Being a pastor has made me better than I am. This is because the pastoral vocation requires that I act in ways that seem beyond me. Recently I came across a sermon, “The Pleasures Peculiar to the Ministerial Life,” preached in 1728 by the Rev. Amos Adams at the ordination of Jonathan Moore at First Church in Rochester, Massachusetts. He examines the ways that being a pastor enhances one’s spiritual life. While granting that it’s not a shortcut to sainthood (“I don’t mean that ministers are necessarily eminently good men,” he writes), he concludes, “The ministry is, in short, a school of virtue.”Update the language a bit and Rev. Adams could have been writing about me.
Prayer on demand
I began to learn how to pray when I was in seminary—not in a class, of course, but in a small prayer group of fellow students that met weekly. It was only when I became a pastor and had to pray for the congregation, that my experience of prayer deepened. After all, the only way to learn how to pray is to pray. Or, as Thomas Merton put it, “If you want a life of prayer, the way to get it is by praying.” And pastors are asked to pray a lot. Rev. Adams makes a similar observation: “The continual exercise of prayer, to which we are called, in public and private, on a variety of occasions, and in a multitude of circumstances, can scarce fail of improving the spirit of prayer within.”
Early in my ministry, Tom Cullins, the son of members of our church, was one of 152 passengers on an airplane that was hijacked and diverted to Beirut. They were held by terrorists for 17 days before being released.
When I first heard about Tom’s captivity, I went to his parents’ house, where other members of their family had gathered. I stayed for hours as they made phone calls, watched the news, and awaited word. The situation was grim. One of the hostages had already been shot by the terrorists, and his body thrown from the plane. Sitting in the family’s living room that anxious first day, I was keenly aware that I didn’t know what to do. For the most part, I just sat there in silence, which might seem appropriate under the circumstances, but which was also entirely necessary because I didn’t know what to say.
But then, after the family received a few more frightening details of Tom’s situation, his mother turned to her young pastor and said, “Martin, this is when you offer a prayer.” It was part instruction and part demand. Everyone else in the room may find it difficult to pray on such a day, but for me that simply was not an option. I was the pastor, and I was expected to pray. So, of course, I did.
As a pastor you cannot opt out of prayer. You cannot say, “I’d rather pass, if you don’t mind.” At any given moment, you may not feel particularly prayerful but, by golly, you are expected to offer a prayer anyway.
If I were not a pastor, I am sure that I would still pray, but I am equally sure that I would not pray as often. I would probably be like so many people who find prayer difficult to fit into the hectic tumble of their days. Rev. Adams described them sympathetically as “the greatest part of mankind [who], in the busy and active scenes of life, have scarce a moment to turn their thoughts to heaven.” Although—God knows!—a pastor’s thoughts are not continually turned heavenward, it is also true that a pastor’s thoughts are frequently reoriented in that direction simply by performing your pastoral duties. As a pastor, you are expected to pray with the Men’s Fellowship at their breakfast, with someone who is ill in the hospital, with the youth group as they head off on a service project, with a committee before they meet, with a couple as they prepare to marry, with a family as they gather after the death of a loved one.
This expectation can be something of a gift. Over time, I discovered that prayer was beginning to dip deeper into my soul. Over time, through one of the untraceable patterns of grace, the prayers of my lips became the prayers of my heart. Increasingly my life has been shaped around the contours of prayer because, as a pastor, I was expected to pray and was given abundant opportunity to practice.
Constant surveillance
There is no escaping the pastoral role. It follows you relentlessly. That is a good thing, I have concluded, but like many things that are good for us, it doesn’t always go down easily. Any pastor knows what it is like to covet the “off duty” sign of the cab driver. But we are not issued such signs; there is no such thing as slipping in and out of the local grocery store for a quart of milk. A simple errand is always potentially strewn with unplanned pastoral encounters.
And because there is no escaping the pastoral role, there is no escaping the scrutiny of the people around you. The pastoral life is lived in the round. In a term used in the theater, there is no “blind side,” no side where there is not an audience. As Garrison Keillor once observed, when you are a pastor, people are always reading you literally.
