The Relational Pastor E-Book

Andrew Root

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

Seitenzahl: 494

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

One of the Academy of Parish Clergy's "Top 10 Books for Parish Ministry" When is the last time you asked yourself hard questions about why you were pursuing certain relationships in your ministry? Could it be that the end game for many of us is not relationship per se but loyalty, adherence, even submission? The sheep in our flock become the means to our end: pastoring becomes less about the people of God and more about maintenance of the status quo—and, if we are willing to recognize it, the elevation of our pastoral status. Here practical theologian Andy Root dissects relational ministry as we have come to understand it and searches for the seed of a more wholesome, more pastoral understanding of the relationships for which God has prepared the church: the place where, when two or more are gathered in his name, Christ is present.

Leseprobe

The Relational Pastor

Sharing in Christ By Sharing Ourselves

Andrew Root

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

© 2012 by Andrew Root

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 movement of students and faculty 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. While all stories in this book are true, some names and identifying information have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved. Stories are shared with permission.

Design: Cindy Kiple Images: silhouette of crowd: © Kirsty Pargeter/iStockphoto green texture: © hudiemm/iStockphoto silhouette of urban crowd: © edge69/iStockphoto

ISBN 978-0-8308-6463-8 (digital)

To Kara

My friend, my wife, my pastor, my heart

Contents

Preface

1: Reshifting Pastoral Ministry

2: New Energy, New Communications, New Consciousness . . . New Ministry

3: Transitioning from the Pastor as Self-Help Entertainer

4: Sipping the Sweet, Hard Liquor of Individualism

5: All the Lonely People

6: What Is a Person?

7: Empathy, It’s a Spirit Thing

8: Can I Read Your Mind?

9: New Visions of Incarnational Ministry

10: Relational Ministry as Gift

11: Sharing Is More Than What You Learned in Kindergarten

12: The Place Between

12: ¾ A Quick Pauline Excursion

13: Will You Pray for Me?

14: What This Looks Like

15: I’ve Got to Run the Church Don’t I?

Appendix

Notes

Index

Praxis page

About the Author

Endorsements

Preface

My friend and teacher Kenda Creasy Dean calls me “a well socialized introvert,” and it’s true, I am a severe introvert. Apart from the juxtaposition of loving to stand up in front of large rooms and talk, I prefer to be alone, to be in my head reading, writing or most wonderfully watching TV. As an introvert I’m far more energized by time by myself than with others. I feel particularly stretched and exhausted by things like elementary school carnivals, small talk in elevators and dinner parties with (even good) acquaintances. (Though I can imagine I’m not alone with the carnival thing!)

This very confession makes it quite odd for someone like me to write this book on relationships. This book makes the claim that at our core we human beings are our relationships, that God encounters us in relationships and that pastoral ministry at its base is about facilitating relational encounters. It seems a contradiction that a loner introvert would conceive of such a perspective.

But I see it differently. I’ve come to recognize that the very fact that I possess this personal disposition gives me a perspective on the depth and mystery of relationships themselves. Because relationships are not a reflex for me, I’ve been forced to think deeply about them. And when reflecting on my own experience I’ve been overcome by the spiritual significance relationship has played in my life (even in the life of a TV-loving introvert). When I’m broken, afraid and needing to celebrate, like an impulse I (again, the severe introvert) seek out others; I need others to share with me, to share in me. There is something about relationship that is deeper than the introvert-extrovert personal traits; there is something about the human spirit that yearns (needs at the deepest level) for others to share in our lives.

This book you hold is for pastors; that is its primary audience. But it is a book, I hope, with ramifications beyond the vocation of pastor, connecting to the whole of the Christian life. Nevertheless, in these pages the pastor is the focus. It is a book for pastors which seeks to ignite the imagination on how relationships draw us into the very presence of Christ. It is a book that critiques the way we pastors have used relationships in the past, thinking that our ministries need to be relational because the relationship can win us the loyalty we need to get people to come and stay at our church.

My goal with this book is to make a case that “relationship” is the very goal (not a tool) of ministry. That in sharing in each other’s lives we share in God’s own life through Jesus Christ. I look to place the theological, the spiritual, within the concrete practice of ministry.

As an introvert focused to reflect on my relationships, it has been clear to me that in those moments where God moved—those moments where what is dead in me gave way to life—that others, that relationships, were present. Our relationships are the very field, the very place, where God is encountered.

Pastoral ministry can be nothing more and nothing less than making space for people to encounter the very presence of God. Here, in this book, I claim that space is created in the sharing of relationships of persons.

This is a book born out of my own work of training and educating pastors for the last eight years, listening to their stories and hearing their challenges. It is a book born out of not only teaching pastors but living with one. My wife, Kara, who shows up in these pages, is a pastor, is my pastor. I’ve watched her lead a small church with skill, sensitivity and theological depth. I’ve watched her do this from the inside; I’ve listened to her as she articulates the frustrations, fears and many failures that come with this calling. This is a book, I dearly hope, that is sensitive to the pastor’s experience. While I desire for it to push and prod, I yearn for it to do so in appreciation for the pastor her- or himself.

This is a book about the relationships of persons, and there are many such persons who have blessed me in the journey of writing this book. Dave Zimmerman, my editor, has worked hard to make this book tight and readable. As an editor Dave is all an author could ask for, someone with wisdom, intellectual depth and appreciation for the process of writing. This is actually my second project that seeks to explore the issue of relationships in ministry, and Dave Zimmerman was behind the first as well.

