Our aim as pastors should be to produce people whose lives will either make Jesus appear to be incredibly crazy or amazingly able to produce the sort of people he demands.
—William H. Willimon
“I want to do well as a pastor,” said the seminarian, “but I never want to lose sight of the fact that I’m a person. My personal needs are more important than my pastoral duties.”
At first hearing, this young man’s attitude sounds charmingly modest, appropriately suspicious of his new clerical role. He wants not to be the pompous preacher. He wants to be just a person. Yet this is a strange view of a “person.” Can any person be detached from his or her commitments?
A pastor is not merely a person. A pastor is a person who has had hands laid upon his or her head, made public promises before God and the church, willingly yoked his or her life to the demands of the gospel. This marvelously empathetic seminarian has unwittingly subordinated church tradition, theology, and ordination to his own needs. How can he be sure that his desire to be “just a person” is not simply another means of self-centeredness (what we once called sin)?
The romantic rebel
In our attempts to be empathetic and ordinary people above the limitations of the pastoral role, we fall into what Mercer law professor Jack L. Sammons, Jr., has called “Rebellious Ethics.” Following such ethics, we stand apart from our professional roles in judgment of them. The worst moral danger, according to Rebellious Ethics, is for pastors to be captured by their professional roles. The goal of this ethic is to be the sort of pastor who doesn’t take himself or herself too seriously, to be more a person than a pastor. In fact, says Rebellious Ethics, the more we summon the psychological courage to rebel against our socially imposed roles, the more ethical we will be.
Listen to the cynicism within the conversation of the Ministers’ Monday Morning Coffee Hour. Clergy sit around making cutting comments about their flocks, or regale one another with sacrilegious jokes—an ersatz rebellion from the clerical roles they find so confining. It is an attempt to deny clerical demands by making fun of being a cleric. We adopt the stance of the romantic rebel, the fiction of the roleless person.
In rebelling against traditional expectations for pastors, we have not rebelled against cultural expectations. We have succumbed to the most ethically debilitating of those expectations. We have fallen backward into the clutches of the dominant ethic—you stay out of my life, and I’ll stay out of yours.
Chaplain to the personal
The contemporary pastor attempts to achieve power by being so nice, appearing to be caring, empathetic, and kind, all the while conveying this culture’s officially sanctioned ethic: there is no point to life other than that which you personally devise. You don’t intrude on my comfort; I won’t intrude on yours.
It is not that we have been too good at being pastors and not good enough at being people; rather, we have not been good enough at being pastors. True morality, the ability to judge our self-deception, the gift of seeing things in perspective, comes from practices outside those sanctioned by the system. It comes from being forced, Sunday after Sunday, to lead and to pray the Prayer of Confession followed by the Words of Absolution. It comes from being ordered, Sunday after Sunday, to “do this in remembrance of me.”
Our ecclesial claim is that through obedience to these practices, Jesus gives us the resources we need to be faithful disciples. And we will never know whether Jesus was speaking truthfully if we refuse to hold ourselves and our people accountable to Jesus’ demands.
Our aim as pastors should be to produce people whose lives will either make Jesus appear to be incredibly crazy or amazingly able to produce the sort of people he demands.
Just one of you
During a lunch with the chair of our chemistry department, he noted that ministers could profit from the ethics of chemists.
“The ethics of chemists?” I asked.
“Sure,” he replied. “It is impossible to be a good chemist and a liar at the same time. The chemist’s honesty about experimental results, openness with other chemists, and commitment to standard methodology would enhance the practice of ministry.”
Which suggests Jack Sammons is correct: we don’t need to be better rebels from the virtues and practices of our craft; we need to be more deeply linked to them. Separated from the skills and commitment of our craft, we are left morally exposed, victims of conventional wisdom. For pastors, the worst form of self-deception may be the deceptive idea that we are without power, just one of the boys (or girls), not taking ourselves too seriously, a person.
Consider the ethics of preaching. The morality required by the craft of sermon preparation, the self-criticism, obedience to the text, confidence in the congregation, and weekly hard work are moral disciplines. In fact, that may be a good test whether ordinances are morally ready to be entrusted with a congregation: Have they mastered the craft well enough to write fifty-two Sundays of sermons without lying too often?
Sportscaster Red Barber recalled that the chief ethical crisis of his career occurred when the manager of the Dodgers, Branch Rickey, called to prepare him for the fact that in the next few days, baseball’s color line would be broken and black players would join the team. Barber’s small-town Mississippi roots caused him great consternation. What should I do? he asked himself. Should I resign rather than be part of this? “Then a voice said to me, ‘You are an announcer. You will announce!’ Scales fell off my eyes. I knew what I was to do. The next week I announced to the world the arrival of Jackie Robinson. There was no problem.” Freedom came from accepting his role.
The notion that we are most fully ourselves, most fully ethical, when we have freed ourselves from the demands of Scripture, tradition, and church, merely demonstrates that we are held captive by the belief that the individual is the basic unit of reality, the sole center of meaning. We live under the modern presupposition that none of us should be held to commitments we have not freely chosen. If I explain my actions on the basis of tradition, community standards, my parents’ beliefs, or Scripture, I have obviously not decided for myself, have not been true to myself, have not been moral. I am less than a person.
Ironically, we jettison the older, traditional story—that it is my duty as an ordained leader of the church to bear the church’s tradition before the congregation—for a more socially acceptable one—my duty is to my individual feelings and standards in order to free my parishioners to be dutiful to their individual feelings and standards. In effect, all we do is serve the status quo, become chaplains to the present order, urge people to feel sincerely and make up their own minds. Clergy are thus fated to be nice. We hope that nobody will get hurt doing that. Of course, nobody will get to be a true saint, either.
The mother of modernity
In Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, Charles Taylor notes that the Reformation rejected the historic Catholic presumption that some within the body of Christ could be more dedicated to the faith, and thus more capable of winning merit and salvation, and others could be less so.
Now everyone is a saint. God is not more present through specially dedicated people than God is present through everyone. Thus, the Reformation made its own distinctive contribution to the individualism of the modern world. Despite what we Protestants may think of Taylor’s observation, we should pause for thought. Taylor claims that the Reformation’s effort to deny special mediation of God’s grace through peculiar institutions or special people ultimately destroyed the church’s christological center. Everything gets flattened to “what seems right to me,” and any person can deliver that.
However, to be a Christian is to be someone who is baptized into practices and virtues based upon the claim that in Jesus Christ, God is busy saving the world, not on our terms, but on God’s terms. God’s principal way of saving the world appears to be persons, but not just any old person—saints are needed.
Therefore the church calls persons to be pastors to help the rest of us be more than the persons we would be if we had been left to our own devices.
A Baptist friend of mine felt compelled to speak out in the middle of a recent racial crisis in his small southern town. In a sermon, he charged his congregation with being more influenced by their surrounding southern culture than by the Bible they professed. When his board of deacons complained to him about his sermon, his reply was, “Look, I’m a preacher. You pay me to preach the Bible, not what you (or I) think. You think I enjoy preaching like this?”
His board sat there in a moment in silence. Then they applauded him and went on to their business. Their pastor had reminded them that for him to be “ordained” meant that he was “under orders.”
Both pastor and people are ennobled by being accountable to something more substantial than their “felt needs.” Vocation, in a Christian sense, means no one is “just a person.” No one is “just” an anything after God’s claim upon our lives.
Copyright © 1996 by Christianity Today/Leadership
