Category Archive: Theology – Pastoral

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Presence and Welcome

When we remember that hospitality comes from an attitude of welcome, we open ourselves to an abundance of creative opportunities for shaping a hospitable life.  Hospitality often involves the practical help of food and shelter, but it also includes the provision of relational connection.  Hospitality can be as simple as making extra food for dinner and welcoming our children’s friends to the table or being the one to initiate conversation with strangers at church, parties, or other social gatherings.

Hospitality can also mean sitting with another person over coffee, showing an interest in who they are.  The “ministry of presence,” as Christine Pohl calls it, is hard to comprehend in our task-oriented world.  Spending time with another person, listening, sharing stories, and bridging the gap of our modern isolation requires an eternal perspective.  If we are aware of our call to hospitality, we will be more likely to remember that people are more important than finished tasks. — Andi Ashworth, Real Love for Real Life: The Art and Work of Caring, p. 71.

The Inefficiency of Caregiving

If there’s one thing that characterizes our modern world, it’s that people don’t have time for each other. We rush from one activity to the next; we’re overcommitted, overscheduled, frenzied, and worn out.

Many of our time pressures come from outside sources and are not within our control. The long hours required of corporate workers, the travel and the deadlines that factor into certain careers, the hours of homework loaded onto our children — all of these demands come from systems and decisions made by someone else. But we also normalize frantic lifestyles when we don’t need to. Whether we take a job that requires a long commute, sign our children up for too many extracurricular activities, or take on more projects and commitments than we can handle, our decisions have long-range consequences that we need to consider. Even when we are the ones who made the series of choices that got us into our schedule crunch, we often feel that our schedule controls us. We yield to the pattern of continual intensity without offering any resistance. We have a growing realization that overcommitment and overwork are destructive, but in general, we don’t seem to change.

And as we give in to the standards society sets for us, we gradually internalize what our culture values: efficiency, speed, control, and quantity over quality. In this paradigm, caregiving seems very much out of place. Caring does not “maximize” our time. Its richest rewards are not tangible. Its results are not quantitative. Caregiving needs are unpredictable, and sometimes meeting them is a slow process. — Andi Ashworth, Real Love for Real Life: The Art and Work of Caring, pp. 37-38.

Later, Ashworth writes:

Most of the time caring cannot be summarized, quantified, or measured. Not much is ever finished. Or if it is finished, it’s finished only for a short time. Families and houseguests get hungry again, clean houses get messed up, babies need to be fed every few hours. The most significant results of caregiving cannot be seen with human eyes.

A young mother once told me that when she weaned her baby, she realized that she had given eight hours a day for an entire year to nursing him, and even more when he was a newborn. Without eyes to see more than finished products, we can miss the significance of this special kind of work. Hour after hour of rocking, holding, and feeding a baby might not look like much to some people, but this mother knew better. She had captured a time that could never be repeated in the life of her child. She had given him the gift of herself and in doing so had to let go of the idea that a productive life is measured by a series of completed, visible projects (pp. 45-46).

Face to Face

We were created to respond to voice, touch, and physical presence, yet our society is increasingly voiceless, faceless, and untouchable.  We can bank, shop, put gas in the car, buy groceries, and make business calls without once interacting with a live person.  Most of the time it’s convenient, many times it’s frustrating, but all of it contributes to the loss of human connection in daily life.

Societal structures are efficient but not always beneficial to the emotional and physical health of the people they are meant to serve.  Technological advances bring help, physical healing, and convenience, but they also invade our daily routines and patterns.  High-tech industries subtly change the way we think adn act until we have fewer and fewer opportunities for face-to-face human connection.  Mounting time pressures make it easier for us to be isolated and unaware of each other’s needs, resulting in a thread of loneliness and neglect that runs through our lives.

As the gap widens between family and community needs and the people who are available to meet those needs, we are left scrambling for substitutes.  We’ve entered the era of home meal replacements, domestic outsourcing, and outside care for our elders and children.  We are growing accustomed to writing a check for services that have historically been done out of love.  We are in danger of losing a vision for the creative, interdisciplinary, hands-on work of loving each other deeply.

