The Use of the Bible in Pastoral Care
Part Three: Drawn to the Religionless

These first few posts in this series are autobiographical, tracing my journey as a minister within the world of evangelicalism. I’m doing this with the goal of putting some “flesh” on the subject. In posts to come, we’ll look at some thoughts about the Bible itself and how caring Christians and pastors might find it to be a rich resource for ministering to others.

Here are a couple of quotes to set up one last stage in my own experience that changed the way I came to view my vocation as a minister.

…the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up for three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon.There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.’ When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage.

• Luke 4:25-28

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Think of it this way. The program of our church is everything all the members are doing between Sundays. The church keeps house, goes to school, teaches, practices law, medicine and dentistry, runs business and industry, farms, works on construction jobs, researches in many fields, sits on school boards, city councils, county councils, state legislatures and congress. Between Sundays the church is involved in everything productive and constructive that is happening in our community. And it does so as a witness to Christ, to the glory of God, in His love and in the power of the Holy Spirit, sensitive to its accountability to Christ.

“And what of the church work which is done in and for the church organization? Its purpose is to equip each member to do the work for the church Monday through Saturday. All the programs within the church are for the purpose of enabling the church to do the work of ministry between Sundays when she is invisible as a congregation.”

• Richard Halverson, How I Changed My Thinking about the Church, p.106f

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I often ask myself why a “Christian instinct” often draws me more to the religionless people than to the religious, by which I don’t in the least mean with any evangelizing intention, but, I might almost say, “in brotherhood.” While I’m often reluctant to mention God by name to religious people — because that name somehow seems to me here not to ring true, and I feel myself to be slightly dishonest (it’s particularly bad when others start to talk in religious jargon; I then dry up almost completely and feel awkward and uncomfortable) — to people with no religion I can on occasion mention him by name quite calmly and as a matter of course. Religious people speak of God when human knowledge (perhaps simply because they are too lazy to think) has come to an end, or when human resources fail — in fact it is always the deus ex machina that they bring on to the scene, either for the apparent solution of insoluble problems, or as strength in human failure — always, that is to say, exploiting human weakness or human boundaries. Of necessity, that can go on only till people can by their own strength push these boundaries somewhat further out, so that God becomes superfluous as a deus ex machina. I’ve come to be doubtful of talking about any human boundaries (is even death, which people now hardly fear, and is sin, which they now hardly understand, still a genuine boundary today?). It always seems to me that we are trying anxiously in this way to reserve some space for God; I should like to speak of God not on the boundaries but at the center, not in weaknesses but in strength; and therefore not in death and guilt but in man’s life and goodness.

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letter to Eberhard Bethge, 30 April 1944

I was trained and equipped by my evangelical education to do essentially two things:

1. To make it my priority to study, teach, and preach the Bible.
2. To center my life and work in the institution of the church.

Little encouragement or education was given me in the realm of pastoral care. In my segment of evangelicalism, at least, it was understood that a pastor = a “pastor-teacher,” a syntactical combination which was justified through a certain reading of texts like Ephesians 4:11 and passages in the Pastoral Epistles. The pastor’s duty was to “preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching” (2 Timothy 4:2).

Ministers in historic traditions and mainline Protestant groups were trained in worship and sacraments, church history and tradition, pastoral care, counseling, and visitation, and community service and social engagement. They were encouraged to read widely, to be students of the world and culture, to see a kinship between their religious studies and the liberal arts, the sciences, and creative arts.

The Bible school movement, on the other hand, and the culture of fundamentalism and evangelicalism was separatist in nature. From its pietistic and revivalist roots, it created institutions whose world was dominated by a focus on the Bible (and some particular doctrinal emphasis) alone. Some evangelicals tried to balance that in the mid-20th century, and the seminary I attended was heir to that “neo-evangelicalism.” Nevertheless, in reality, TEDS never strayed from their foundationalist bottom-line, and its education was oriented around training us primarily to study and communicate the truths of an inerrant, authoritative Bible.