This became clear to me early in my ministry when I attended a high school reunion. There were many old friends I wanted to see, most of whom I had not seen since I had gone to seminary. Perhaps because my father was a pastor, no one seemed particularly surprised that I had gone into the ministry. Actually, at the time I think I wished that they had been a bit more surprised—it’s not like I just inherited the family business!
As is the way with reunions, everyone seemed to slip comfortably into the roles they played 10 or 15 years before, as surely as if we had picked up old scripts with our names on them when we walked in the door.
We had all thought of ourselves as so knowing and sophisticated when we were in high school. One of our favorite expressions was, “Of course,” as if we had already seen everything there was to see by the age of 16, and so we were beyond the reach of surprise. Irony and sarcasm were the lingua franca. Conversation was like a contact sport, particularly among the males.
Gratefully, by the time of this reunion, everyone had matured a bit, which mellowed the conversation, but the pull toward our familiar roles was sometimes too much to resist. As the reunion was concluding, a small circle of us were comparing notes. Someone mentioned having a conversation with a classmate I will call Paul Jameson, who in high school had been widely considered “obnoxious.”
“Paul told me that he lost ten pounds so that he could look his best for the reunion,” she said.
I quipped, “The trouble is, even ten pounds lighter he is still Paul Jameson.” It was the sort of putdown that would have been part of our banter in high school. But my friend didn’t let me get away with it. She said, without a hint of sarcasm, “Martin, and you’re a minister?” Another friend added, “Yeah, we’re counting on you.” To this day I remember well my embarrassment.
Even though these friends were not my parishioners, they were holding me to a higher standard because I am a pastor. My first reaction was something like, “Can’t I be petty for one evening? Do I have to be a pastor even here?” But my embarrassment was a sign that these friends were not wrong to expect me to “govern my tongue.” They did not want me to forget that I am a pastor, which, in this instance, meant prompting me to do the right thing.
As a pastor you can take a day off from your duties, but there is no taking a day off from your role. People rightly expect that the person they see in the pulpit will be the same person they run into at the grocery store or meet at the high school reunion. The pastoral life is an integrated life. Put another way: being a pastor requires integrity. And the inescapable vocation can be “a school of virtue.”
Caring when it doesn’t come naturally
As a pastor I am expected to care for people I may not particularly care for. I remember, for instance, getting a phone call from one parishioner informing me that another parishioner, “Jim,” had been taken to the hospital with chest pains. The person on the phone knew very well that Jim had been relentlessly critical of my ministry. Jim was the sort of person I would find myself talking with, even when I was alone. In these conversations, in which I played both parts, Jim would say something potentially wounding and I would have the perfect rejoinder—strong, not unkind, irrefutable—the kind of statement that would reveal to him the error of his ways and send him home chastened, to sin no more. That worked when I was able to play both parts. Unfortunately, in real conversations Jim always insisted on playing himself and seldom did it go well.
When the parishioner called to tell me that Jim had been taken to the hospital, he assumed that I would go to be with him, to comfort him, to pray with him. And I shared the same assumption. When I got off the phone, I simply got in my car and headed to the hospital. Because it’s what you do. It is not something I would choose to do on my own, but it is what a pastor does. He had been entrusted to me, big pain in the posterior though he may be.
My wife, an attorney, can “fire” a client who is too difficult to work with. A restaurant manager can refuse service to a troublesome customer. But pastors are expected to care for those they did not choose and perhaps would never have chosen. The church, like the family, is a place where we learn to live with those we are stuck with. Of course, we are not always able to pull it off. But in those times when we are able to live with, and perhaps even love, those we are stuck with, the church gives us glimmers of the love of the God who is stuck with us all.
When I got to Jim’s room at the hospital, I learned that Jim had had a mild heart attack. He told me about the treatment options that the doctors were considering. He sounded positive, almost cheerful, as he discussed his condition. He certainly sounded more positive than he did whenever he talked about church matters—which, gratefully, he avoided on this occasion. Then, when I asked Jim if I could offer a prayer, he said, “Well, I’m not sure that’s necessary. It was only a small heart attack.”
