Meditation on Pastoral Ministry

 Meditation on Pastoral Ministry

It is commonly said that there are three aspects of pastoral ministry. They are said to be the priestly, the pastoral, and the prophetic aspects of the call. I would add that there is often a seemingly less holy part of the call, the administrative. Perhaps it would be worth reflecting a bit on each of them here. I don’t know that most pastors have them specifically in mind as they go about their work a church pastor. Still, they designate important parts of the work of a traditional church pastor.

I’ll start with the priestly. In the priestly part of the call, the pastor leads worship, preaches, and presides at the sacraments, the Protestant traditions the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist. I found this to be both the easiest part of pastoral ministry and at least one of the most rewarding. No matter how many times I’ve done it, leading Christian worship fills me in a way nothing else does. Presiding at the Eucharist is one for me one of the most powerful experiences of my ministry. When I do it, I stand in an unbroken line of faithful men and women who have celebrated that sacrament with the people of the church from very early in the Christian tradition, at least since 50 CE. They haven’t all understood it the same way of course. Tragically, and in a very un-Christian way, they have even fought wars over it. Nonetheless, in presiding at that sacrament I connect the people of my church with the ancient Christian tradition and, I hope, with the good parts of it not the bad parts of it. I often feel closer to God when I am presiding at the Eucharist than I do at any other times of my life.

The priestly aspect of parish ministry also includes preaching. In the more liturgical traditions, the Eucharist is the center and the high point of every service. In the Reformed Protestant traditions like My UCC, the sermon takes the place of the Eucharist in most worship services. I tell myself, perhaps in delusion though I truly don’t think so, that I am a damned good preacher. As I’ve mentioned, a very fine retired UCC minister called the first sermon I eve gave one of the best sermons he’d ever heard; and that was when I was practicing law (or at least trying to) and it had never occurred to me actually to become a preacher. I rarely have trouble coming up with something meaningful to say. I rarely if ever quote anyone else in my sermons. That may or may not be a good thing, but I don’t need other people speaking my truth for me. I can do it perfectly well myself.

Preaching, as I think I’ve already said, has some things in common with giving a closing argument to a jury. In both exercises, you are trying to convince the people you’re talking to of some truth. In court it may be that your client is innocent of the crime with which she is charged or at least to find her guilty only of a lesser included offense or, depending on which side of the case you’re on, that the defendant is indeed guilty as charged. In a civil case you are trying to convince the jury to rule in your client’s favor, most commonly on the questions of liability and damages. I always found giving a closing argument to a jury both exhilarating and exhausting.

I used to react to preaching the same way. It would take me days to come down from the high I experienced after preaching. I come alive when I’m preaching. I open up, expose emotions and deep feelings, and I get to tell church people things that I hope are meaningful to them, much of which most of them have never heard before. In my retirement I still jump at every chance I get to preach. It is, I think, the meaningful things I do these days.

Then there’s the pastoral aspect of the call. To “pastor” means to tend the sheep. As pastor, the ordained minister is mostly simply present with his parishioners in whatever is going on in their lives. Few people understand the power of presence, yet just being present with a parishioner who is experiencing difficulties in her life is often the greatest gift a pastor can give a parishioner. To pastor is to listen, but it’s not to listen so you can formulate a response. It is to listen for the sake of listening. It is listening to understand. It is setting yourself aside truly to listen to what your parishioner is saying to you without filtering it through your own experiences and, especially, not through your own hot button issues. It may be listening to respond by encouraging the person to say more. It is rarely if ever to respond by criticizing what the person is saying unless that person asks you to. In my experience, parishioners are reluctant to take up their pastor’s time talking about themselves and what’s going on in their lives. When I hear someone say that, I want to say: “What do you think we’re here for?”

Pastoral care may occur in the pastor’s office only rarely. The setting may be a parishioner’s home. Perhaps more frequently a hospital room. It may be with a parishioner with good prospects for recovery from an illness or accident. Or it may be, it rather unavoidably will be, with a person nearing the end of her life. Depending on the degree of the person’s dementia, she may or may not know that her death is near. Either way, the pastor’s call is still mostly just to be present. It may be to assure a parishioner of God’s unconditional love and grace if she has concerns about her fate after death. Tragically, the Christian tradition has instilled that concern in people for two millennia even though God’s love truly is universal and unconditional. The fate of our souls after death are not something we need to be concerned about, and some parishioners need reassurance about that. offer it to a person is one of the pastor’s more rewarding tasks.