The first project, Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry, explored relationships in the context of youth ministry. I received word from many (mainly youth workers) who read that first book that they wished I would broaden the audience so their pastor too would wrestle with the ideas. I did end up writing a more popular version of the youth ministry book for Zondervan, but resisted a broader text, not because I didn’t think it would translate but because I wasn’t interested in writing a derivative book that somehow simply replaced “youth pastor” with “pastor.” But as time went on I saw some exciting new ways of making the argument (particularly with neuroscience and the hypostatic union). So with the blessing and wisdom of Dave, I have, in no small terms, pulled down the structure in which I built the thesis of Revisiting and rebuilt it here with all new theoretical frameworks and theological dialogue partners. (I’ve also sought to address some of the questions raised after the first book, for instance, questions about education, evangelism, why influence is so bad, etc.) I’ve done this not because Revisiting is in any way deficient but rather as a way of driving my perspectives and points deeper, of making another case for imaging ministry as place sharing.

This project was written while I was on a sabbatical generously given by the board, President Bliese and Dean Martinson of Luther Seminary. I’m thankful for the space it provided me.

Two of my dearest colleagues at Luther Seminary read and commented on the whole of the manuscript. I’ve known both Jessicah Krey Duckworth and Theresa Latini for more than ten years now, and our history of dialoguing with each other’s work goes all the way back to the seminar rooms of Princeton Theological Seminary. I’m thankful for the blessing of now working with both of them and for their insight into this project. Theresa, particularly, saved me from some potential pitfalls.

Two other friends took the time to read the manuscript, two friends with pastors’ hearts and scholars’ minds, Blair Bertrand and Jeff Keuss. Their insight was invaluable. Thanks to Victoria Smith for working on the index and for being a partner in pedagogy for so many of us at Luther.

You’ll find at the end of this book an appendix with practices and examples that seek to ground the perspectives of this book further in pastoral practice. I was blessed by a group of pastors doing ministry in different contexts, whose monthly gatherings are funded by a grant from Austin Theological Seminary. They made space to read and interact with this text, and to provide these needed snapshots of practice in the appendix. Big thanks to Jodi Houge, Marc Oslie-Olson, Jamie Schultz, Travis Gerjets, Phil GebbenGreen and Kara Root.

And it is to Kara Root whom I owe the greatest debt of gratitude. We are partners in all things.

1Reshifting Pastoral Ministry

An Introduction

Every church has a Dave. In the church my friend Shane pastors, Dave was in his early sixties, was a member of the church for decades and thought he knew everything about everything. Dave was overly involved in any church business. Hearing the need for more consistent stewardship, Dave took it upon himself to corner new members, providing a little muscle to begin or increase their giving. Confidently sure he could fix the broken entryway door, he only made it worse, locking everyone out of church on a Sunday morning. The problem wasn’t that Dave thought he was always right and always needed. The problem was that Dave told everyone so, explaining to parents of small children why they were parenting their kids wrong, or announcing all the reasons why the car you bought was stupid, or asserting why worship needed to happen in a certain way. Dave was exhausting. As my friend Shane explained, when you saw Dave, you walked in the other direction.

On the other end of the continuum was Jodi; every church has or wishes for a Jodi. Jodi was in her early thirties, a petite redhead, bubbly and constantly upbeat. She had come to the church right out of college by happenstance. She had just taken a new (“first real,” as she said) job. The church was in her neighborhood, and feeling lonely one Sunday, and being a real people-person, she showed up. Since then Jodi had been a fixture. In no overstatement, the church simply couldn’t function without her; her energy was infectious, giving new life to this aging congregation. In generosity she made sure things happened, making all the arrangements for the annual outdoor service at the beach and single-handedly hosting a jazz cocktail party to fund the confirmation retreat.

If Dave was the great know-it-all annoyance of the church, Jodi was its young saint, quietly and competently leading. Jodi literally kept the church going as they went through the fourteen-month transition from the previous pastor to my friend Shane. Everyone loved Jodi for her kind, upbeat and selfless leadership.

It was then no surprise to anyone that both Dave and Jodi were elected to the church council. Though in two radically different ways, they were both leaders. Even though most people couldn’t stand Dave, truth be told, it didn’t matter. The church needs people willing to do things, and Dave was more than willing to do so.

As the council met for its annual retreat, there was business to be done, but this business would be intense, and Shane knew it. So he decided to start with an exercise, something he heard from somewhere now forgotten, an exercise that was radical in its simplicity. He knew that in his church, issues so easily became more important than people, so he began by setting chairs facing each other no more than three feet apart. He then passed out notepads and pencils. As the room got heavy with confusion Shane invited the council members to sit facing another person, with just notepad and sharp pencil in hand. They were instructed to say nothing. One half of the pair was to look at the other person, just to see, for a whole minute, and then for two more minutes to sketch the other person’s face. The discomfort was palpable; to cope, giggling and funny faces began the process, and a handful of council members kept protesting that they had no artistic skills. But Shane kept reassuring them that it had nothing to do with artistic skill but with seeing, and asked them to please honor the silence. After a few minutes, they switched roles, the sketched becoming the sketcher. Then Shane had them switch seats and repeat the process a couple more times, spending a few silent minutes staring and drawing each other until they had each drawn, and been drawn, three or four times.

As the exercise came to completion, the once uneasy atmosphere in the room became calm, almost relaxed. Then they debriefed their experience, and Shane asked how it felt. People expressed what they sensed in the room as a whole, that after pushing through a level of unease, these short few minutes of silent attention to this other person drew them to the other, looking into their face in order to draw it forced them to really see each other. It was a galvanizing experience for everyone—well, everyone but Dave.