It was also very church-centered. The men and women who went there expected to find vocations within the church world, either in local congregations, denominations, missions, or parachurch organizations. Although there was a spectrum of separatistic attitudes about how much Christians should be involved in the community and the world, it was clear to me that we were to be “temple servants,” doing most of our work within the boundaries of the ecclesia.

A couple of major influences in my life after seminary, while I served in local churches, opened me up to a wider world and a broader view of ministry.

First, I had children, children who we enrolled in public schools and who participated in community activities such as youth sports programs. As they grew, and they became more involved, I began to not only attend games but to coach. This not only rejuvenated my long set aside love of sports, baseball in particular, but it increasingly immersed me in a world outside the confines of the sanctuary and study.

Over the years, I received some criticism from church people for the amount of time I gave to these activities. I’m sure there was some validity to this, and I probably became defensive about it in some unhealthy ways. However, there was also something happening in my heart and life through this “real world” experience. Like Bonhoeffer, I found myself being “drawn to the religionless.” Some of our friendships with school and sports neighbors became deeper and more meaningful than relationships within the congregation. I learned new ways to talk about faith and “spiritual things” that seemed more natural and down to earth. I felt myself becoming more human, less “spiritual,” more a person who was part of the fabric of an entire community, and not just a “pastor” whose life was hidden away within a religious organization.

Once my youngest, when our car stopped at a crossroads where we could see our church building, said to me, “Look Dad, there’s the church where we live.” Ouch. I was learning not to like that idea much anymore.

Second, I went around the world on some mission trips, primarily to India. Though these trips were very evangelically oriented, the mere act of leaving my comfortable home and going to a place so different, so complex, with so much variety, with sights, sounds, smells, and experiences so far beyond what I had ever imagined the world to be like, was the best kind of shock treatment. I was awakened and lifted out of the smallness of my world, my thinking, my experience, my expectations, my presuppositions.

People who go on these kinds of trips will tell you that one of the greatest challenges is not the culture shock you feel when you get to a new place, but when you get home. These trips uncovered the parochialism of the world in which I lived. In particular, I began to see the parochial perspective of the church and evangelical culture. What was important to me and so many of my fellow parishioners now seemed to pale in comparison with the grand vision of the world to which I had been exposed. Our little programs, the teaching we found comfort in, the inability to see beyond our agenda became increasingly frustrating to me.

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You may well ask, at this point, okay I get your journey, but what does this have to do with the use of the Bible in pastoral care?

But you see, I can’t talk about the latter without describing the former. The way we read the Bible, the way we understand what it is and what it’s designed to do, is intimately tied to the community in which we practice our faith and the expectations and traditions we buy into in that community.

I ultimately came to think that evangelicalism was often missing the mark when it came to what the Bible was for, and how to use it in ministry. I still love the church (in all my conflicted relationship with it), and I still believe in good preaching and teaching. I consider that a gift of evangelicalism to me. But it is an incomplete gift.

Evangelicalism’s perspective often fails to include how to know yourself, how to be fully human, and how to live in the real world among your neighbors. It fosters a “temple mentality” in which people separate themselves from the world in many different ways and focus their attention on programs and priorities within the institution.

I came to think that the Bible does not really support that point of view, and that the Bible itself should be set free from the chains that perspective puts on it.

The Use of the Bible in Pastoral Care
Part Two: A World Between Sundays

In part one, I said that my first congregational ministry experience changed something inside me and made me more open to the work of pastoral care.

However, I must also admit that a battle about this raged inside me when I went back to seminary. The work of pastoral care could be so demanding and so much of it seemed mundane and unproductive, that I didn’t always like it, at times I was discouraged and didn’t think I wasn’t very good at it. On the other hand, I was good with books and had long been affirmed as a good teacher and preacher. Perhaps I should pursue a calling in teaching rather than in pastoral ministry.

