In his book Under the Unpredictable Plant: An Exploration into Vocational Holiness, Eugene Peterson warns that there is little that is glamorous about the pastoral vocation. Peterson explains, “Pastoral work consists of modest, daily, assigned work.” The same holds true of the pastor’s spiritual life—it is ordinary. There is nothing remarkable about the primary disciplines that nourish a pastor’s spirituality. They are the same fundamental practices that we have urged our congregations to engage in for years: prayer and reading God’s word.
We pastors have been looking for vibrancy—a word that carries with it a scent of excitement—when we should have been aiming for vitality. Vibrancy describes the character of my experience. Vitality, on the other hand, has to do with life and health. For most of us, the experiences that mark our spiritual lives are not vibrant. They do not shimmer and pulsate. Like the pastor’s work, they are modest and daily.
But even though pastors practice the same spiritual disciplines as everyone else, what is remarkable is that spirituality is part of our job description. We are, in a sense, paid to be spiritual. By this I mean that our congregation expects us to study the Bible. It expects us to pray. We would not be doing our job if we failed to practice these disciplines.
Practically, this means that the schedule can be our friend instead of our enemy. We should not be afraid to build a spiritual regimen into our workday routine. It isn’t “cheating” to make the study of God’s word and the practice of prayer (or any other discipline) part of our daily obligations as pastors. We can also protect the time assigned to these activities, just as we would other pastoral duties. We don’t feel guilty about declining appointments in order to visit someone in the hospital or perform a funeral. In the same way, we need not feel guilty about not receiving a phone call or turning away a visitor (assuming it is not an emergency) in order to pray.