As people took their turns stating what it was like to share these few silent minutes with the person across from them, Dave spoke up. He stated, “I felt very comfortable with everyone as I drew them, I mean I really did.” People nodded, affirming that this was their own experience as well, but Dave wasn’t finished, “I mean, I felt really comfortable with everyone, everyone . . . except Jodi.”

It was as if the air had been sucked from the room. Dave continued, “Yeah, looking at Jodi just made me feel really uncomfortable, I mean, I felt judged just looking at her.” The tranquil atmosphere turned toxic. People sat shocked. Did he really just say that? Shane thought. Did he really say that Jodi, little, smiley, kind Jodi, made him feel uncomfortable? No one knew what to say; after all, the absurdity of Jodi making anyone, let alone Dave, uncomfortable seemed crazy. But Dave continued to insist, stating again, “I mean truly I felt comfortable and safe looking at everyone, but Jodi, I really have no idea why, she just made me feel uncomfortable, just uncomfortable. She just did.”

As Dave continued to spew his reactions, the rest of the council, as inconspicuously as possible, looked over at Jodi. Her face was bright red, almost matching her curly hair. And her eyes opened wide, she sat frozen, as if knowing any move would bring a flood of tears. Shane now knew something needed to be said; he regretted ever doing this exercise in the first place, cursing his memory for ever recalling it.

He took a breath, hoping to repress the response his flabbergasted anger desired, like, “Hey, Dave, why are you being such a jerk?” Shane imagined such a response receiving a standing ovation from the rest of the group. But he resisted. Instead, to his own shock, he turned to Dave and asked, “OK, we definitely hear that she made you feel uncomfortable, but that is only a reaction to a feeling. Why do you think you are reacting with discomfort?”

Dave responded without as much as a beat between Shane’s question and his answer, “I don’t know, she just does. Jodi just makes me uncomfortable.” Shane tried again, “I know, Dave, you’ve told us your reaction and reactions are important, but tell us more about what you’re feeling.”

Jodi still sat frozen and Shane’s pushing of Dave only seemed to amp up the tension in the room. It was clear that people couldn’t take much more. Dave folded his arms across his chest and stared at the floor. Shane watched him, not sure if he was reflective or shut down, searching for an answer or ready to explode.

Finally, Dave broke the silence. He stated, “Well . . .” and then stopped. His voice cracked and the muscles in his cheeks twitched. He sat silent another long few seconds before mustering the strength to continue, “Well,” he started again, “you all know my daughter Donna. She grew up in this church, and I told many of you that she just moved back in with us. When she was thirteen she kind of stopped coming often to church, and now that she’s back with us, she has only made it to church once every month or two. I’ve said it is because she works late on Saturday. Well, she does work Saturdays, but she’s done by four. And she is done with that job now anyhow; she was just fired for not going. I’m sure a few of you know this, but Donna suffers from severe depression and she can’t come to church because she can’t get out of bed, and now she can’t get out of bed to go to work. She lost her job, her apartment and even her car, because of the depression.”

Now, everyone’s attention shifted from Jodi and rested squarely on Dave. The tension in the room evaporated and in its place was only attention, attention to Dave. Where tension tends to thrust us into ourselves to be concerned with how we are feeling, attention to another person and their story pushes us through ourselves into the other’s experience.

The council sat hanging on Dave’s every word. Dave breathed another deep breath, his eyes filling with tears, and then he continued. “And I guess, that’s it. Yeah, no, that is it, that’s why Jodi makes me feel so uncomfortable.”

“What is?” Shane added quickly.

“Well, I guess I feel so defensive and uncomfortable looking at Jodi because when I see her, I see who Donna could be if she didn’t suffer from depression. I see my little girl in Jodi. It just reminds me of my sweet Donna, and all that she could have been.”

Something had just changed, something holy. Something transformational had just occurred. Dave was seen, and seen in the fragility of his humanity. As my friend explained to me later, “It was from that moment that everything changed; Dave was no longer an annoying know-it-all hindrance, but a person. He became someone we shared not just leadership, but life with.”

Persons and Relationships

And this is what this book you hold is about. This book is about seeing ministry as the encounter of human person to human person, sharing deeply in relationship as the way to encounter the presence of Jesus Christ. But who would deny this? Who would think that ministry isn’t about relationship? I can imagine that there are few.

While we in the church frequently discuss the importance of relationships for our ministry, we have often failed to recognize that relationships, or something called relational ministry, is dependent on persons. It is dependent on personhood, on seeing those in our churches and communities as persons, not as consumers of programs, not as “giving units” or volunteers, nor as rational calculators that decided that they and their families can get the most out of their involvement at this church over another. And we have done this too often. We have deeply wanted our ministry to be relational, but not for the sake of persons, for the sake of the ministry, for the sake of bringing success to our initiatives. In other words, we’ve wanted people to feel relationally connected so that they might come to what we are offering or believe what we are preaching or teaching.

So when we speak of “relational,” we usually mean it as another strategy, another buzzword, to get people to do what we want them to do. Relationship becomes a kind of glue that keeps individuals involved or coming. The point of our ministry isn’t the relationships between persons, but how the relationship wins us influence. In other words, the relationship in ministry becomes something we use for influencing individuals, for the purpose of winning some leverage to get individuals to commit. And this makes sense if we view human beings as individual, rational calculating wills. Then relationships are simply the repetitive choices that people willfully and rationally make, which influence them to give their resources like time, money and energy. Individuals decide to be in relationship with Skippy Peanut Butter, buying it every week, in relationship with Central Methodist Church, attending three times a month, and in relationship with Joe from work, joining his fantasy football league.

