Back to the Basics
Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity by Eugene H. Peterson, Eerdmans, $7.95
Reviewed by James D. Berkley, associate editor, LEADERSHIP
Those of you who think you know Eugene Peterson, beware! Although he was described in Christianity Today as a Protestant contemplative, a “monk out of habit,” somewhere the gentle pastor, meek and mild, found a set of verbal brass knuckles, which he uses with ferocity in his latest book, Working the Angles.
“American pastors are abandoning their posts at an alarming rate,” he writes. “They are not leaving their churches and getting other jobs. … they are abandoning their posts, their calling. They have gone whoring after other gods. … The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shopkeepers. … They are preoccupied with shopkeepers’ concerns-how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that the customers will lay out more money. … And there must be any number of shopkeepers who by now are finding the pottage that they acquired in exchange for their ordination birthright pretty tasteless stuff and are growing wistful for a restoration to their calling.”
Why the brass-knuckles beginning? “I was mad,” Peterson replied in a telephone interview. “I get so discouraged and angry when I see the abandonment of the essential pastoral tasks. And I suppose I’m still trying to make some sense of what I have chosen to do, what I’ve found essential in ministry.”
Following the flailing, what sense we have left almost has to agree: Maybe we have been “satisfied with satisfying the congregation, impersonating a pastor” as he says, rather than fulfilling our calling.
Then what is our calling?
Peterson sets out a “trigonometry of ministry,” complete with three sides and three angles. The sides are the pastoral tasks-preaching, teaching, and administration. These sides vary in length in different ministries.
Peterson first began several years ago to write about the three sides. But as he mulled the idea, he picked up another image-the angles.
These angles-prayer, Scripture reading, and spiritual direction-are “the means by which the lines of work get connected into a triangle, pastoral work,” according to Peterson. “The pastor who has no facility in means buys games and gimmicks and programs without end under the illusion of being practical.” Instead, Peterson calls pastors to “work the angles.” The remainder of the book addresses each of the three angles.
Prayer, says Peterson, would never be voted a top pastoral priority if time and consideration cast the ballots. But the witness of history would make it an overwhelming victor. “For the majority of the Christian centuries, most pastors have been convinced that prayer is the central and essential act for maintaining the essential shape of ministry,” writes Peterson.
As a textbook for prayer, Peterson recommends the Psalms, in which he dwells for several pages. He shows how prayer can be learned as a child learns language: God has spoken to us; prayer is our learning to return the speech.
Peterson intentionally gave the mechanics of prayer light coverage. He told me, “What I do can sound so intimidating. I get up around five and spend two hours drinking coffee, praying the Psalms, and reading the New Testament before I let anybody else into my life. Other people may need only fifteen minutes. But what we’re doing is filling our minds with certain images, preparing our attentiveness, so that prayer is what we do the rest of the day out in the world.”
For the second angle-Scripture reading-Peterson sets out to turn eyes into ears. “The Christian’s interest in Scripture has always been in hearing God speak, not in analyzing moral memos,” he writes. “The intent in reading Scripture . . . is to extend the range of our listening to the God who reveals himself in word.” Mere reading material we can put down; a speaking God commands our attention.
Peterson wants pastors to move beyond reading Scripture merely “to get something out of it.” By searching for something useful, according to Peterson, “I am no longer listening to a voice, not listening to the God whom I will give a response in obedience and faith. … I am looking for something that I can use to do a better job for which people will give me a raise.”
Peterson conceded least familiarity with the third angle, spiritual direction. “The other two angles I feel I have been doing long enough to have gained some mastery,” he confessed, “but I’ve known what I was doing in spiritual direction only the last ten years or so.” Only ten years of practice doesn’t appear to have hurt his discussion of this angle.
Peterson compares our need for spiritual direction to the necessity of a guide for a difficult mountain ascent: We may make it on our own, but we’re in great peril and rather foolhardy to try. Four guides-including lay and clergy, male and female, Protestant and Catholic-have led him in his own journey.
“I look for someone who will take my life with God as seriously as I do or more so,” explains Peterson. “My directors are not easily diverted, nor do they allow much nonsense. Recently I started agonizing over something, and my spiritual director broke out laughing. I realized how pretentious I was being.
For all its clarity in calling pastors back to the essential tasks of ministry, this book is no how-to manual. Its strength is in the what-to’s. Peterson is not all that enamored with technique, anyway. His is the untimely voice in the wilderness calling, “There’s another way to do ministry: the way it’s been practiced for centuries before ours.”