I responded, “Well, I’d like to, if I may.” So I offered a prayer for his healing. I asked that he might know God’s love through the skill of the doctors and nurses, through the devotion of his family, in the care of the church. I went on to ask that he be given, grace upon grace, those gifts that we wish we could give him, but which he can only receive from God’s hand—the gifts of strength, hope, peace. And then I prayed that he might rest in the everlasting arms that we are assured are underneath it all.
Given the nature of our relationship, I wondered if such a prayer would ring hollow. But if it was hollow, it was with the hollowness of a cup waiting to be filled. And filled it was—filled with my own struggling attempts to love this one I was stuck with and, by the time I was finished, filled with a resonance and power beyond whatever I was bringing to this encounter. In my prayers for Jim’s healing something in my own heart was healed. It used to surprise me when things like that happen. Now I look for it.
Here is how the Rev. Adams put it in his sermon: “The continual exercise of pastoral affection, in earnest care, tender pity, and affectionate sympathy with the flock in all their variety of circumstances, in trouble and in joy, hath a most powerful tendency to form in us those habits of goodness, that liken us to the angels of light.”
It does not always work that way, of course, but it does often enough that I now think I understand why Jesus tells his followers to act in particular ways, regardless of how they feel at the time. He says turn your cheek, pray for your enemies, pray then like this. He focuses on actions, not because interior dispositions are unimportant but because most often we act our way into a new way of thinking and feeling, rather than the other way around. So I am grateful that the pastoral vocation requires that I act in ways that seem beyond me.
Hypocrisy or something else?
In Max Beerbohm’s story, “The Happy Hypocrite,” he tells of a wicked man who loved a virtuous girl. The man knew that he could not hope to woo her if he approached her undisguised, so he donned the mask of a saint. Sure enough, the girl fell in love with the man—or perhaps it is more accurate to say that she fell in love with the saintly mask. Years later, when a spurned lover of the hypocrite discovered the deception, she challenged the hypocrite to shed his mask in front of his beloved and show his face for the ugly, repulsive thing it was. When, after considerable protest, he dropped his mask, he discovered what he could not have anticipated: Under the mask of the saint, his face had become transformed. It was the face of a saint.
As a pastor you can take a day off from your duties, but there is no taking a day off from your role.
Beerbohm correctly labeled the character in his story a “Hypocrite,” for clearly it was the man’s intention to deceive. When someone takes on the pastoral role, obviously it cannot be as a deceitful disguise. Nevertheless, the pastoral role can be donned in the hope—indeed, the expectation—that one will be inwardly transformed to its likeness. Or, as the Rev. Adams put it, we assume the role in the hope that “the continual exercise of pastoral affection, tender pity, and affectionate sympathy” might “form in us those habits of goodness.”
Perhaps that is a lot like what Paul had in mind when he urged the members of the church in Rome to “put on Christ.” He was asking his listeners to assume some of the qualities of Christ, to wear them as they would a new and perhaps ill-fitting set of clothes, in order that some day they might fit, and be fitting expressions of who they had become. Such an outfit may not fit naturally at first. It may make the wearer feel awkward. But as every child who has been fitted for shoes has been told, it is important to have “room to grow.” What seems to cause you to trip all over yourself today allows for the possibility of growth.
Those who have experienced some form of transformation in their lives often exhibit a tendency to exaggerate both the before and the after. So let me add: If I had not become a pastor, I don’t think I would have been a child of the darkness. In many respects, I probably would have been very much the same person. Just as surely, even though I have been a pastor all of these years, I do not think anyone would describe me as one of the Rev. Adams’ “angels of light.” But I do believe that, by donning such a role and by doing those things that are associated with such a role, being a pastor has made me better than I am.
Martin B.Copenhaver is pastor of Wellesley Congregational Church in Wellesley, Massachusetts. This article is excerpted by permission from his book, This Odd and Wondrous Calling (Eerdmans, 2009), co-authored with Lillian Daniel.
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