In this way of thinking, relationship becomes a generic term used to signal what people are loyal to. People can be in relationship with things as much as people, with ideologies as much as fellow human beings. So the church’s relational ministry becomes about using relationships to win such loyalty from individuals. It becomes about using a relationship to get them to become loyal to the idea of Jesus, as opposed to encountering the person of Jesus Christ. Again, as I said earlier, the relationship is never the point but is the tool used to get individuals to decide to give their resources (time, money and energy) to the church. Relationship becomes more about loyalty to a brand.

I realize that this sounds harsh, and truth be told, I’m confident that no one is seeking to use relationship intentionally as the candy coating that wins loyalty—I don’t think! But, I do think we have tended to use relationships this very way. I think we’ve done this because this is the very water we contextually swim in; our American context is constructed to mistakenly see people as individuals and not as persons, pitting the church in a battle for people’s resources and making Jesus into an idea (ideology) that I’m individually loyal to. The church has adopted this cultural reality at the expense of the central Christian commitment to personhood.

These words (individual and person) may seem to be synonymous, but they are fundamentally different (a difference we will explore later on). But for now it is enough to say that personhood, as opposed to individualism, sees relationship with others as the very ontological structure of humanity. Or to say it in a less jargon-y way, personhood claims that we are our relationships. Relationships are not what we decide to be loyal to, not devices that bring loyalty to ideologies, but what give us our very selves. We are our relationships; they are the very core of our existence, the source of life. As Jewish thinker Martin Buber said, “In the beginning was the relationship.”[1]

In the journey of this book we will seek to shake pastoral ministry free of individualism, to place it again on the Christian confession of personhood.[2] We will explore relationships as the mysterious core of what it means to be alive and human, as the very confession that God becomes person in Jesus Christ and therefore personhood becomes the form in which human beings encounter the God who becomes human.[3] I’ll claim that relationships of persons encountering persons are the very way that we encounter Jesus Christ. Drawing on what the church fathers called “the hypostatic union” (the relationship between the divine and human natures in the person of Jesus), I’ll claim that relationships in ministry are an end. Relationships are the very point of ministry; in and through relationships people encounter the person of Jesus Christ and are therefore given their own personhood—a true personhood free from sin and death.

But all this is easier said than done. Making a distinction between individualism and personhood works through theological musings on paper, but what concretely signals that we are doing ministry in the logic of the personal and not bound to individualism? What gives witness that our relationships are ends and not means? I’ll contend that there are two concrete realities that signal this, two realities we saw in the story of Dave and Jodi; these realities are empathy and sharing as transformation.

When Dave confessed why Jodi made him uncomfortable, when he revealed Donna’s depression and his own broken heart, the group reacted with empathy. They felt Dave’s pain and opened their own person to his. Through his expressed suffering, like a reflex, the rest of the group opened their person to Dave’s, because through his expressed suffering they saw not an individual, but a person. It is no coincidence that his suffering was the yearning and pain of stressed relationship. We are our relationships, and for Dave to express the burden of this relationship was to open his very being to the being of others.

Empathy is a personal reality. We find it hard to be empathic for someone whose car is broken, this is the loss of individual resources. But we find empathy spilling from our pores when we hear that someone’s car is broken, and therefore they’ll be unable to get their daughter to physical therapy. As persons we empathize with the personhood of the daughter who yearns and suffers, and with the parent who struggles. The car is at issue because of what it means to persons. It is only stuff, but material becomes important (even sacred) when it becomes the material of personal, relational existence. It becomes the material of personal place.

Individualism has no room for empathy, no room to feel the other’s place as your own. The popular phrase “It sucks to be you!” is the mantra of individualism and the enemy of empathy. It is the crass retort expressing that your life is yours and only yours, your suffering has nothing to do with me, and we aren’t connected as persons but as free-floating individuals. It, then, just sucks for you, because now your own individual freedom and self-fulfillment is threatened. The I or me is so distinct in individualism that there is no you, just other individual competing Is. So “It sucks to be you,” but your sucky situation is actually good for me, because it means that I’m winning, that my I, my me is more successful.

We are only in the land of the personal, where relationships are an end, when we are pulled into empathy. (We’ll explore this further in chapter six.) As Jeremy Rifkin says, “Turning relationships into efficient means to advance productive ends destroys the empathic spirit.”[4]

But there is more. The personal, empathic encounter possesses the power to bring forth transformation, to bring change to the person. Personal encounter is transformation (even conversion); encountering the person of Jesus, people are called to follow him, to sell everything and follow him (Mt 19:21).

But even the theological concept of conversion has been overtaken by individualism. In our churches we desire ministries that change people, that transform and convert people from death to life, from the old to the new. But too often, caged by individualism, we contend that transformation or conversion is solely an epistemological reality. Even when we dress it up with personal language, like saying we want people to “have a personal relationship with Jesus,” what we actually mean is not something personal but something individual; we want them to individually, in their own minds, assimilate knowledge about Jesus and become loyal to the idea of Jesus.[5] We use our relationships as leverage to get people to know things about their own individual ideas or behaviors, to change to new ideas and behaviors. We use the relationship to convince them that our Christian subculture is better than another. And so often in ministry we become burned out or discouraged, or burned out because we’re discouraged, because transformation never seems to stick. People can individually be converted to an idea, only later to be individually captivated by another competing perspective. Bound within individualism, transformation is like fashion, it is important for the now, but eventually we’ll move on.

