(Second of two parts; click here to read Part 1) Then study starts to erode. You cannot go to a pulpit week after week and preach truth accurately without constant study. Our minds blur on us, and we need that constant sharpening of our minds. And without study, without the use of our mind in a disciplined way, we are sitting ducks for the culture. This culture is an evil culture. This culture is the enemy. Through the media, through friends, through conversations we’re constantly fed lies, and like most lies, they’re 90 percent the truth. So you swallow the lie, and subtly, the edge of the gospel is blunted; you think you’re preaching the gospel, and you’re not. You don’t even know it.
So the first task in providing pastoral care is to pray and to study the Word
Who’s going to do that except the pastor? People in the congregation are busy in their jobs, reading their periodicals and attending their conferences. It’s my job to be suspicious of the culture. I’m not a culture critic, but to be a pastor, I cannot be seduced by the world. This becomes increasingly difficult in this so-called postmodern time. If you’re not sharp, you’re on the Devil’s side without knowing it. A student was telling me he saw a video on Michael Jordan. He said, “Michael Jordan looks so lazy. He looks like he’s not doing anything. Then suddenly, he’s through three people, and he’s slam-dunking the ball.” As a pastor, how do you slip through the opposition and make your point? You do it by being lazy—or what looks like being lazy—sitting in your study for half a day reading a book that doesn’t have anything to do with your sermon. As a pastor I’ve got a responsibility to be alert to my culture so that my congregation is not seduced. If I don’t do it, nobody will.
Most congregations don’t think they’re paying pastors to do that.
That’s true. But they’re not the ones who give me my job description. I get my job description from the Scriptures, from my ordination vows. If I let the congregation decide what I’m going to do, I’m as bad as a doctor who prescribes drugs on request. Medical societies throw out doctors for doing that kind of thing; we need theological societies to throw out pastors for doing the same thing. And if you give up prayer and study, you will soon give up the third area: people.
Pastors give up caring for people?
Nobody makes a decision to do this. The defection happens slowly. Listening, paying attention to people is the most inefficient way to do anything. It’s tedious, and it’s boring, and when you do it, it feels like you’re wasting time and not getting anything done. So when the pressures start to mount, when there are committees to run to and budgets to fix, what’s got to go? Listening to people. Seeing them in their uniqueness, without expecting anything of them. You quit paying attention, and people get categorized and recruited. It doesn’t take long for pastors to become good manipulators. Most of us learn those skills pretty quickly. If you can make a person feel guilty, you can make him or her do almost anything. And who’s better at guilt than pastors?
Mothers?
(Laughter) Mothers, yes. What happens, though, is that when I see the person, I’m not really listening to his or her situation because I don’t have time. I’m thinking, I wonder if he’ll say yes to taking on this ministry. Or, I’ve heard her troubles fifty times already. She’s not going to tell me anything new. Maybe she won’t. But people are not telling you their troubles in order to inform you about their troubles. They’re looking for connection. They’re waiting for prayer. They’re pilgrims, and my task as their pastor is to be with them where they are.
A lot of pastors would say, “My job is to make sure that pastoral care takes place in the congregation, not to provide it all myself. My job is to lead and to create systems in which lay people provide pastoral care.”
I don’t like that. I don’t think it works.
Why doesn’t it work?
You lose the unity and wholeness of pastoral ministry. The person who prays for you from the pulpit on Sunday should be the person who prays for you when you’re dying. Then there’s a connection between this world and the world proclaimed in worship. Classically—and I have not seen anything in the twentieth century that has made me revise my expectation—a pastor is local. You know people’s names, and they know your name. There’s no way to put pastoral work on an assembly line.
But don’t you want to equip the saints for ministry, including the ministry of pastoral care?
Certainly, one task of the pastor is to form people into Christians who know how to care. That way, pastoral care is diffused through the church. I’m not saying a pastor has to do it all. My son is a pastor and leads a Stephen Ministry, in which lay people do a great amount of care for each other. But nothing exempts a pastor from the work. Pastoral care can be shared, but never delegated. If the congregation perceives that I exempt myself from that kind of work, then I become an expert. I become somehow elitist; I’m no longer on their level. Elitism is an old demon that plagues the church.
In some churches, it would be impossible for a pastor to know everybody’s name and to care for everyone.
That brings up the problem of size, and I don’t have clear, strong answers to that. I did it in a fairly small congregation. On the other hand, when I left, there were 500 people, and I was the only pastor, and nobody lacked for pastoral care. But I’d been there thirty years, and I had a lot of people helping me. I’m not saying everybody ought to do this. I’m saying this is what pastors ought to do. There are other offices in the church—evangelism, mission, administration.
Have you seen a pastor of a large church do what you’re advocating?