When we moved back to the Chicago area, I explored this, but didn’t come to any immediate conclusions. Then, over the course of my seminary training at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS), I abandoned the idea. God brought another group of people into my life who opened my heart even more to the work of congregational ministry and pastoral care. Ironically, these were my seminary professors, who were some of the most respected academic teachers in the evangelical world! They had found their vocation in the academy, but as I took classes from them, I kept hearing something over and over again in my spirit:

“Teaching is good and necessary, but the campus is, in the end, not where it’s at. The front line of God’s work is in the church and the real work of ministry is done by congregations and their pastors right where people live.”

It seemed my teachers really believed this, even though they had come to find their own calling as seminary profs. They salted their lectures with intriguing stories about church and pastoral ministry, and continually emphasized that the lofty truths they were teaching were only important as they were integrated and applied into the real lives of individuals, families, and communities. It helped that I had been in ministry already, for I could visualize the things they were saying, and could participate with keen interest in class discussions, having had a little experience. I didn’t have many answers about being a minister, but I had learned a few questions, and seminary proved to be a good place to ask them.

However, my seminary experience with the Bible was still primarily about studying it, preaching it, and teaching it. It happened on a much deeper level, and I received much more help in studying scripture for myself rather than just being fed a set program of doctrine and teachings, but there was still only a token nod to subjects of worship, congregational life, and the actual work of a pastor with people.

It helped that I began reading the books of Eugene Peterson during these years. The one that had the most impact then was The Contemplative Pastor: Returning to the Art of Spiritual Direction. It’s almost cliché now to point to Peterson as the person who awakened the soul of an evangelical to the true nature of pastoral work, but I’m one of those that found true resonance with what he was saying way back when. During seminary I became the pastor of a small church, and Peterson became an important guide for me there.

In particular, he confirmed what I had known and continued to experience in church ministry: that Sundays were easy, that preaching, teaching, and leading worship were celebratory acts based on clear expectations in a “clean and orderly” environment where we tend to be well-behaved. On the other hand, what Peterson calls “ministry amid the traffic” Monday through Saturday is messy, unpredictable, confusing, and humbling.

But after the sun goes down on Sunday, the clarity diffuses. From Monday through Saturday, an unaccountably unruly people track mud through the holy places, leaving it a mess. The order of worship gives way to the disorder of argument and doubt, bodies in pain and emotions in confusion, misbehaving children and misdirected parents. I don’t know what I am doing half the time. I am interrupted. I am asked questions to which I have no answers. I am put in situations for which I am not adequate. I find myself attempting tasks for which I have neither aptitude nor inclination. The vision of myself as pastor, so clear in Lord’s Day worship, is now blurred and distorted as it is reflected back from the eyes of people who view me as pawn to their egos. The affirmations I experience in Sunday greetings are now precarious in the slippery mud of put-downs and fault-finding. (p. 61f)

This accurate description of the pastoral life outside the sanctuary confirmed to me how important it must be. The realistic picture he painted of the lives of my congregation stood in stark contrast to the more artificial atmosphere on campus. I developed a hunger to immerse myself in the unpredictable circumstances of real life rather than retreat into controlled settings. As Peterson urged us, “an equivalent attention” must be given to this aspect of the ministry, since this is where most pastoral work is meant to take place.

I must mention one more profitable experience that opened my spirit to the work of pastoral care during these years. As part of my seminary training, I discovered that I could take a quarter of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) at a local hospital. CPE is a program to teach pastoral care to clergy and others. Here in the U.S. it is one of the primary methods of training hospital and hospice chaplains and other spiritual care providers. It uses a combination of teaching, clinical practice, small group work, and supervision to help students become better pastoral caregivers. However, it was not something I had heard about in the world of evangelical pastoral ministry. CPE bills itself as an intercultural and interfaith program, and that is probably why. Those adjectives did not fit my evangelical culture.

The best part of taking CPE was that it helped me to know myself better. In fact, that is one of its goals. I had a wise supervisor who gently but insistently prompted me to evaluate my thoughts and feelings about what I was experiencing as I worked with people in the hospital. For example, it was in CPE that I had to tell someone for the first time that her loved one had died and take her to the morgue to view the body. I distinctly remember how that shook me and how hard it was to process. Talking through those experiences with a wise and caring mentor was invaluable for my personal and pastoral development.