We sometimes seem to have forgotten that though society is constantly shifting and adapting to new ways, it will always be filled with human beings who need personal care and attention.  We should carefully consider the difference between service that is motivated by love and concern for the individual, and service that is purchased from anonymous for-profit companies….  When we recognize that the work of caregiving is essential to human well-being, we take the first step toward easing the loneliness and neglect that characterizes so many lives today. — Andi Ashworth, Real Love for Real Life: The Art and Work of Caring, pp. 9-10.

Ashworth’s book is the best thing I’ve read (all right, I’ll admit it: it’s probably about the only thing I’ve read) on the Christian calling of caregiving.  It’s an excellent book and one I’d highly recommend for pastors.  It’s changed the way I think about my ministry.

In connection with what Ashworth writes here, it strikes me that it might be valuable to forego the convenience of ATMs and the computer scanners at the grocery story or the library in order to stand face-to-face with and talk to real people at the bank, the checkout line, and so forth.

A waste of time?  Yes, maybe.  Sometimes we’re in a hurry and it’s important not to spend too long at the store.  But God has given pastors a certain amount of leisure time during the week precisely for the purpose of meeting people, getting to know them, building relationships with them.

In the couple of years that I’ve been in Medford, for instance, I have met and spent time chatting with ladies working in checkout lines, bank tellers, postal workers, and multitudes of baristas in coffeeshops.  They know that I’m a pastor because they see my clerical collar.  Sometimes they ask me about my church.  But what’s equally important is that they see the face of a pastor, which is the public face of the church, as well, and that they see that face as friendly.

Depression

Some pastoral counseling from Paul Buckley:

N.T. Wright tells an instructive story at the beginning of a lecture given at Wycliffe College in Toronto. A minister friend in England, before he sought ordination, was working in a rough area of London. The experience was trying, and he became very depressed. The warden of the hostel where he stayed told him he should read the letter to the Romans every day for a month. As in a chapter or half-chapter a day? No, the warden said. Read the whole letter, every day, after work. He did, and he says it changed his life and transformed his views of all sorts of things.

The Christian psychiatrist John White tells a similar story, about himself, in The Masks of Melancholy.

Years ago, when I was seriously depressed, the thing that saved my own sanity was a dry-as-dust grappling with Hosea’s prophecy. I spent weeks, morning by morning, making meticulous notes, checking historical allusions in the text. Slowly I began to sense the ground under my feet growing steadily firmer. I knew without any doubt that healing was constantly springing from my struggle to grasp the meaning of the prophecy. (202-03)

The Gideon Bibles you find in hotel rooms usually have an index of passages to read when you’re fearful, guilty, doubtful, or otherwise beset. It’s a perfectly legitimate approach to fear, guilt, doubt, and the rest. But there’s something to be said for what Wright’s friend and White did, immersing themselves in a couple of whole books of Scripture. I suspect it “worked” in part precisely because Romans and Hosea didn’t address their depression head-on, at least not in any obvious way. Repeated exposure to the letter and the prophecy kept drawing their minds away from themselves and pushing them toward other concerns.

Maybe there are times when we don’t need another comforting passage to read or another Christian book on suffering; we need something that will open our minds to the big picture, and a work such as Romans does nothing if not present a big picture. Ditto a stretch of Scripture such as Isaiah 40-66. Ditto the Gospel of John. Ditto (if you want something much shorter) the letter to the Ephesians.

Study or Office?

My friend from seminary, Michael Shipma, on the name of the room the pastor works in:

My parents served as custodians in the church of my youth on and off for a handful of years. This meant that I spent a lot of time playing with my Hot Wheels car collection under the church pews, interspersed with emptying classroom waste baskets, dusting windowsills, and the occasional running of the vacuum, banging into as many chairs and floorboards as possible.