Peterson gets our attention with a two-by-four, challenges us, and instructs us-all with dead-center accuracy. He’s worth reading, even if you have to pass up a Rotary Club speaking opportunity to do so.
Baring the Burden
Counseling and Guilt by Earl Wilson, Word, $12.95
Reviewed by Donald Stoat, psychologist, Grand Rapids, Michigan
“I feel it is wrong for me to want to lose weight. I hear so much about the ‘me’ generation, and I don’t want to be part of that.”
“I can’t tell you how I feel toward my parents! The Bible says we are supposed to honor our parents, and what I feel isn’t very honoring.”
“Sometimes I’m not even sure I’m a Christian. I’ve asked God to forgive me, but every time I drive past her house I remember what happened and I feel guilty all over again. I hear at church that once God forgives it is gone, but for me it isn’t.”
“I do okay at church until they read the Bible. Then I get depressed realizing how sinful I really am.”
As a counselor, I’ve heard variations on these remarks countless times. What is the person struggling with, really? I wonder as I listen to an unfolding story of grief and pain. Sounds like guilt, but is it a spiritual problem or an emotional one? Is it true guilt or false guilt? Does he want to get rid of the guilt, or does it help him in some unusual way? Where do I start in helping him?
If these wonderings sound familiar, psychologist Earl Wilson’s recent book Counseling and Guilt offers some straightforward answers.
As director of the Lake Psychological and Counseling Center and professor of clinical and counseling psychology at Western Conservative Baptist Seminary in Portland, Wilson speaks from experience about both the academic and practical sides of counseling people with guilt. He explained to me in a phone interview that many people have been counseled from the scriptural viewpoint without actually putting the principles into action.
“We all know more Scripture than we practice,” he observed. “We need to help counselees with the nitty-gritty aspects of implementing Scripture.” Providing guidelines for this task was his goal as he wrote.
The book’s fourteen chapters are divided into three sections. Part 1, “Understanding Guilt,” deals with conceptual issues such as biblical and psychological perspectives on guilt, the distinction between earned and unearned guilt, the problem of motivation by guilt, and the confusion of love and guilt.
Wilson’s analysis is useful in helping counselees modify distorted perceptions. For example, he disarms the common notion that guilt is a necessary condition for growth and aids in preventing future sin. “In fact, helping people look at Jesus and not at their sin is one of the most productive ways of helping them work through guilt.”
He begins with the scriptural truth that Christ his taken away the guilt of our sins and then moves to the issues that keep us from living in the deliverance that is available. As he put it, “We don’t have to stay in the garbage can when we can get out and enjoy the fresh air.” He writes: “Guilt is only a virtue if it leads to repentance and newness of relationship with Christ. After that it usually serves no godly purpose.” He realizes that “the dynamics of guilt . . . are complex. Guilt often serves purposes for the guilty which may have nothing to do with their relationship to God.”
Of persons reluctant to give up their guilt, he observes, “One common payoff is control. After all, others won’t expect much when a person is bleeding and broken. The feelings of guilt can be turned on and off as needed in order to manipulate those around them.”
Vignettes of actual cases illustrate the dynamic.
Part 2, “Counseling and Guilt,” covers a range of counseling approaches and the merits and limitations of each. As Wilson discusses each treatment style, he explains how it can be applied. Describing cognitive therapy, for example, he recommends the technique called reframing, “to look at the problem or situation from a different perspective.” He offers two detailed illustrations of this concept applied in counseling situations.
Part 3, “Preventing Guilt,” is the shortest section, focusing on steps Christian counselors, pastors, and leaders can take to prevent people from feeling inappropriate guilt, along with a chapter on how counselors can avoid feeling guilty themselves. He does, though, believe true guilt is necessary in the redemption and healing process. “There is a need, however, for the prevention of perpetual or chronic guilt which lingers and immobilizes the person long after the records in heaven have been cleared.”
A number of books on guilt are available, including Paul Tournier’s Guilt and Grace, which is footnoted by Wilson. However, Tournier’s book and most of the others are more theoretical and conceptual than Wilson’s. For example, Wilson doesn’t go into detailed analysis of the shame and grief aspects of guilt. The strength of this book is Wilson’s consistent emphasis on practical understanding and “how-to” techniques in an easy-to-read form.