But, to encounter another person, to have your own person empathetically embraced, is not to (solely) go through a conversation of knowledge or ideas but to find new possibility, new life, in the life of others. Dave is never seen the same way again after his confession. It ultimately doesn’t matter if he changes his own knowledge of himself. In this community he now is different, in this community he is embraced. And this new way of seeing him becomes, as I’ll argue, more real than what Dave ultimately thinks about himself. (We’ll see that it stretches so deep it even has neurological changes.) In the end, because we are persons, we will see ourselves and we will know ourselves through others. To have our person embraced is to find our person bound to others and therefore transformed in and through the relationship.

Jesus calls himself a vine and us the branches. We are invited to remain in him as he remains in us—participating in his personhood (Jn 15:5). Now, in the community of others, in relationships of persons, Jesus is present (“Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” [Mt 18:20]) transforming death into life, so that our person might live forever with his own.

This book will explore how relationships are bound in personhood, and how this personal reality is fundamentally theological, making relationships in ministry ends and not means. We’ll see how relationship with persons in ministry becomes about sharing deeply in the lives of others, for no other reason than to be with and for them as Jesus Christ is with and for us as the one who is incarnate, taking on two natures in one person.

This project will end by turning to practice; how do you, as pastor, actually take action in ways that participate in the personal? How do we do ministry that avoids seeing relationships as a means when it feels like we have so much pressure to build a church or lead people? We will explore how what I’ll call “place sharing” (personal relationships of empathetic encounter) sets the direction for rethinking prayer, leadership, preaching and education in the church.[6]

But before diving in, it might be helpful to take a flight to 10,000 feet and look again at the cultural situation of the church. Believe me, I understand that this isn’t new; for the last few decades thinkers have been taking pastors up to 10,000 feet, showing them the cultural typographical changes, often pointing out how some obtuse philosophical construction like postmodernism has changed the landscape, or how digital technology has flooded once dry sections of earth with information and choices. But I do think there is something to be seen by climbing again to this altitude, something unique that points to cultural changes which will greatly affect pastoral ministry and reveal the need for rethinking pastoral ministry along the lines of the personal relationships we have just discussed.

So let’s begin.

2New Energy, New Communications, New Consciousness . . . New Ministry

I vividly remember being a third-year MDiv student on the cusp of graduation, taking one of my last required courses on the practices of pastoral ministry. In this class we learned how to do baptisms and funerals, discussed keeping a budget and explored a theology of stewardship. It was a class on the basic how-tos of pastoral ministry. Yet, outside of some of the basic topics, I really don’t remember much else. That is, except for the day our instructor, a retired pastor—now professor—in his early seventies said in a tone of disappointment, “I remember back at the beginning of my career, being a pastor was important. People in town shook your hand and said, ‘Hello, pastor!’ And if you got pulled over, the officer rarely gave you a ticket, you were the pastor!” Then, pausing, with a hint of sadness, he added, “Not anymore. No one cares if you’re the pastor now, no more free lunch for you people.”

The change in the cultural conception of pastoral ministry stung, but a second experience made the change bleed. A seminary classmate of mine was having lunch with a highly esteemed professor, a famous theologian known for a long career of brilliant work. As they talked about theology and pastoral ministry, the great theologian launched into a short but potent diatribe. Turning to my classmate, lowering his voice and pointing around to the other students walking through the cafeteria, he said, “In my day, going to seminary was important, and not just everyone got in. If a family had three kids and one went to med school, one to law school and one to seminary, the seminarian wasn’t less than his siblings; the seminarian was doing something just as rigorous and important, something to be proud of. Often parents were more proud of their seminarian! Now, well . . .” He sighed, “Now it just isn’t that way. I mean we used to get the best and the brightest; now look at these people!”

It might be best to chalk up his comments to low blood sugar. (I actually have come across a number of very bright students.) But while these words may have been harsh and nostalgic, they do point to the truth that even the best and brightest of seminarians feel inadequate, even those that could compete with any med or law student. The simple truth is that the cultural conception of the pastor and of ministry in general has changed. Or it may be better to say that it is in the process of changing; we are in the whitewater of a wave pushed from what once was to something else.

Of course there are a number of theological commitments that give continuity to the practice of ministry. After all, ministry is nothing more and nothing less than joining in God’s continued action in the world. But God’s continued action happens in the world, therefore the pastor or minister is always seeking to discern God’s action in a time and place.[1] This means that while our theological conception of God’s action, as I will argue, is inextricably linked with persons and personhood, our cultural contexts have not always made it easy to see this theological perspective clearly, and particularly clearly enough for it to inform our practice of ministry.

So as the cultural ground shifts below our feet, it may be time for us to push beyond our (unaware) weddedness to the individual and make a case for the personal. There has been an overall awakening to the personal in the social sciences, an awakening for which some give credit to the Christian tradition.[2] Psychology, sociology, political science and other fields have begun to make pushes for the social and personal orientation of human beings. But at times this pushing feels like it’s up a steep hill as cultural individualism has soaked so deeply into the very soil in which we seek footing to climb.

Things are changing, the world is shifting, whether for good or ill is still to be determined. But it has now become a truism of our time that we are resting squarely in a time of transition, a time of post- or late or hypermodernity, a time at the end of Christendom, a time of a new missional era. In this time business as usual will not do, but what to do seems unclear.

