The Back Page | Philip Yancey: Replenishing the Inner Pastor
Churches should take greater interest in their shepherds' spiritual health
Philip Yancey | posted 5/21/2001 12:00AM
A few months ago, I participated in a National Pastors' Conference cosponsored by Christianity Today's parent company. Organizers, who had hoped optimistically for 800 registrants, instead had to scramble to accommodate 1,700, which may indicate our pastors' hunger for companionship and nourishment.
Is there a profession that demands more and rewards less? A pastor spends up to 20 hours a week preparing a sermon and then hears at best on Sunday morning a polite "Good job, Reverend" from a few parishioners at the door—that is, as long as he or she stays within the 22 minutes allotted for preaching. When time for a formal job evaluation rolls around, pastors find themselves rated by plumbers, salesmen, and engineers, many of whom know little about ministry. This same hodgepodge of lay people votes on salary and housing allowances behind closed doors as the pastor sits like a schoolchild in another room.
"We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us," said the apostle Paul about the ministry. God does indeed make his appeal through human instruments, and after my conversations with pastors, I came away with renewed appreciation for the hazards of that endeavor. They devote hours to the premarital counseling of dreamy young lovers, then years later counsel these same couples, now embittered antagonists, through divorce procedures. They comfort the sick and pray boldly for healing, then somehow must find the strength to stand before weeping relatives at their funerals.
We push our pastors to function as psychotherapists, orators, priests, and chief executive officers. Meanwhile, we place on them a unique burden of isolation and loneliness. The pastor or priest loses any private life. Henri Nouwen used to say, "Being friendly to everybody, he very often has no friends for himself. … The paradox is that he who has been taught to love everyone, in reality finds himself without any friends; that he who trained himself in mental prayer often is not able to be alone with himself. Having opened himself to every outsider, there is no room left for the insider."
Called to Be "Another Christ"
During a trip to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, I once had dinner in an Amish home, where I heard about their unusual procedure for choosing a pastor. In that part of the country, few Amish acquire education beyond the 8th grade, and almost none have theological training. The entire congregation votes for any men (in this denomination only males need apply) who show pastoral potential, and those who receive at least three votes move forward to sit at a table. Each has a hymnbook in front of him, and inside his randomly chosen hymn book one of the men finds a card designating him as the new pastor for the next year.
"What if the person selected doesn't feel qualified?" I asked my Amish friend. He looked puzzled, then replied, "If he did feel qualified, we wouldn't want him."
I don't recommend the Amish method of pastoral call (though it does have intriguing parallels with the Old Testament system of casting lots), but his last comment got me thinking. Thomas Merton once said that most of what we expect pastors and priests to do—teach and advise others, console them, pray for them—should in fact be the responsibility of the rest of the congregation. The pastor's distinctive vocation is to be a person of God, one who "is called to be another Christ in a far more particular and intimate sense than the ordinary Christian or the monk."
The pastor stands as a kind of intermediary between the mercy of God, which it is the minister's job to convey, and the dreadfulness of sin. The pastor knows the latter better than any of us, thanks to his role as a spiritual counselor. The former—well, that is what concerns me.
May 21 2001, Vol. 45, No. 7
1 of 2
E-mail
Print
Post
Subscribe to Christianity Today magazine today!