A fond memory often comes to mind when I recall those days. The pastor of the church, Rev. Bob Vander Schaaf, asked me to help him in his study one late afternoon. The job, to me, seemed monumental. He wanted to remove his books from his shelves that lined the wall (it looked like the Great Wall of China to this young lad), have those shelves dusted and the books returned to their proper place. Apparently, he didn’t think he could accomplish this task without the assistance of an eight-year-old, so into his study I went for a few hours. I recall the time was filled with me climbing up and down a chair, books in hand, standing on tip toes in an effort to get those hard to reach places with a dust rag, and then handing him his books as he returned them to their original location. I remember we talked. A lot. I don’t recall about what, probably about school, how I’m getting along with my sister, am I minding my parents, and so on. In exchange for my services (or, more likely, in exchange for my getting in the way), I received ten cents. That ten cents was as good as gold. It’s indescribable what a couple of hours of the pastor’s time and a dime will do for an eight-year-old.

I’ve invited you into this memory because I have used a word you might not be familiar with, or at least you don’t hear used very often. Study. I used it, not as a verb, but as a noun – used to refer to the room reserved in the church where the pastor does his sermon preparation and from which all his ministerial labors emanate.

It is a word that at one time was in the common vocabulary of church members. That important room was always called the “study.” And we all had a sense that something wonderful and important and mysterious went on in there. In my mind’s eye as a child, that room was where the pastor met with God during the week so that he knew what to say on Sunday.

But somewhere along the way, something changed. The “study” gave way to the “office.” Looking back, I can’t really recall when that change took place. Certainly, it changed in different places at different times in different ways for different reasons. But one thing is certain – with the change in word came a change in our perception of that room.

Words mean something. Words reflect our ideas of things. With the change from “study” to “office” came the idea that the pastor’s task is not study in God’s Word, prayer, and giving counsel to God’s people. The task became perceived as administrative. The pastor is no longer engaged in the daily task of giving God’s people spiritual guidance; he’s running an organization, one that has goals and flow charts and staff evaluations and vision statements, one that refers to members as “tithing units” and evaluates the faithfulness of pastors based on the number of “tithing units” assimilated that year and how much the budget has increased.

I have an office, because my vocation is primarily administrative. Pastors Mark and Shawn, however, have studies, because the tasks we have called them to are different. They are not running an organization; they are leading a people. Something wonderful and important and mysterious is to go on in those rooms. In those rooms they are to be in the Word, to be engaged in prayer, to be engaged in giving us counsel. It is where, in a very real sense, they meet God so that they know what to say on Sunday.

I encourage you to recover the significance of words. To recover the use of the word “study” in referring to the place in the church set aside for the pastors will be a corporate confession of what we believe about the work of the pastor and that work’s significance in the life of God’s people.

“Thy Kingdom Come!”

On the threshold of Advent, it’s good to remember that Christ came so that God’s kingdom would come on earth.  But He did not merely come to establish God’s kingdom on earth.  He came so that we would long and work and pray for God’s kingdom to come more and more on earth, for God’s will to be done here on earth as it is in heaven.

Paul Buckley provides a helpful meditation on our prayer “Thy Kingdom Come.”  Here’s a paragraph to whet your appetite:

“Thy kingdom come … on earth as in heaven.” That’s a plea. But I doubt many of us experience it as much more than pretty words until we get some heartfelt sense of the present disjointedness between heaven and earth. We’ve got to feel in our gut, as Hamlet did after that horripilating midnight interview with the ghost, that “the time is out of joint.” We’ve got to feel the pinch. I suspect that my brothers and sisters in Asia and elsewhere feel it more keenly than most of us in the West do. The ones I met gather every morning at 5:30 to pray. I take it their circumstances have taught them something about the importance of prayer, perhaps especially a prayer such as “Thy kingdom come.”

The Virtual Pastor

Brian McLaren raises some questions about the new technology that allows people to “minister” without actual contact with people:

Many of us have thought to ourselves, Ministry would be great if it weren’t for the people, and increasingly it has become possible to “have a ministry” without ever having to actually live, in your flesh, with people in their flesh. In fact, vicarious ministries (via books, radio, TV, or whatever) have a higher status in the minds of many than the work of actually being with people who argue, fail, disagree, react, sin, attack, have emotional breakdowns, get sick, call you at 2 a.m., betray you, try your patience, and eventually die and leave you in grief.