Playing with Our Transition

To articulate this transition, I want to play with Jeremy Rifkin’s historical typography in his book The Empathic Civilization. This chapter is a sandbox and Rifkin’s theory my toy. The historical structure I’m building here is made of sand, and Rifkin’s typology can easily be dowsed and drowned in critique.[3] But, like play, though the reality may be more complicated and many things left unsaid, it nevertheless allows for a creative performance that, though simplified, points to something true. Playing with Rifkin’s theory allows us to say something true about our pastoral situation, while acknowledging that things are always more complicated outside the sandbox.[4]

The buckets and shovels I’ll borrow from Rifkin are his assertions that through human history we can see a number of transitions that come when a new energy regime is created (like the industrial revolution, for example), which lead to new forms of communication to manage this new regime, which then lead to new ways of understanding ourselves, others and even God. If there is anything clear about our own time, it is that we are plotting (or fighting over) new energy and new communications. It may help to hear Rifkin in his own words,

Energy is critical, but it doesn’t stand alone. The great economic revolutions in history occur when new energy regimes converge with new communications revolutions. The convergence of energy and communications revolutions is what changes the human condition for long periods of time. New communications revolutions become the command-and-control mechanisms, the means of structuring, organizing, and maintaining the energy flow-through of civilization.[5]

He continues, “The convergence of energy and communications rev­olutions not only reconfigure society and social roles and relationships but also human consciousness itself. Communications revolutions change the temporal and spatial orientation of human beings and, by so doing, change the way the human brain comprehends reality.”[6]

But it isn’t play to simply copy the creations of others. It becomes play when we adapt and add to the structure in the sandbox. Using Max Weber, I’ll playfully offer my own contribution by adding how ministry, the pastor and evangelism were seen in Rifkin’s later times of transition, and therefore what our own transition might mean for ministry, pastors and evangelism. This sandbox history may help us not only understand why the two professors in the stories at the beginning of the chapter felt this transition, but beyond their complaints we’ll also seek a new vision.

History

Hunter-gatherer transition. The oldest energy regime that we are aware of is hunting and gathering. In this period there was simply no managing of the resources of the earth; people in small tribes often responded to the earth itself. In many ways the earth and its creatures were personal. In some tribes killing an animal and eating its flesh meant taking in its life power. The earth was alive, giving rain or fruit, and god was creator, often bound within the earth itself.

To manage the energy of hunting and gathering, oral communication through language became essential. Cooperation in gathering and hunting was an absolute necessity. Stories of past hunts or droughts or storms socialized the young. Unique languages were created among small groups of people who were actually (in our terms) living close together. But though other tribes were within miles of each other there was little reason to communicate. Communication is for cooperation, and often the only interaction with other groups was not cooperative but violent.

Language became the best way to manage the energy of hunting and gathering. What is ironic is that though the earth was personal, those outside the communication system, those with other language, often weren’t. Humans showed personal connection to only those with whom they had blood ties. This is why warring tribes, upon forging peace, would marry off their daughters to each other, intertwining their bloodlines. It made the other tribe persons.

Ministry. It’s hard to discuss ministry in this primitive period, especially if we think of ministry as a fundamentally Christian or a Judeo-Christian reality (as I’ll presume as this history unfolds). But to stretch the term for argument’s sake, we could assert that in this period ministry or spiritual leadership existed as cosmic storytelling.[7] As any first-year seminarian has heard, the creation story in Genesis has interesting correlation with older mythological stories from the area, for instance the Babylonian story of Gilgamesh. These ancient stories, while from the view of our post-Enlightenment definition of truth as provable fact, couldn’t have actually happened, nevertheless gave the hearer a conception of self, world and god. This energy regime of hunting and gathering, managed by language, led to what Rifkin calls mythical consciousness. So spiritual leadership was about telling cosmic stories of why or what the world was and who was in control of it.

The spiritual leader was then a storyteller, performing and protecting the stories of his or her people. Interpreting new phenomenon (wildfire, early winter, war) within the cosmic stories of the past. The spiritual leader was embedded within the energy regime and communication system. The spiritual leader explained why the energy regime thrived or failed, and used the communication system, language, to give cosmic significance to the practice of managing the energy. Hunting (and to a lesser degree gathering), through cosmic story, became spiritual.

The spiritual leader wasn’t just a storyteller but also an endorser of war or was himself a warrior.[8] Up against others with different languages, which led to different stories, resulting in different gods, the spiritual leader would need to defend the tribe’s cosmic stories, showing that this tribe’s gods were powerful in making it rain, assisting in slaying the beast.[9] The spreading of mythological perspective (call it evangelism) often happened then through war, through the battle of gods. It is no wonder, as we read in the Old Testament, that when Israel was conquered, the Philistines took their ark—which they assumed to be their god (1 Sam 5). Of course the point of that text is that Yahweh is no territorial, tribal god. The Philistines soon witness that Israel’s God can act outside of the orbit of the original tribe’s cosmic story, that Israel’s God is not in need of a cosmic storyteller to be animated.[10] But this only illustrates that gods were tribal and the only way to evangelize was to capture the people or the people’s gods. As Rifkin says, “In the age of mythical consciousness, being heroic was the measure of a man.”[11]

Agricultural transition. The next energy regime to come on the scene following hunting and gathering is the agricultural age. Eventually the hunter-gatherer people discovered how to store the energy of the sun in crops. Now instead of encountering the earth as a person, plants could be managed, put in rows, and animals fenced and fatted. This period of agriculture would last thousands of years.[12] As human populations grow and the entropy (i.e., waste and cost) of energy becomes exponential, the time between the regimes shortens, moving from millions of years to thousands, and then, as we will see in chapter three, from centuries to decades. Yet, new energy regimes aren’t around every corner. There is only a handful of regimes for the whole of human existence, which makes our own search for a new, clean regime all the more onerous.

