{"id":5128,"date":"2014-10-27T02:22:00","date_gmt":"2014-10-27T02:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/pastors\/2014\/10\/27\/for-love-of-fierce-variety\/"},"modified":"2014-10-27T02:22:00","modified_gmt":"2014-10-27T02:22:00","slug":"for-love-of-fierce-variety","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/pastors\/content\/for-love-of-fierce-variety\/","title":{"rendered":"For the Love of Fierce Variety"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n\tThirty years ago I was a 20-something pastor, green as a sapling, standing in a 100-year-old pulpit dense with ancient oak. Weekly I addressed people who, on average, were 40 years my senior. They were good people, kind and generous. They nurtured me well in my first bumbling years of pastoral ministry. I still feel a deep affection for them and owe them a great debt.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tBut without anyone even noticing it, we had become a clique. G.K. Chesterton wrote: &quot;The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce variety and uncompromising divergences of men.&quot; We may have been a small community, but we knew little of &quot;fierce variety and uncompromising divergences.&quot; What we knew&mdash;what marked us out&mdash;was sameness and conformity. We attracted people much like ourselves. We felt awkward whenever someone different from us wandered in. And they felt awkward, too&mdash;and soon left.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tI observed this, but never confronted it. It haunted me.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tSix years later, I took another pastorate in a town where fierce variety and uncompromising divergences could not be avoided. It helped immensely that my predecessor sought and welcomed people on the margins. He was a &quot;highways and byways&quot; pastor, always on the hunt for the least of these, and leaping with childlike joy whenever a one of them came stumbling through the doors.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tAnd so they came, in droves. The weekend I interviewed at that church, they had a sharing time. One tattoo-slathered woman (in the days when only that kind of woman got tattoos) stood up and, to raucous applause, told everyone she hadn&#39;t touched liquor in six months. Then a man stood up and shared that he&#39;d gone three weeks without indulging his sex addiction. Cheers and wild clapping.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tI turned to my wife and whispered, &quot;I think we&#39;re home.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>\n\tWe stayed 18 years.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tThat church, that town, was an ongoing crash course in Chestertonian community. There were times when I missed the middle-class tidiness of my old church. This new community was messy all the day long. It was like a city-wide pool of Bethesda: &quot;here a great number of disabled people used to lie&mdash;the blind, the lame, the paralyzed&quot; (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.biblegateway.com\/passage\/?search=John+5%3A3\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"\" title=\"view Scripture passage at BibleGateway.com\" rel=\"noopener\">John 5:3<\/a>). Add bulimics, alcoholics, drug addicts, sex addicts, the mentally ill, and a host of others, and you&#39;ve got the picture.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tIt makes you desperate, God-hungry. You become unwilling to settle for anything less than Jesus&#39; touch, voice, presence. Nothing else will do. Not that I didn&#39;t try. I tried managing the mess, isolating from it, bringing in the latest slickest program to deal with it. But slowly Christ changed me. I saw the smallness of my own soul: my territorial defensiveness, my deep love of comfort, my glaring deficiencies of compassion, my fear of the stranger.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tI still have so very far to go. But I know this: I was naked and he clothed me; I was thirsty and he gave me something to drink; I was hungry and he fed me; I was in prison and he visited me. And now he keeps showing up in all these same terrible disguises, and bids me find him where I least expect him, where I least want to go.<\/p>\n<p class=\"is-style-article-bio\">\n\tMark Buchanan teaches pastoral theology at Ambrose Seminary in Calgary, Alberta.<\/p>\n<p class=\"is-style-article-copyright\">\n\tCopyright &copy; 2014 by the author or Christianity Today\/<em class=\"citation\">Leadership Journal<\/em>.\n\t<a href=\"http:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/le\/help\/permissionsprivacy\/permissions.html#answer\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"copyright\" rel=\"noopener\">Click here<\/a> for reprint information on <em class=\"citation\">Leadership Journal<\/em>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thirty years ago I was a 20-something pastor, green as a sapling, standing in a 100-year-old pulpit dense with ancient oak. Weekly I addressed people who, on average, were 40 years my senior. They were good people, kind and generous. They nurtured me well in my first bumbling years of pastoral ministry. I still feel <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/pastors\/content\/for-love-of-fierce-variety\/\">Read more&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":5129,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"tax_ctp_authors":[2383],"tax_ctp_books":[],"tax_ctp_categories":[154],"tax_ctp_field_guide_subcategory":[],"tax_ctp_field_guides":[],"tax_ctp_format":[131],"tax_ctp_multimedia":[],"tax_ctp_point_editor":[],"tax_publications":[176,185,156],"tax_ctp_tags":[3646],"tax_ctp_topics":[],"class_list":["post-5128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tax_ctp_authors-mark-buchanan","tax_publications-2014-leadership-journal","tax_publications-fall_2014-leadership-journal","tax_publications-leadership-journal","tax_ctp_tags-community-life"],"acf":{"scripture_references":null},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>For the Love of Fierce Variety - CT Pastors<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Thirty years ago I was a 20-something pastor, green as a sapling, standing in a 100-year-old pulpit dense with ancient oak. 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