But as McLaren argues, such “ministries” damage people, including the pastors who “minister” from afar in this way. Worth thinking about in our technologized age.

Highest Form of Theology

In the comments on a post on the De Regno Christi blog, James Jordan writes something that’s worth a blog entry of its own:

When I was in school, long ago, it was commonly thought that Systematics was the queen of theology. Exegesis led to Biblical Theology and finally climaxed in Systematics. Well, I submit that this is very seriously wrong. For me, this is a form of gnosticism. The true goal is Practical and Liturgical Theology. Systematics gives us boundaries (it’s really Polemical theology), and this helps Biblical Theology, but the goal of all of it is Exegesis, the ability to explain a given pericope to PEOPLE so that PEOPLE are transformed. To do full justice to a given text, not explain it away because it does not seem to fit our tiny systems. Jesus came to save and to glorify people, not to bring an ideology. Way too often Reformed people take our great Confessions as ideologies, ignoring their many fuzzy edges, and forgetting that the men who wrote them were Bible-centered, not Confession-centered. They expected more Confessions to be written in the future, and the Covenanters and Associates were faithful to this notion. The State churches and later American denominations were not. My own study was in Systematics, and I still do plenty of it in my writing and teaching. But the highest form of theology is preaching and liturgics.

Personally, I’ve always disliked the idea that the highest pinnacle of a pastor’s success would be to be appointed to teach at a seminary: “Sure, you’re pastoring now for a few years.  But I think one day, pastor, they’re going to hire you at the seminary!” they say, as if they’re saying, “You’re going to go places, boy!”  But the seminary exists to serve the church and to serve by training pastors for the churches, and they could do a better job in teaching seminarians the Word and training them in liturgy.  Jordan is right: “The highest form of theology is preaching and liturgics.”

Serving the Word of God

I’ve recently been reading Serving the Word of God, edited by David Wright and David Stay.  It’s a collection of essays in honor of James Philip, who served for forty years as the pastor of Holyrood Abbey Church in Edinburgh, from 1958 on.

I knew nothing about James Philip before reading the biographical essays in this volume.  He appears to have been one of those great pulpit giants, a man who preached twice on Sunday and once again at the midweek meeting, besides leading the Saturday night prayer meeting (at which he also spoke), preparing Bible Reading Notes for every day of the year, writing a monthly pastoral letter to the congregation, and keeping up correspondence with many missionaries.

I’m not going to go through the book chapter by chapter, though there are a few things in the later chapters that I’ll spend more time on in another blog entry.  But here, I want to pass on a few things that I especially appreciated, all of them from James Philip himself as he is quoted at various points in this book.

On what young Christians need:

What I am certain of is this: a great many of the problems and difficulties that beset young Christians’ lives, and the not-so-young as well — temptations, pressures, mixed-up-ness, loneliness, depression, discouragement, or whatever — would be well on the way to solution if only they would at last submit themselves to the “ordinariness” of the means of grace, and applied some discipline to themselves in terms of getting themselves under the word of ministry on a regular, as opposed to a spasmodic basis (cited p. 62).

On preaching the whole of Scripture:

We need all the truth of God for our balanced growth, not merely this or that doctrine, this emphasis or that.  Christ is made unto us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption, and to get a whole Christ we need the whole Word (cited p. 63, emphasis mine).

On being missional:

The gospel that lifts the burden of sin from our hearts lays upon us another burden — the burden of a lost world (cited p. 103).

On worship:

The deeper reaches of worship are attained not by the mystics or those that are temperamentally suited or inclined to rapt adoration and wonder, but by those that are poor and of a contrite spirit, that tremble at His Word (Isa. 66:2); and for this reason, that the issues involved are not mystical primarily, but moral, a matter not of temperament but of character (cited p. 246).