Pastoral care may not be with the person who is actually experiencing difficulty in their life. It may be with that person’s family or others close to him. Some of my most powerful experiences of providing pastoral care had been with people who have just suddenly and unexpectedly lost a loved one to death. Here’s the thing though. You can’t make their loss go away. You can’t make their loss alright. All you can do is be with them and, much more importantly, to help them know that God is with them and their departed loved one too. Doing so is indeed a powerful experience of pastoral ministry.

Next there is the prophetic aspect of the parish pastor’s calling. This is the one that often gets a pastor sideways with her congregation. The people of any congregation are people from the culture and the society in which the congregation is located. At least some, if not many, of them will come into the church with the prejudices and cultural, social, and political common wisdom of that culture and that society. The problem is that the gospel of Jesus Christ is nearly always, if not, indeed, always, in opposition to those prejudices and that common wisdom. At least some, and perhaps many if not all, of the people of the church do not want to hear their pastor preaching Jesus’ gospel of nonviolence, peace, distributive justice, and inclusion. Any number of pastors have been driven out of their pulpits by congregations who would not tolerate things like sermons against the Vietnam War or in support of the Civil Rights Movement. They may not tolerate being told that the gospel calls them not just to acts of charity, which most of them will accept, to acts of justice. To the transformation of social, economic, and political structures from their current unjust ways to the much better ways of justice. They probably won’t accept any hint that they are racists, even though essentially all Americans are racists the pastor included. It is woefully easy for a pastor who feels God call to prophetic ministry to lose the support of her congregation.

Is it possible for a pastor to preach prophetic sermons that his people don’t want to hear and still keep his job? Not always. The pastor can try to be in good with the parishioners through other means. A mentor of mine once told me: If you want to be prophetic, make lots of pastoral visits. Making lots of pastoral visits is, of course, good pastoral practice in any event. It may or may not be enough to keep the congregation from wanting to fire the pastor.

Being a pastor isn’t easy. One of the powerful dynamics of pastoral ministry is that the pastor almost certainly needs the income she receives from the church to cover their living expenses and maybe even save up a little bit for retirement. Doing things as pastor that the church’s people don’t like can be a good way of losing that income. A parish pastor is sometimes faced with the difficult choice between preaching and teaching what he knows to be the gospel truth on the one hand and remaining employed on the other. No other person can tell any pastor how to deal with the conflict between proclaiming the truth of the gospel and what the pastor’s people are willing to hear. I didn’t have this problem much in the first church I served. I had it with several of the people in the second church I served, and it was one of the things that drove me to resign from that call.

Then there is the administrative part of the pastor’s job. How much of a administrator the pastor must be varies from denomination to denomination and from church to church. The pastor’s call agreement is likely to make her the immediate supervisor of other church staff, perhaps the music director, the Christian education director, and the office administrator. I know that I can do administrative work, but I don’t like it. I doubt that very many other people who have responded to a call to pastoral ministry have gone into ministry so they could be administrators. It’s work that the pastor must do. Not many of us love doing it.

No one should go into any ministry unless that person cannot deny that God is calling her to that ministry. Discerning that call will almost certainly change your life in ways you can’t even imagine before they happen. You will face difficulties. You will fact opposition. You might be called things you never thought you’d be called, as when that Hispanic evangelical minister I mentioned above called me apostate because I don’t hate gay people. If you’re lucky, you will receive praise and appreciation. Even if you do, you will still face criticism and displeasure with what you’re doing and what you’re not doing. Parish ministry isn’t easy.

It is, however, by far the most rewarding thing I have ever done in my professional life. There is a sense of fulfillment and wholeness that comes from doing, as best as you are able, what you God is calling you to do. There is peace in knowing that you are responding to a call from a congregation of people; but there is much deeper peace in knowing that you are responding to a call from God. I would never recommend parish ministry to anyone lightly. No one should go into it without a long period of prayerful discernment. And then you should go into it only if can’t not go into it. If that is true of you, it can be the most rewarding thing you ever do.