I was a student intern at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City with George Buttrick. At that time, Madison Avenue was probably the preeminent pulpit for the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. Buttrick was a great preacher, and he had a staff of three or four other pastors. But every afternoon, he visited people. Not everybody got visited by Dr. Buttrick, but everybody knew people who did get visited by him. They knew he was there. He often said, “I can’t preach if I don’t know these people. I can’t be their pastor if I don’t touch them, if I haven’t been in their homes.” I think that’s true. You can’t do that week after week and then take on management models that obscure people or turn them into functions in the church. The church is not a functional place. It’s a place of being.
Many lay people come to their pastors and say, “Why don’t we have such-and-such a program?” Do they really want their church to be “a place of being”?
It’s odd: We live in this so-called postmodernist time, and yet so much of the public image of the church is this rational, management-efficient model. If the postmodernists are right, that model is passe; it doesn’t work any more. In that sense, I find myself quite comfortably postmodern. I think pastors need to cultivate “unbusyness.” I use that word a lot. My father was a butcher. When he delivered meat to restaurants, he would sit at the counter, have a cup of coffee and piece of pie, and waste time. But that time was critical for building relationships, for doing business. Sometimes I’m with pastors who don’t wander around. They don’t waste time. Their time is too valuable. They run to the tomb, and it’s empty, so they run back. They never see resurrection. Meanwhile, Mary’s wasting time; she’s wandering around. To be unbusy, you have to disengage yourself from egos—both yours and others—and start dealing with souls. Souls cannot be hurried.
If I were to walk into a church, what would tip me off that it was concerned about meeting needs or about “dealing with souls”?
Some of this you don’t notice right away. I would be wary of a church that was over-glamorous, that promised a lot. I have no objection to finding all the ways you can to get a hearing. Sometimes that means helping people get their kid off drugs. So I’m not saying we shouldn’t respond to people’s needs, but the rock-bottom thing is “Repent and follow.” My job as pastor is to call people to repent, deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow Jesus. If I revise “Repent!” to “How I can help you get your life in order?” I’m turning away from the gospel. If I take the “Follow” part out and say, “We’ll find out how you can live your life best the way you define it,” who needs Jesus? Sometimes I feel like a backwoods fundamentalist or somebody carrying a sign around Times Square that says repent. But I’ve been a pastor for thirty-five years, and I don’t trust people one inch in defining what they need. We don’t know ourselves. We need God to tell us what we need. For me, being a pastor means being attentive to people. But the minute I start taking my cues from them, I quit being a pastor.
Give me an example of someone who came with expectations you weren’t able to meet on his or her terms.
One woman had just become a Christian and joined the congregation. She was around 40 years old and divorced. She didn’t know much about the faith. She was always living with somebody or other; that was just the way she lived. She came to me for a year or so because she was trying to get her life in order, and I was teaching her how to pray. Sometimes I’d listen to her and think, Should I say something about her sexual lifestyle? She’s in church every Sunday. She knows what I believe. She’s got to know something about the Ten Commandments. But somehow I never felt I should say anything. After about a year, I said to her, “Would you do something for me?” She said, “Sure. What do you want me to do?” “Would you live celibate for six months?” “Why would I do that?” she asked. I said, “I’m not going to give you any reasons. I just think I know you pretty well, and we’re trying to figure out how to live this Christian life. Just do it. Do it for me.” She said, “Well, I don’t see the point of it. But yeah.” She started to live celibate. After two or three months, she said to me, “Thank you for that. I have never felt so free. I didn’t know you could live this way. I know the Bible says something about it, but I thought times had changed so much that you couldn’t do this. I don’t know anybody who lives this way. Thank you. This is wonderful. Things are coming together for me.” She thought she was coming to me to bless her in her life the way she was; at some point it seemed right to interfere with that. Thankfully, I waited long enough, so the Seventh Commandment became a word of freedom to her rather than some kind of oppression.
So people come for blessing and sometimes the most pastoral thing you can do is offer correction.
I would call this “spiritual formation.” You’re forming character. You’re showing people how to practice certain things so they become embedded in their living. But those things are quite different from what they came to you for. Most people come to church with wrong expectations; they usually don’t think about repentance, not doing something that has become habitual to them, and following Jesus instead of their egos. As a pastor, I teach them, “Jesus is a real person, and you need to follow him.” Basically, you’re teaching people how to pray.
How do you go about doing that?
You’re going to get tired of this answer, but the first thing I say is, “Meet me Sunday morning at eleven o’clock.” I want to get past the idea that prayer is a do-it-yourself activity. I’m trying to give some sense of the largeness of prayer, the church at prayer. Then I get to know what kind of life they live. Do they wake up in the morning alive, or does it take ten o’clock and three cups of coffee for them to wake up? If they’re that kind of a person, I don’t suggest a morning quiet time. I encourage them to memorize prayers so when they don’t feel like praying, there are prayers to pray. Somehow, I want to find out how people can disengage from their culture so there is some silence and solitude. I’m willing to work with people to find out how to do that, but this is slow work. Most pastoral work is slow work. It is not a program that you put in place and then have it happen. It’s a life. It’s a life of prayer.
1997 by Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.