As the agricultural regime became more sophisticated over time, people learned not only how to manage plants in rows and animals in fences, but how to get the essential resource of water through hydro-ducts from one area to another. As water traveled, so too did people, and the once distinct languages had to evolve to some common tongue so the resources of agriculture could be managed and traded. After all, as people got better and better at growing, soon they had more than they (or their people) needed, allowing the excess to be traded for other goods.

As this common tongue became necessary across vast stretches of space, soon writing was needed. Rifkin explains that in every great agricultural society script or writing was soon developed. This writing was used to manage the new energy regime. But just as soon, the cosmological stories were transferred from oral tradition to text. Now in text, gods were no longer local, transferred only through war, but transcended one locale and could place a demand on anyone or any people that had the text itself. Talcott Parsons explains,

Once there are sacred texts, . . . these are subject both to continual editing and to complex processes of interpretation and tend to become the focus of specialized intellectual competence and prestige in the religious field and on the cultural level of rationalized systems of religious doctrine. Groups who have a special command of the sacred writings may then attain a special position in the religious system as a whole—the Jewish rabbis of the Talmudic tradition present a particularly salient case.[13]

This pushed the personal connection from blood ties to religious ties.[14] In other words, those who shared your religion by reading your sacred texts were called brother or sister. This is why the parable of the good Samaritan is so significant (Lk 10). (We’ll return to this in more detail later.) The parable throws hearers off balance by calling the followers of Jesus to risk danger for the sake of someone who is not a Jew, for one that does not read the law, for a stranger that lives beyond that context’s circle of personal connection.

Ministry. To think about ministry, the pastor (or spiritual leader) and evangelism in this period is more than difficult. After all, this is the period that stretches over the heart of the Christian tradition, starting sometime, imperiously, around Moses and going until the period of the Reformation (if not after). Therefore, to keep it broad, we can state that this was the period of the rise of the priesthood,[15] whether at the beginning with Aaron and the first and second temple periods in Israel, or at the end of this period with the rise of the priesthood in the period of the church fathers leading into European Catholicism. And the priest’s job, according to Weber, was not to proclaim spiritual or social change (this was the job of the prophet), but to manage divine things.

The spiritual leader as priest was the one who offered sacrifices or mediated the sacraments, and did so as the sacred text stipulated. But the pastor as priest did more. The pastor in this period was the devoted and authorized reader of the sacred text. Whether it was rabbis reading Torah and providing midrash or medieval priests reading the New Testament in Greek and performing mass in Latin, the pastor was the manager of divine things by being the sole devoted reader of the sacred book.[16] After all, at least part of the Protestant Reformation related to loosing the priests’ grip on the Bible, translating it into the common vernacular so all people could read it.

Managing of this energy regime through writing allowed for large empires to dominate huge spaces.[17] Caesar Augustus could keep his hand on the Jews in Israel in the first century because of the communication system, and he could use writing to direct his governors or his generals. This allowed for the sweeping impact of civilizations (complex cultures) on others. Around the Mediterranean it is nearly impossible to find a place not affected by Roman culture in this period. People were literally evangelized to this way of being by the currents of imposing civilizations. It is no wonder that this may be when the largest evangelistic impact in Christian history occurred (for good or ill), when Constantine converted the empire overnight to Christianity. Too often the priest, the pastor, was spiritual defender of the civilization, using the sacred text to support the ruling system.[18]

We can see evangelism as imposed civilization; as with all periods of evangelism there are both positives and negatives. Yet, for the sake of example, it may be most helpful to look at one of the most shameful evangelistic operations of Christian history, the Crusades. The way to recover the Holy Land and evangelize the heathens was to bring forth the force of civilization, the power of a civilization’s knights. It was justified because the Christians were civilized, and after all, the Muslims didn’t share the same religious sacred text and therefore deserved personhood only if they converted. As we’ll see, such a perspective obscures Jesus’ teaching on love of neighbor.

It is worth adding that in the time of the Reformation, which was a transitional time when the communication system was changing, and on the horizon was a new energy regime, the Catholic Church in many ways was the proprietor of civilization. Religion and civilization were inextricably linked. To give one popular example, King Henry, the lord of the realm of England, a divinely appointed master of civilization, had to answer to the pope for his sex life. For the pope was true lord of all of European civilization. But at the same time a dirty monk of the peasants in Germany, Martin Luther, a crass, uncivilized man, was using that very sacred writing, the very text of the Bible, to point to the hypocrisy of the pope as lord of civilization, and giving the sacred text to the common person, fracturing the exclusive right to it by the lords of civilization, the kings of empire.

To be continued . . .

3Transitioning from the Pastor as Self-Help Entertainer

What Relational Ministry Can’t & Must Become

As we continue to play with Rifkin’s history, it will become clear how much the conception of the pastor, ministry and evangelism has shifted in the last 100 to 150 years. It will be the pursuit of this chapter to place the pastor, ministry and evangelism as our central focus.

In chapter two we explored two periods (hunting-gathering and agriculture) that each lasted thousands to millions of years. Yet, in this chapter we’ll see three significant transitions occurring in quick succession and having radical impact on our understanding of pastoral ministry. In chapter two our purview was vast. In this chapter it will be narrow, examining more directly how the conceptions of pastor, ministry and evangelism coalesced in these periods for American Protestants.

