Letter to a Seminarian

DEAR STUART,

I know what you mean when you write that you are uneasy about going to a parish ministry when you are ordained. Our troubles are well-publicized. Our mental breakdowns have been counted and discussed in the press. Sociologists study our complaints, national magazines record our casualties. A picture has been painted of the pastor’s lot as anxiety-ridden, frustrating, crowded with triviality.

The picture is probably a true one.

I doubt if the parish ministry has ever been more anxious, more difficult, more filled with the possibility of failure. That’s what is good about it. This may well be the most exciting time in the long history of the pastorate. Never has this call offered more to the man who wants the Lord to give him a job that is bigger than he is, who prefers risks to certainty, who is willing to fail ten times to succeed once.

Anxiety? Plenty of it. For one thing, people today take seriously what ministers say and do. If they didn’t, pastors wouldn’t have to be so wary of people who want to use them. Because people take pastors seriously, some of them are mad at their minister all of the time and quite a few are likely to be at any given time. If a pastor is lucky today, he can often have extremists on both sides of him, equally unhappy. Sometimes he gets tired of the uproar and wishes that no one cared what he thought. (Monday is usually my day to feel this way.) But most days he is glad that they do care. In these days of secularism, racial turmoil, and moral disintegration, the minister has to speak. If his words result in anxiety, it is because people are listening.

We can’t deny that it is frustrating, either. Somehow the church spelled with a small c doesn’t correspond very well with the Church we discussed in seminary. The pastor discovers early that most of his members have a very different view of the Christian faith from any he has read. They are not divided into liberal and evangelical, Bultmannian and post-Bultmannian. In fact, they aren’t easily classified at all. If there is a majority view, it may be a kind of eclectic universalism whose major premise is that any belief is good as long as you believe it sincerely. The parish church is not a well-drilled Christian army waiting to commission a seminary graduate as its general. It is a confused gaggle of saints, pagans, and people with unrealized possibilities. In short, it is a group of people who need their pastor more than they know. They will often surprise their minister, when their faith and vision outrun his. They will more often disappoint him. For the minister, the parish represents an unanswered challenge that will never be completely answered.

I don’t know about the triviality. I do know that there is never time enough to read or write. We don’t play much of a role in history. The history-making concerns are always being crowded aside. The great issues before the Congress and the United Nations are great issues to us, too. But we are always being interrupted by the crushing concerns of our people, people whose names won’t be remembered by the historians. The pastor is called from his study to go to the emergency room at the hospital, to drink coffee late at night in strangers’ kitchens. He is summoned from his typewriter and his books to hold dying hands, to look into eyes glazed with grief. And so often there is nothing he can do—nothing but suffer along with them, and care enough to be hurt when they are hurt, and pray. He will not take the hurt away with good theology and a smattering of amateur psychiatry. All he can do is care, and trust, and hope. Is this trivial? I don’t know. But I do know that the pastor should care. Hardly anyone else does, and people need him for that.

The parish minister is constantly being brought into bruising contact with the brutality of life. He has many more failures than successes, and the successes are so slow and intangible that he’s never sure that there are any. He is often insecure, often alone, too often faced with tasks beyond his power.

Yet, can you understand what I mean when I say that this is what is good about it? The very things of which we complain are the exciting, the worthwhile part of a pastor’s life. If no one cared what we said, if our churches were bands of perfected saints who didn’t need us, if we didn’t share the joy and heartbreak of people of little fame, it would all be safe, but empty. The pastorate is not quiet and comfortable. If it ever gets that way, it will be no place for the Lord’s children to serve.

Yours in anxiety and joy,

Malcolm Nygren

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