On the church as a body:

In a loose association of individuals, each may well remain not only independent of the other but also indifferent to the other; nor is there any essential bond existing between them to lay mutual obligations upon them.  But in membership of a body there is an organic bond which obliges us to be interested in one another, and lays upon us the duty of mutual consideration and care.  What then, are we to say of those believers who are regularly present with us week by week, feeding on what they themselves have sometimes called “the finest of the wheat” but who nevertheless do not become involved in the real life of the fellowship … but remain detached, reserved and, even after some years, still comparative strangers to those who want to share fellowship with them in the things of God….  Either we are content to regard Holyrood as a preaching station, a kind of spiritual “self service” store where you help yourself to anything that happens to appeal to you, or we submit to the biblical teaching about membership of the body and take our responsibilities towards one another seriously….  We need one another.  This is the meaning of the fellowship.  There is a healing, sanctifying and enriching power in the true fellowship of the Spirit.  Most people would be surprised to learn how many needs there are that nothing but the love of the saints in fellowship can meet and solve (cited pp. 257-258).

Anointing with Oil

Danny Hyde, the pastor of Oceanside United Reformed Church, has a helpful essay on the anointing with oil spoken of in James 5.  Unlike some in the Reformed tradition, he sees it as a continuing blessing for the church.  In this essay, he interacts helpfully with the views that this anointing is simply “medicinal” or that it was restricted to the early church, as well as with the current charismatic and Pentecostal uses of this passage.  Good stuff.

Blue Like Jazz

A couple of weeks ago (yes, I’m behind in my blogging!), I galloped through Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality. I’d heard about it online, especially in connection with “Emerging Church” stuff, and at first I didn’t know what I was going to make of it. But on the whole, I found to my surprise that I liked it.

That’s not to say I liked everything. I was irritated by Miller’s left-leaning politics, though I do appreciate that he’s reacting to a background in which (or so he implies) being a faithful Christian was inextricably linked with being a Republican. His insistence that Jesus was a religious figure, not a political one, suggests that he could use a dose of N. T. Wright.

Furthermore, it often appears that Miller’s beliefs are grounded on feelings and “what makes sense to him” and whatever seems cool to him. If there’s a scriptural foundation, it’s rarely obvious. But here I should note that this weakness is also one of the benefits of the book. I suspect that Miller is hardly the only one in this particular boat. Pastors may think that the members of their congregation know what they believe and why but I suspect that many members simply drift along, believing whatever they’ve learned growing up or whatever makes sense to them or whatever seems cool.

In fact, Miller himself points out how important it is to the people around him, and to him himself, to be (or at least appear to be) cool:

In the end, the undercurrent running through culture is not giving people value based upon what they believe and what they are doing to aid society, the undercurrent is deciding their value based upon whether or not they are cool (p. 105). 

He talks about a girl he knew who

decided what to believe based on whether other people who believed it were of a particular fashion that appealed to her. I saw myself in her quite a bit and that scared me (p. 106). 

As he says later on, “Even our beliefs have become trend statements…. We only believe things because they are cool things to believe” (p. 107). But, as he points out, the gospel isn’t a fashionable or cool thing to believe. And yet it is the most relevant thing. In response to a friend who thought that the new church in America, unlike the old, would be “relevant to culture and the human struggle,” Miller writes:

I don’t think any church has ever been relevant to culture, to the human struggle, unless it believed in Jesus and the power of His gospel. If the supposed new church believes in trendy music and cool Web pages, then it is not relevant to culture either. It is just another tool of Satan to get people to be passionate about nothing (p. 111). 

But does Miller himself fall into the trap of chasing the cool instead of the true? He may indeed. And if you were to point out examples in this book, he’d probably agree that you’re identifying a problem in the way he behaves, a problem he’s only just becoming aware of. But it’s a problem that many people, including people in our churches, share.

And that’s one of the great benefits of this book. Miller is very honest about his thoughts and feelings and struggles as an evangelical Christian (and the theology that does come through in this book appears to be evangelical, though I’d want to take issue with some aspects of it) and the result is a pretty good picture of where a lot of Christians are at today.

