Richard L. Floyd: “Prophetic” pastors who don’t love the church
Being pastor of a congregation is hard work. I was one for thirty years. It’s not a day job. It's a vocation that takes up most of your waking hours.
A pastor's life and family are necessarily involved in their congregation “in season and out of season.” I often say being a pastor is the best vocation there is, but the worst job. If you are not called to it, you really don't want to do it.
When I started as a pastor, I learned quickly that you have to love your congregants, even the unlovable, of which there are far too many. These take up a good deal of your time. Some of them you will just never learn to love, and you have to turn them over to God, who does.
I had been a political activist in college and seminary, and had gone to jail for my causes, but when I got into the pastorate I learned very quickly that you can’t be a prophet until you have earned the peoples' trust. This means years of marrying and burying and sitting by hospital beds.
If you do this well they may be ready to hear hard truths from the pulpit. Or they may not. Certainly Isaiah’s prophecies fell on deaf ears.
New ministers who have grown up in the church have a leg up, because they know its rhythms and customs, its “grandeur and misery.” But today many of our ministerial candidates haven't grown up in the church. They often come to seminary in a process of self-discovery. Most of us did that to one degree or another. Seminary is a good place to learn many useful things. What seminaries are not so good at is forming men and women into Christians, much less teaching them how to be faithful pastors. Don’t blame seminaries. It’s not their job. Christian formation is primarily the church's job.
Many come to seminary not only to find themselves, but because of a passion for a social cause, which is fine. In seminary the flame of their passion is often fanned by others who share it, which is also fine.
But if all you know of the faith is what you learn in seminary, you are at a distinct disadvantage. And if the main reason you accept a call from a congregation is to promote your cause, then your soul is in danger, and so is the life of a congregation. The congregation you go to may or may not share your passion. It can be dangerous either way.
If they agree with most of your views, the temptation is to self-righteousness, a tendency to see sin and evil “out there” in your ideological adversaries, and not also in your own soul. Then you have lost the great insight expressed by the Reformers' wise axiom simul justus et peccator, that we are both justified and sinners. Some ministers risk this danger for their entire careers and they don’t even know it.
The other temptation is perhaps more dangerous: to go to a congregation where they don’t share your cause, and you scold them for it. You do not learn to love them, and they do not learn to love you, and eventually your ministry fails.
Some of our pastors sadly seek out this kind of martyrdom, and when they are inevitably cast out, they can then turn and say how stiff-necked and hard-hearted their congregation is. Congregations can be stiff-necked, hard-hearted and even abusive. This is nothing new. Read Exodus or First Corinthians.
But congregations can also be wonderful, supportive, gracious, and long-suffering, especially if they sense you are really trying to be their faithful pastor.
If you’ve the diligence and patience, you can be both a prophet and a pastor. But you’d better be a pastor to the people first. Because that is your primary calling.
Richard L. Floyd is Pastor Emeritus of First Church of Christ in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he served for 22 years. This post is excerpted from his blog, “Retired Pastor Ruminates.”
Excellent perspective!
Richard, you have captured the dilemma and task of the pastoral calling wonderfully well. I am still learning that pastoral ministry is first a ministry to the people to whom God has called me. Everything else is secondary. This is not a popular view now, but a needed perspective nonetheless. Thanks for your wisdom, insight, and clarity. -Chuck
ministry and organizing
Well put.
I often worry about seminarians who want to go into the ministry because they see churches as untapped forces for social change. The logic goes - here we have a captive audience week after week, and I can come in and fix them with right thinking, with the political analysis straight from Jesus they've been missing all these years and then real change can happen.
I also find myself annoyed, in that they usually seem to believe they are the first ones to make this clever connection.
I have truly loved the faith-based community organizing I have been a part of as a pastor, but the only times it works is when it grows out of faith and love for the church, rather than disdain for the church or church members.
When ministry is viewed cynically as a means to an end, the ministry and the organizing both fail, as well they should.
Rick, A good word and work.
Rick,
A good word and work. Some matters noted elsewhere, as in the three-fold work of Christ--prophetic, priestly and royal
--Gabe
15 minutes of fame
Rick, you deserve more than 15 minutes. You should have time to do a seminar on the atonement and Christian basics!
Chris
"prophetic" pastors
Rick:
That's just about the truth of it!
Left unsaid may be any reference to the troubling avoidance by church preachers/teachers of the prophetic witness of Judaism and Christianity. A story:
I was a pastor, just over the St. Louis city line, when their new baseball stadium was proposed. Late in the process, a lot of people became aware that the City's tax contribution to the funding package seemed hurtfully large. [Despite the appearance of newer teams, the Cardinals, once baseballs most southerly and westerly team, still had a huge 8-state market. The case seemed to me standard Brueggemann stuff: powerful people acting in a manner hurtful to poor and relatively powerless people, as the cardinal (ha) sin of the Old Testament, especially the prophetic books.] I happened to be writing a column at the time for a suburban weekly, and I said as much. One day my phone rang at work. It was a man I didn't know who said he'd read with interest my comments about the prophets and wondered who and what they were. Hmm. I went over matters quickly (Got a Bible? Open it in the middle. Etc.] He seemed to absorb what I was saying and then said: "I've been attending the ... Presbyterian Church regularly for 22 years, and in all that time I don't recall ever hearing the prophets referred to." I guess I suggested he tune in the Revised Common Lectionary--that it might suggest what the preachers he was hearing were omitting. That got me to thinking. I punched up the church he mentioned on the computer, and it had a website which, amazingly, listed all the sermons preached, with texts. Over the years listed, all texts listed were New Testament texts, with the exception of the predictable Old Testament texts added on at Passiontide and Advent/
Christmas.
I am left feeling that keeping the prophetic witness inaudible is just fine with a lot of preachers. There's a need to teach these writers in the Bible class and to provide responsible introductory comment for every text read out during our services.
My comments do not in any way invalidate your point. I especially resonate to the word patience. In the previous pastorate it was seven years to creation of a Christian Social Concerns Committee!
Keep it coming!
-- George
prophetic pastors
George,
Thank you for the good comments and story. I would be disturbed if my remarks were taken as a rationale for pulpit cowardice or Marcionite neglect of the Old Testament.
And some of the difference may be geography. Here in the Bay State we have no dearth of preachers with social issues at the heart of their preaching.
This piece was also an excerpt of a much larger piece that had a couple of illustrations about how pastors, actually one was a rabbi, earned the right to be heard as prophets because they had done their priestly work over time with diligence and patience. That piece, a rant really, can be found at my blog listed above.
Best,
Rick
I felt I should comment
I felt I should comment because I was a pastor's kid. You got me when you said being a pastor was hard work and hard on the family. Isn't that the truth. I always felt guilty because I couldn't love the congregation because they were always judging and watching me. I was helping my dad with a christmas party at church and was told that I was more of a hindrance than a help to my dad. I was devastated.
Thanks for sharing your views. It brought back some good and some bad memories.
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