Instruction with Impact
Teaching to Change Lives by Howard G. Hendricks, Multnomah, $9.95
Reviewed by Larry K. Weeden, associate editor, LEADERSHIP
“As a boy I lived in a neighborhood in north Philadelphia in which they said an evangelical church could never be planted,” begins Howard Hendricks in his book Teaching to Change Lives. “But God . . . led a small group of Christians to band together . . . and start a church.”
One man in the church, Walt, “had only a sixth-grade education. One day Walt told the Sunday school superintendent he wanted to start a Sunday school class. ‘That’s great, Walt,’ he was told, ‘but we don’t have an opening for you.’ Walt insisted, however, so the superintendent said, ‘Go out and get a class. Anybody you find is yours.’
“Then Walt came into my community. The first time we met, I was playing marbles out on the concrete. ‘Son,’ he said, ‘how would you like to go to Sunday School?’
“I wasn’t interested. Anything with school in it had to be bad news.
“So he said, ‘How about a game of marbles?’
“That was different. So we shot marbles and had a great time, though he whipped me in every single game. … By then I would have followed him anywhere.
“Walt picked up a total of thirteen boys in that community for his Sunday school class, of whom nine were from broken homes. Eleven of the thirteen are now in full-time vocational Christian work.”
Hendricks observes: “Actually, I can’t tell you much of what Walt said to us, but I can tell you everything about him . . . because he loved me for Christ’s sake.”
With that story, Howard Hendricks draws us into his subject. He also uses it to illustrate several of the major principles taught in this highly readable book that distills the lessons he has learned in a teaching career of thirty-five years.
Walt’s taking the time to shoot marbles with a young boy, for example, illustrates the need for pastors and other teachers to be audience centered, Hendricks says, to look and listen for students’ questions and concerns rather than simply addressing their own.
“A student is seeking answers to whose questions? Yours?” asks Hendricks. “No, his. If we bring our own problems into the classroom for students to solve, they have no ownership of the solutions, and we’re in danger of producing fake Christianity. … So find out, Where are they? What are they struggling with? What temptations are they facing?”
Walt’s story also illustrates another of Hendricks’s major principles: Effective teaching requires a commitment to care for people. This commitment will have a far greater impact than specific lessons taught from the pulpit or classroom. “It means coming to class early, and staying late just to talk with them. It means inviting them into your home. . . . You can impress people at a distance. But you can impact them only up close. And the closer you are to them, the greater and more permanent the impact.”
Hendricks writes of a young man who was given a class of junior high boys only because no other teacher could be found, yet who did a fantastic job. When Hendricks asked him the key to his success, “he pulled out a little black book. On each page he had a small picture of one of the boys, and under the boy’s name were comments like ‘having trouble in arithmetic,’ . . . or ‘would like to be a missionary some day, but doesn’t think he has what it takes.’ ‘I pray over those pages every day,’ he said, ‘and I can hardly wait to come to church each Sunday to see what God has been doing in their lives.’ “
“I’m constantly amazed when former students tell me years later what had the greatest impact on them. It isn’t what I’d like to think it was,” Hendricks said in an interview. Rather than citing a profound lesson taught in the classroom, he said, they usually refer back to conversations held in the student union, his home, or his office.
A third major emphasis in the book is that “what’s important is not what you do as a teacher, but what the learners do as a result of what you do. … Never forget that your task is to develop people who are self-directed, who are disciplined, who do what they do because they choose to do it.”
To that end, Hendricks lays out three primary goals for the teacher.
1. Teach people how to think. “If you want to change a person permanently, make sure his thinking changes, and not merely his behavior.”
2. Teach people how to learn. “Create learners who will perpetuate the learning process for the rest of their lives.”
3. Teach people to work. “Never do . . . anything for a student that he is capable of doing for himself. If you do, you’ll make him or her an educational cripple.”
The book is organized around the “Seven Laws of Teaching” first discussed by John Milton Gregory in his 1884 book of that name. More than one hundred years later, Hendricks believes they still capsulize well the keys to effective teaching. They are the Laws of the Teacher, of Education, of Activity, of Communication, of the Heart, of Encouragement, and of Readiness. One chapter is devoted to each law, and each is summarized in one sentence; the Law of the Teacher, for instance, is “If you stop growing today, you stop teaching tomorrow.”
