The Imperfect Pastor (eBook)

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Recovering Our Humanity

We have no home in this world, I used to say, and then I’d walk back up the road to this old place and make myself a pot of coffee and a fried-egg sandwich.

MARILYNNE ROBINSON

“You can be like God,” the Serpent says.

“But how?” I ask.

I read the Bible with glasses.

I kneel to pray for people with coffee breath.

I stand to preach Jesus with a blister on my foot.

I serve the Lord’s Supper with bread bought for $1.99 at Schnuck’s Grocery.

“Just pretend it is otherwise,” the Snake responds. “People love it that way.”

Advice for a Would-Be Pastor

I had recently learned that a longtime pastor and personal mentor committed suicide. I took a sabbatical from the seminary where I served as professor and spent six months as interim pastor with my departed friend’s family and congregation. I had pastored a church before. I had served as an interim before. But not like this. We would forage together for scraps of grace and truth amid the wreckage. The living Christ would inhabit the heaps with us. We would learn from him in the trash. He would sup with us in the shadow’s valley.

But presently I was seated in a crowd of professors and ministry students in our jeans and tennis shoes. I was asked to give a word. What could I say to help a rookie in ministry?

The atmosphere was light, but my heart was heavy. I was thinking about how my pastor mentor could have chosen to step down from ministry and still have mattered to all of us. But for him, stepping down in the midst of inner haunting indicated not humanity but failure. He could not see himself useful if he no longer held the position of pastor with the care for others that the position enabled. I missed him. I was, for the first time in my life, asking myself the same question. Did I know that I could serve Christ humanly and significantly whether or not I was a pastor or leader in ministry? I did not know it at that time, but I would soon have to answer such a question in a painful and public way. For the moment, however, among those ministry students, with grief in my heart and soberly confronting my assumptions about what it meant to lead in ministry, it was now my turn to speak. I breathed a quick prayer and stood. That’s when I said it. “Jonathan Edwards farted.”

Some laughed. I didn’t. Some smirked at my irreverence. Maybe I was irreverent. I wasn’t trying to be funny. I probably could have found better language to describe what I was grappling with. I had no intention to disparage the great theologian and pastor from America’s history. I was trying to put words to the damage and myth of his celebrity and others’. I felt harassed by a new question in my being: What does it mean for us that if revival came and we went on into the night with heaven-sent prayer, we’d all still have to use the bathroom at some point? I wanted to say that even the greatest theologians or preachers among us are still just ordinary persons needy for grace in Jesus. I was tired of pretending otherwise.

First Things First

At a conference, I preach Christ for you with a hemorrhoid while my books are on sale out in the hallway. What is more, I may have seen myself in my children’s eyes that morning and had to ask their forgiveness for something the day before, or maybe I’m still blind as I speak to you regarding what my wife or my children or my congregation still desperately need me to see. When I visit you in the hospital, I had to tie my shoes that morning or figure out which sweater makes me look a bit slimmer or cry out to God with my own doubts as you hurt and I have no answer why. When you’ve been changed by grace through something I said or wrote, I likely had a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast or enjoyed the sound of the owl that visits our place.

Therefore, as we begin to think about desires, we need to cry from the rooftops that pastoral ministry is creaturely. A pastor is a human being. I believe that Christian life and ministry are an apprenticeship with Jesus toward recovering our humanity and, through his Spirit, helping our neighbors do the same. All of this is for, through, by, with, and in him for the glory of God.

I also believe that the general absence of this recovery of our humanity within pastoral ministry is spiritually killing us. I want something done about it. I realize that placing our humanity in Christ front and center for the Christian life and the pastoral task will make some of us uneasy, and rightly so. It could seem that I intend to droll out only more of the self-centered spirituality that our generation and our own hearts harmfully want.

To allay such concerns, I think of a professor and friend of mine. He sometimes has his ministers in training turn individually and face the rest of the class and confess out loud to the rest, “I am not the Christ.” In these words from John the Baptist, we learn that while it is true that we can dangerously make too little of God by drawing improper attention to ourselves, it is equally true that we cannot fully magnify God without confessing that we are not him. To say “I am not the Christ” is simultaneously to expose for all to see that we pastors are merely human and only local.

I use the words merely human and only local in order to differentiate us from Jesus. Jesus is human, but not merely. Jesus is local, but not only. We clarify this distinction between Jesus and us as an act of worship and commitment. As ministry leaders we endeavor to give of our lives in such a way that every neighbor we minister to will know that we are not God. Each of us is not God and is only human.

So let’s mark this point down. Greatness, even in ministry, cannot escape humanity. Being human does not mar greatness; it informs it and sets its noble boundaries. How have we come to think otherwise? Whatever desire we may crave for ministry, we do so as one whose big toe can itch and whose sockless feet get cold in winter.

Human Physicality

Pastoral desires, however grand or noble, do not deliver us from bodily limits.

Theological study taught me the doctrine of creation. I was examined for ordination on my views of creation days and Darwin’s legacy. But what it means that God created us human, bodily, local, finite, and in his image did not translate into my theology of pastoral ministry nor inform the shape that pastoral work must take. I think now that it should.

For example, I am one of Wendell’s pastors. Polio has held Wendell’s legs hostage for seventy years. Wendell has conformed to the regimen of diabetes too, with its drill sergeant–like demands upon his daily routines. Two bouts with cancer have also bushwhacked Wendell. The death of his wife ransacked his heart and made his bed too empty at night. His hands tremble. His voice sometimes slurs.

Within his motorized chair Wendell does his daily tasks as well as reads his Bible, prays to God, and shares Christ with others out of the praise he finds for God’s care of him all these years. To care as a physician of the soul for Wendell, one must account for Wendell’s physical body.

In the words of the pastor poet G. M. Hopkins, we are like a “skylark” in our “bone-house,” souls and bodies.1 Early in pastoral leadership, I knew that the battle I fought would not be against “flesh and blood” (Eph. 6:12). But I underestimated how flesh and blood would form the arena for this fight. “Beloved, I pray that all may go well with you and that you may be in good health, as it goes well with your soul” (3 John 2). John the apostle prayed like this, and we learn.

Preparing Our Bodily Senses for Ministry

Let’s not forget that we who do the serving are bodily creatures too.

I was asked to visit a middle-aged woman in the community. Mentally, she was four or five, though she had lived forty or fifty years. When I walked through the door, she was bibbed, trying to tackle a plate full of spaghetti. She smiled wide with wonder as I sat down beside her.

“Who are you?” she asked, covered with red sauce and noodle pieces.

“My name is Zack. I am a pastor,” I answered.

She immediately and excitedly responded. “I have learned the ‘Our Father’ by heart,” she said. “Wanna hear it?”

“I’d love to,” I said.

After proudly reciting the Lord’s Prayer, she declared Psalm 23 from memory.

“Did I do good?” she asked.

“You sure did!” I said.

“I believe in God!” she continued. “He loves me. I love him. He died on a cross for me. He will come and take me home one day.”

She said this quite seriously, staring straight into my eyes. It was as if she knew what my role was, that to talk about God with a pastor is normal. She was assessing me too. Perhaps detecting what kind of pastor I was. She suddenly dropped her fork, held out her spaghetti-covered, saliva-sprinkled hand, and said, “You wanna pray? Take my hand.”

I did, and we prayed to God with our wet spaghetti hands in a living room unknown to the world but cherished by him.

Pause here for a moment. Prayerfully linger with this question: What does it mean for you that ministry is an act of neighbor love and that to love your neighbor will require close...