The coolness thing is only one example. Elsewhere, in a couple of passages, Miller talks about his struggles with evangelism:

So much of me believes strongly in letting everybody live their own lives, and when I share my faith, I feel like a network marketing guy trying to build my down line (p. 114). 

I have to admit that I recognize the feeling. I’ve walked up to people in a park to talk about the gospel, and it does feel very much as if you’re imposing upon them, intruding into their activities, like a salesman trying to push a product. I don’t like telemarketers calling me, and some forms of evangelism make me feel like one myself.

Here’s another observation worth thinking about:

I associated much of Christian doctrine with children’s stories because I grew up in church. My Sunday school teachers had turned Bible narrative into children’s fables. They talked about Noah and the ark because the story had animals in it. They failed to mention that this was when God massacred all of humanity (p. 30). 

Like many people, Miller struggles with grace:

I love to give charity, but I don’t want to be charity. This is why I have so much trouble with grace (p. 84). 

Which leads up to this gem at the end of the chapter:

In exchange for our humility and willingness to accept the charity of God, we are given a kingdom. And a beggar’s kingdom is better than a proud man’s delusion (p. 86). 

But for me, the heaviest punch of the book came toward the end, in the chapters where Miller talks about being alone and living in community. Miller is single, lived on his own for a long time, and now lives with some other single men.

When you live on your own for a long time …your personality changes because you go so much into yourself you lose the ability to be social, to understand what is and isn’t normal behavior. There is an entire world inside yourself, and if you let yourself, you can get so deep inside it you will forget the way to the surface (p. 152). 

Loneliness is something that happens to us, but I think it is something we can move ourselves out of. I think a person who is lonely should dig into a community, give himself to a community, humble himself before his friends, initiate community, teach people to care for each other, love each other. Jesus does not want us floating through space or sitting in front of our televisions. Jesus wants us interacting, eating together, laughing together, praying together (p. 173)

Miller talks about his experiences as he moved into a house with several other guys, after living by himself for a long time. The transition was hard. One of his roommates kept dropping by at times when Miller would prefer to be alone. He’d want to talk and Miller would try to drop hints to make him leave.

Living in community made me realize one of my faults: I was addicted to myself. All I thought about was myself. The only thing I really cared about was myself. I had very little concept of love, altruism, or sacrifice. I discovered that my mind is like a radio that picks up only one station, the one that plays me: K-DON, all Don, all the time…. 

Having had my way for so long, I became defensive about what I perceived as encroachments on my rights. My personal bubble was huge. I couldn’t have conversations that lasted more than ten minutes. I wanted efficiency in personal interaction, and while listening to one of my housemates talk, I wondered why they couldn’t get to the point (p. 181).

As someone who lived alone for many years, including the first five years of my ministry, I found these chapters illuminating. They shed light on who I am and what makes me tick. I’ve lived alone too long, and I bless God for giving me a loving and patient wife with whom I’m learning what it means to love.

I highly recommend these chapters to all singles — to single guys in particular — and I second Miller’s recommendation: Difficult though it is, don’t live on your own; live in community and learn that way to put others ahead of yourself.

Pastoral Theology

The problem with my pastoral job is that I don’t really know what I am doing. So I read every book I can find and I cling to the Bible like a kid who can’t swim but somehow found a life preserver in the middle of the ocean….

Often, I just want to be left alone or to start preaching sermons that sound like pithy statements strung together from fortune cookies and just cash my paycheck every week. But I can’t help myself. Invariably, I see the needs of the culture and the condition of the church, and like the Hulk, my skin becomes green, my eyes bulge out of my head, and I lose the ability to speak in full sentences. So I just keep going and more people keep getting saved and more churches keep getting planted and I keep seeing more than needs to be done.

The only thing that gets me out of bed on Monday is the picture in Revelation of King Jesus on his throne ruling over all of creation, which is his kingdom. I have never seen what John saw, so I am forced to take his word for it. But because Jesus is in charge of everything, there is hope, even for my city (Mark Driscoll, The Radical Reformission, pp. 183-184).

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