome remain quarrelsome and the stupid seem to get no wiser. Meanwhile people continue to get sick and die, argue and get divorced, lose their jobs and get depressed.

Elijah’s Experience

For many years I have taken Elijah’s story in 1 Kings 19 as a paradigm. Elijah has just pulled off a dramatic and successful confrontation with the prophets of Baal. But as soon as Jezebel finds out about it, Elijah takes off into the wilderness. He succumbs to fear and flight. His ministry is in shambles. He hides in a cave, reminding us of the depressed state of the discouraged minister. God tells him to go out onto the mountain. After the pyrotechnics of wind, earthquake and fire comes “a sound of sheer silence” (1 Kings 19:12). The unexplainable voice of God commands him to do the unthinkable: “Go, return” (1 Kings 19:15). Elijah experienced the crucifixion of ministry. Henceforth for Elijah ministry was possible only on the basis of the Word of God.

Two Seasons of Dying

I suspect there are two major crucifixions or seasons of dying in ministry. The first happens early on, as studies now show. After seven years of higher education, great expectations of service in the Lord’s vineyard often turn to sad and angry disappointment. About one third of those in early ministry leave, never to return. This is a major death, full of deep disenchantment and at times embittered recriminations. It is a personal, familial, fiscal and ecclesiastical disaster.

The second crucifixion is more subtle and less dramatic. It moves in on us more slowly and insidiously than the rapid, stunning disillusionment of the first crucifixion. It is more profound and in its way more deadly. Once endured and understood, it may usher in a resurrected theological conversion that makes ministry possible for the first time. It is the deep death and the real raising of our ministries. I suspect there are no surveys to consult here, and the timeframe is likely different in each case. There are no Kübler-Ross-like categories, but here is my impression of the typical order of events.

Once the first crucifixion is survived, the minister begins to realize the need for some serious skill learning beyond what the seminary offered. Further education may take the form of a doctor of ministry degree, which offers peer learning, theological retooling and skill enhancing. Some of us travel for a while in the rich pastures of spiritual renewal, all to our spiritual good. We begin to make our way along the career track. Workshops, conferences and seminars are grist to the surviving minister’s professional mill. The pastoral tool bag gets filled up with all kinds of ministerial accoutrements, although sadly most ministers in North America are not reading very much these days.

Then somewhere along the way—ten, fifteen, twenty years out, who knows when or what circumstances precipitate the process—a terrible awareness begins to dawn. Now the hurt is deeper than before because it goes all the way down to the core of our being. It’s not only a professional crisis; it is also a shattering crisis of faith. It is a theological crisis.

An inadequate theology leads to deep pain. I can’t do this. I can’t convert them. I can’t heal them. I can’t give them hope or make them happy or pray like Peter or preach like Paul. I can barely understand the theology books anymore, even when I carve out the time and energy to try to read them. My drawer full of pastoral, homiletical and administrative skills is impressive. The weight of experience is a great comfort to me, for I now know how to survive in a parish. But something inside tells me that the whole ministry enterprise is turning to sawdust. Inside I feel I can’t bury any more babies, listen to any more divorcing couples, conduct marriages for any more pregnant girls, listen to any more tales of cancer diagnoses, conduct funerals for any more friends or preach the Beatitudes again. I have weathered too many arguments over the color of the church carpets, the brand of cookie for Bible school and bulletin covers for Mother’s Day. The yoke is too heavy and the burden is too great to bear. Maybe I also discover that I am just plain bored.