Most local church work is like holding your breath under water. We sit in meetings, write emails, and provide pastoral counsel. Our weeks are often filled more with what we do not want to do than what we want to do. As pastors we plunge into the lives of neighbors and congregants and we are often found gasping for air in our leisure time.
Maybe this is why I do not like reading books about how to get ministry done. I tend to walk away from such titles with disappointment as I think through the number of ways I’m not doing what these writers tell me I should be doing. Like receiving suggestions in the middle of a golf swing, it often leaves me distracted and frustrated.
Pastors need air, inspiration, and thoughtful consideration about the world. This is why we got into the business in the first place.
Pastors need air, inspiration, and thoughtful consideration about the world. This is why we got into the business in the first place. We are inspired by the rare privilege it is to administer the Spirit of God into the lives of others through teaching, counsel, and leadership.
Few writers bring me up for air like Marilynne Robinson. Her fiction and non-fiction work brings me out of the deep waters of pastoral ministry and into a heavenly perspective filled with air and sky.
I can still remember where I was when I first read Gilead, Robinson’s most famous novel. I closed it and sat back in the hard, wooden chair in the middle of my apartment. I considered starting it all over again. Then I did.
Later, I read everything Robinson had written up to that point. Since then, I have followed her, reading every title as it comes out and getting the air needed in order to dive back in to the murky waters of ministry. These past nine years have been fueled by books like hers.
In her latest collection of essays, The Givenness of Things, Robinson’s hard-hitting, crisp one-liners about the evangelical world (“those lately bold and robust big churches who are obsessed with sins Jesus never mentioned at all”) to her jarring connections to history and theology (there is only one essay where John Calvin is not mentioned in a surprising way), this is the kind of intellectual rigor the mind of a pastor must consider.
Fear and a world without boundaries
Robinson’s description of the universe expands beyond physical dimensions, and delves further into its metaphysical lack of boundary. She sees the cosmos and her faith not as a closed system, but open to infinite possibilities. This makes her endlessly curious. What can feel like unformed thoughts in her writing is really just a humility in understanding she could be at the start of every idea she has. “What we have expressed, compared with what we have found no way to express, is overwhelming the lesser part…we do not know what we obliterate when we drop a bomb” (p. 118-119). This kind of wisdom is refreshing in a world where confident certainty wins. I long to be a pastor with this kind of mind.
Earlier, in a defense of the humanities, she says, “Science of the kind I criticize tends to assert that everything is explicable, that whatever has not been explained will be explained—and, furthermore, by their methods…So mystery is banished” (pg. 14).
Our congregations are wrapped up in more mystery than we would like to believe. As a pastor, my impulse is to control outcomes and solve problems. I like to be able to explain what is happening each Sunday, to understand where the church is and what we’re doing. But Robinson helps me to better understand the larger battles taking place in those who populate the pews. Many of us tend to explain or defend our God, to prove him right in light of recent “evidence.” We have become fearful in our approach.
Out of fear, we seek to manage, quantify, and materialize everything about life. “[W]e are panicked into reducing ourselves and others into potential units of economic production,” Robinson writes in her essay, “Decline.”
And so we see our temptation as pastors: to reduce ourselves and our people. We count our people and our income incessantly only to become depressed when the numbers drop. Let us be reminded we are not producers; we’re shepherds. The metaphors are very different.
Great ideas and the ground level
But Robinson rarely stays in the clouds, circling about the life of the mind. While we need her lofty intellectualism, we also need a connection to our “little lives,” as she calls them. Take, for example, her meditation on the book of Genesis:
“[I]t tells us that we are no ordinary participants in nature, that what we do is a matter of the highest order of importance, however minor our transgressions may seem to us…To me this seems a long way of saying that we are Adam…so remarkably splendid and terrible…”
This leads her to remind us of our practical to educate. She calls out churches who have been “putting down the burden of educating their congregations in their own thought and history,” leaving them “inarticulate.” Our inspiration and evangelism should not shut the doors to putting our congregations through a type of schooling. They need to know their Bibles, confessions, and creeds.
The greatest ideas, however lofty, have massive implications on the ground. When we understand the link between these ideas and our responsibility that change is seen in us and our congregations. As a teacher, Robinson is no stranger to this.
Some of our reading should have no immediate “use.” Leaders can find edification from practitioners, idea-makers, poets, and storytellers. I commend Marilynne Robinson to pastors, church leaders, and teachers as I would commend Eugene Peterson, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Graham Greene. They are the writers who remind us why we tend the flock, why we teach, and even why we live. They are a breath of fresh air.
“Useful” is the wrong word for writers like these. Rather, they are beautiful, awe-inspiring, prophetic, and, yes, necessary.
Chris Nye is a pastor and writer living in Portland, Oregon with his wife, Ali. His first book will be published by Moody next spring. Connect on Twitter: @chrisnye
