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Subscribe to CommentsYour job, young pastor, is to maintain a non-anxious presence within the church you pastor. Knowing that we live in a time when anxiety is everywhere–a time when religion, in particular, has been whipped into a paralyzing frenzy of anxiety by those who are served by fear. Easier said than done, maintaining a non-anxious presence. Where to begin? Befriend the book of Psalms.
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Here’s a myth about pastoring that will crush you if you mistake it for truth: when a pastor is doing his or her job, the church will be calm. Like any myth, this one endures because it distorts a truth: that good pastoring helps a church manage conflict, tension, and turmoil better than bad pastoring. (And that bad pastoring can generate enormous turmoil in a church.) The myth hides the reality that we pastor now in an age of very high anxiety, owing to a rapid pace of change all around us.
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Advice to young pastors: When someone with a major media platform like Pat Roberston asserts that Haiti’s founders made a pact with the devil, we’re not supposed to just swallow the assertion whole. It’s an extraordinary assertion, composed of four extraordinary necessities: 1.) that such a pact was actually made; 2.) that those who made it were authorized to act on behalf of the entire nation; 3.) that it’s being made by those authorized to enter into such a pact actually bound Haiti spiritually for the next 200 years (at least); 4.) that it had anything whatsoever to do with the recent earthquake. So far as I know, there’s no historical evidence that such a pact was made in the first place. A Haitian pastor with the Church of God, Jean R. Gelin, Ph.D, did his homework and could not come up with any credible historical source for the claim. And that’s just the first first of the four necessities. Why do we fall for these things?
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You’ve already heard what he said: the earthquake in Haiti is the outworking of a spiritual, not a geologic history. A supposed pact made with the devil around the time of Haiti’s birth as an independent nation. The wrong thing to say at the wrong time for so many reasons. But let me just point out one of those reasons: laziness. Robertson was cherry picking historical factoids.
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In case you haven’t noticed, your brain is wired to pay special attention to criticism. And it doesn’t matter that you are your own harshest critic, now that email makes it emotionally painless to offer correction (don’t you love the anonymous “propetic” emails?), you will have plenty of opportunity to focus on your shortcomings. So when the encouraging words come, hold on to them. Yesterday I had doozy, and I aim to savor this one.
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Maybe you’ve notice that pastoring seems to be a near occaision to mainline anxiety. I’ve been battling anxiety for the past year myself, thank you, but I seem to be on the mend. Thanks in no small part to the best book on leadership I’ve read in years: A Failure of Nerve by Edwin Friedman. Stop, drop, and read this book if you are a young pastor battling anxiety.
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Jesus Brand Spirituality: He Wants His Religion Back is a book I wrote as an evangelical, by which I mean, as someone who cares about communicating the good news (gk. evangel) among those who have not heard good news. Right here, for example, where I live. It is based on a certain reading of the culture in which I live. We who have received and therfore have a responsibility to be and share good news, also have a responsibility to face up to the cultural context we operate in. Here’s the challenge: we have a branding problem. We who love, admire and seek to follow Jesus of Nazareth, must acknowledge that the Christian brand in America has sufferred something very like trademark infringement.
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How did we, the friends of the friend of sinners get to this place? Jesus was known as the friend of sinners. He took a lot of guff for being the friend of sinners. These “sinners” were a social class, not simply a theological category. They were people on the outside of Israel’s accepted circle for a host of reasons. They were not mobsters or murderers or notorious offenders. (You notice that “tax collectors” and “prostitutes” were often given a distinct designation alongside “sinners” in the gospels.) Jesus so identified with “sinners” as to bring upon himself the judgment of the religiously self-righteous. He expects us to be the friend of sinners, which means our righteousness has to exceed that of the Pharisees; it has to be a righteousness of pure sermon-on-the-mount love, not a righteousness that depends on harsh condemnations and judgment of others–the “business as usual” approach to sinners. We need to get our gentle back.
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So you’re a young pastor. Have you noticed that people sin? Yes, they do bad things. Some they do to you–complain about you to others for example because they are afraid to speak with you directly. Oh that’s galling. So you will be tempted to focus on those sins because they make an impression on you. But that’s not what the poor sinners need so much. They need someone to talk to about the struggles in their lives which often involves sins–the sins of others or their own or the communal sins that affect them. As you are sitting there listening to a poor sinner, you will be tempted to assume the posture of the expert.
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It was an odd encounter, but not the first of it’s kind. I had been asked to speak at a Catholic conference on what Catholics might learn from evangelical churches. The participants were kind, responsive and incredibly humble–sitting there listening to me, a pastor without a seminary degree for heaven’s sake. When it was over, a very decent, thoughtful, intelligent–and I would presume kind–man approached me and asked why I wasn’t Catholic. Oh-oh, I I thought. Been here, done this. The conversation from hell–that circles endlessly and nobody leaves happy. But when speaking to a group of people your pre-frontal cortex gets tired, and your willpower is weakened and you take the bait, and converse, knowing that that it’s not going to be a conversation.
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