Experienced pastors and teachers will find a mixture of helpful reminders and thought-provoking insights in this book. As a veteran teacher of adult Sunday school classes, I was struck after finishing the text by the thought that my major commitment in the past has been to present well a body of biblical information each Sunday morning. But now, while still recognizing the importance of content, I’m convinced my main commitment should be to the class members themselves.
When asked what makes his work different from the many other teaching books available, Hendricks said his emphasis in writing was on maintaining an interesting and easily understood style, since “most books on teaching have great soporific value.” In that effort he has succeeded, mixing the directness and self-deprecating humor for which he’s known.
Finally, Hendricks offers this challenge: “What you are is far more important than what you say. God’s method is always incarnational. He loves to take His truth and wrap it in a person. … So every time you teach, ask yourself, What do I know-and what do I want these students to know? What do I feel-and what do I want them to feel? What do I do-and what do I want them to do?” And to those who strive to teach well he promises “the thrill that someone will actually listen to you and learn from you.”
NEW AND NOTEWORTHY
The Church’s Ministry with Older Adults by Blaine Taylor, Abingdon, $10.95
Close to 30 percent of the active members of American churches are over 65. Taylor, for thirteen years pastor of an urban church with more than half its members over 65, offers helpful suggestions, illustrations, and program hints for ministering to and with older adults.
Taylor argues that older saints are motivated to do ministry the same way others are: by knowing they are a vital part of the church family. Framing his conclusions in personal anecdotes, Taylor shows us how older adults can be assured of that.
Leadership Strategies for Ministers by Charles Somervill, Westminster, $8.95.
Somervill has written one of the most creative and helpful leadership strategy books on the market. He skillfully reveals the life of fictitious pastor Henry P. Whittimore. The reader watches Whittimore progress and falter through three ministries-a solo pastorate in a small church, a staff position, and finally a senior pastorate. Whether Whittimore is fouling up at a board meeting or is absolutely inspiring in his motivation of a younger assistant, sooner or later we find ourselves in this unpretentious book.
The inescapable conclusion is that church leadership is a building process: first building credibility, then understanding organization, and, finally, creating strategies to stimulate change.
When Children Suffer by Andrew D. Lester, Westminster, $14.95
One of the most difficult counseling challenges is ministering to suffering children. To help pastors, Lester has gathered eighteen counselors, teachers, social workers, and physicians to write essays addressing the needs of, for example, children victimized by divorce, bereaved children, and children with learning disabilities.
These essays suggest four strategies: presence, listening, representing God, and advocacy. The pastor must not try to be social worker or physician, but simply what he or she is: a representative of God. When children are the victims of abuse or family conflict, however, the pastor should offer some protection as an advocate.
Sabbatical Planning for Clergy and Congregations by A. Richard Bullock, Alban Institute, $6.95
Although Bullock develops the spiritual meaning of sabbatical, he also offers helpful how-to advice for planning and funding. By showing how to do such planning, he convinces the reader that a sabbatical can happen. And if one is careful to prepare the congregation adequately, even the most recalcitrant church family can become convinced of the benefits of a sabbatical year.
Bullock prepares the pastor emotionally and logistically. Thus armed, the pastor can find courage to answer God’s call and design a sabbatical.
Teaching the Bible to Adults and Youth by Dick Murray, Abingdon, $8.95
Murray weaves a persuasive argument for a revival of good Bible teaching. His emphasis is enhanced by an informed discussion of almost every approach in the marketplace.
Speaking directly to Sunday school teachers (part 1), pastors (part 2), and Christian educators (part 3), Murray insists that whoever teaches the Bible must do so with enthusiasm, witness, reflection, experience, and a love of God. Curriculum and pedagogy, while important, are secondary to these goals.
Clergy Malpractice by Robert W. McMenamin, William S. Hein, $27.50
McMenamin does not produce a polemic against clergy malpractice suits. Instead, asserting that these suits are necessary at times, he develops the complexity, ambivalence, and sensitivity of the clergy profession. He does not ask the church worker to ignore the Holy Spirit, but he does plead with him or her to consider more mundane phenomena like legal precedence.
Suggesting that the best strategy for churches is prevention, he offers sound strategies for avoiding legal trouble. Thus, many church workers will find this small (though occasionally technical) book useful.
Reviewed by James P. Stobaugh, Fourth Presbyterian Church, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