It is important to remember that there is no such thing as a clean break in history. These transitions can still be spotted in our denominations and congregations. To talk about transitions is not to assume that the bone breaks cleanly between one epoch of time and another. Rather, all historical change comes as frayed transitions taking at least pieces and fragments of a passing era into the new one. As I play with Rifkin and Weber, making broad points in my sandbox, it will be helpful to remember that no clear break is possible. And that remnants of the past persist into the future, leading from broad perspectives in the last chapter to narrower views of pastoral ministry in this one.

History Continued

Steam and coal transition (the first Industrial Revolution). The long-reigning energy regime of agriculture would transition slowly, and with stops and starts. But when the slow change finally took hold, it was impossible to not feel its iron grip. According to Rifkin the energy regime transitioned from stored sun in seeds to the steam and coal of the Industrial Revolution. This new energy regime, coupled with a new communication system to manage it—print—allowed for an all-new conception and organization of people. Now, because coal and other resources of the Industrial Revolution were found in some places and not others, boundaries and borders became important; who owned the resources of the land was a vital question. While in the hunting-gathering period the earth was alive, it was personified, now the earth was inert, it was simply a basket, maybe a beautiful one, but just a container of resources needed to animate manmade machines.

This attention to borders due to resources meant a new focus on the nation-state (countries). Now, as Rifkin explains, personal connection (who you defined as a person) moved from blood ties to religious ties to, in this period, ideological ties. The rise of the nation-state due to the energy regime of the first Industrial Revolution brought forth ideological consciousness. This ideological consciousness would have its darkest days in the trenches of the world wars, bloody wars fought (at least in Europe) by those sharing religious commitments but nevertheless opposed ideologically. A German Christian could kill an English Christian because they lived in two ideologically opposed nations. It no longer mattered that they read the same sacred book.

But of course it wasn’t simply locale; to live in Germany, England or America was to breathe the ideological air, it was to see oneself as a citizen of these particular people. While thinkers like Ann Swidler have reminded us that cultures are always more complicated than simply saying “Americans are like this” or the French like that, there nevertheless appears, especially postwar, to be an ideological divide between East and West.[1] It was ideology that made another a companion or enemy.

And often this air became infused with ideological significance through the press, through the distribution of pamphlets and posters made possible by the new communication system of printing. It was, after all, this very system that made it possible for the Reformation to wrestle power away from the priests of Catholic Europe at the end of the last period. But, when this new communication system was full-blown in newspapers and pamphlets, it created ideologically loyal citizens of industrial nation-states. And steam and coal connected these ideological citizens bound within fashioned boundary lines called countries.

Ideological citizenship made possible through the communication system of the press did even more. It potentially sowed the seeds of an individualism that would become full-blown in the twentieth century. After all, it was the individual who read; “I am” the reader.[2]

Ministry. It is not that religion gave way with the transition into this new period. Rather, religion remained a constant reality, but now it too became embedded within the nation-state. Western countries were considered “Christian nations,” and the number of consistent worshipers at churches justified this label. It wouldn’t be until the next period that religious hegemony would be overcome. In the new energy regime and communication system, ministry was broadly seen as perpetuating or protecting a way of life. Through law and government the way of life of a nation-state was upheld functionally, but it was through religion that this way of life was fortified culturally, spiritually and morally.

Perhaps the best example of this comes at the close of this period, an intensely ideological time in which President Eisenhower is reported to have said that he didn’t care what faith American people participated in, just that they did. What was important for the nation-state, especially one in conflict with a secular communism, was to hold to some religion—not for the sake of religion but for the nation-state’s ideology. The early Billy Graham is an example of this. In the mid-twentieth century Graham’s rhetoric not only spoke of an individual relationship with Jesus but also had strong overtones of American nationalism. Some even think that Graham’s escalation to America’s great preacher had much to do with the support of business and political leaders’ appreciation for his hot, nationalist message against the backdrop of the cold war.[3]

Or to give a counterexample, it was because of this very sensed reality that Karl Marx railed against Christianity in the nineteenth century, calling all religion the opiate of the people, drugging them to focus only on being good and seeking heaven, overlooking that the machines of the new energy regime were beating and oppressing them. And the very moral system pastors presented as “the Christian way” overlooked such a state, calling people to be dutiful to what, in the end, Marx contended, was hurting them.

Though this may be overstated, even so it appears at least in some way that ministry in this period was about pushing individual citizens to be moral and upstanding. Both abolition and temperance, while having a collective thrust about them, were often legitimated with an ethic of national and individual uprightness; drunkenness was bad for the nation and bad for an individual’s soul.

And no one was more upstanding than the pastor. The man of the cloth was an honorable and holy man, a model of the good “citizen.”[4] The way a pastor functionally lived out being both the good citizen and calling his flock to do the same was through moral exhortation, through imploring his congregation to act morally and be good citizens. This was a particularly strong phenomenon in American pulpits. For instance, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, while in New York in the first years of the 1930s, writing to friends back in Germany, discusses visiting Riverside Presbyterian Church, calling the preaching simply moral pragmatism—something he found stomach-turning. So the pastor was moral exemplar, using his pulpit to implore his congregation to be good citizens themselves.[5] This fit perfectly with the ideological consciousness of the time made possible by the energy regime of industrialization and the communication system of print.

Yet, it must also be mentioned, if only shortly, that there was another, very strong, pastor response in this period of ideological consciousness and a coal energy regime. Another response of the pastor was to engage with exerted force into justice. Pastors and ministers like Walter Rauschenbusch, Dorothy Day and Reinhold Niebuhr took action in words and deeds against the dehumanizing practices of the industrial revolution. Pastoral ministry as moral exhortation, whether through the call to upright citizenship or social engagement, rested squarely (as a salve or a bristle) in the craw of the nation-state.

Evangelism