Somehow, in my evangelical training, study, and service, the benefits of knowing myself had not been explained to me. I guess, in a world where spiritual development is emphasized as it is, people either ignore the concept of human development or simply assume that it will take place. I never saw the connection between the two. Spirituality as I understood it was all about learning the Bible, having quiet times with God, worshiping and enjoying fellowship with church people, and witnessing to others about Jesus as Savior.

In the perspective of that world, the Bible was given to help me improve my relationship with God, know how to make good choices so that I might please God, and convince others to follow Jesus. In essence, spirituality was about being a person who was saved from the world, separated from the world, and sent into the world as a missionary. This world was not my home, and the Bible was focused on making me “spiritual;” it wasn’t helping me learn to live among my neighbors. When I tried to use the Bible in ministry to them, it was like we were speaking two different languages. I just couldn’t make the connection between the Bible and my development as an adult human being living among other human beings in a complex world of experience.

But what about the little boy in my congregation who had been hit by a car while riding his bicycle, who lay for years in a minimally responsive condition? What about his family, whose world had been forever altered by this experience? What about that little boy’s family, who waited and watched and cared and cried for years until he died?

What about the woman with mental health issues that I had to commit to the psychiatric ward after a manic episode?

What about my fellow seminary student, who went into the ministry and died a year later from an unknown heart defect?

What about the community where I was pastoring — located in a deteriorating urban setting? What did I even know about my neighbors? The indigent people I saw walking up and down the main street? The families I knew who were fostering children that came to them out of the chaos of the social services system? The large number of folks who were battling lung cancer and other terminal diseases after working at the asbestos plant in our town? The lives of those in our increasingly diverse city who looked different than me, spoke other languages, and brought other cultural influences?

How could I help my young daughter, whose good friend participated in our church, who was murdered by her father when he went off the deep end during a divorce?

What about the people I met in the hospital from broken families, those who were alone and without support, those who had incredibly complex issues to deal with in addition to their health problems?

And what then about me, who believed God had called him to show God’s love and bring God’s good news to all these people? Did the Bible in my hand give me anything that could enable me to grasp such real world complexity? That could give me a deeper sense of human connection with my neighbors in a world like this? That could help me flourish as a fellow human being among them, and not just as someone living a “separated” Christian life and standing before a congregation to preach and teach on Sunday mornings?

The Use of the Bible in Pastoral Care
Part One: The Birth of a Pastor

I have been serving as a hospice chaplain for almost thirteen years now, so my daily work involves visiting those who are in the final season of life, along with their families, friends, and caregivers. Before that, I was in pastoral ministry for about twenty-five years. I did a lot of pastoral care then through visiting folks in their homes and in hospitals and other facilities.

Because I served in mostly evangelical settings, I found I didn’t have the training, the tradition, or the resources for doing pastoral care. In the evangelical world, I found I mainly had a Bible, some hymns, maybe a few devotional resources, and a lot of Christian clichés in my pastoral care toolbox. And I found that the Bible, though I believed it was the best resource available, wasn’t a handbook for what to say to hurting people. I did the best I could, usually quoting a passage from Psalms or something that had encouraged me in my devotional reading.

It wasn’t like Roman Catholic priests, who have an abundance of prayers, liturgies, and rituals at their disposal. It wasn’t like the Episcopalians, who have a resource like the wondrous Book of Common Prayer. Those resources aren’t the Bible but they are infused with Biblical texts, language, metaphors, and imagery, all organized for the minister to access to meet specific needs. Those traditions also have a richer and thicker sacramental theology that I now think the Bible supports, which undergirds the work of caring for people as a pastor. This theology understands providing care in the context of a “divine encounter, “ but I knew little about that at the time.

In my evangelical schooling, the idea of “pastoral care” was effectively non-existent. I went to a Bible college that upheld studying and teaching the Bible and doctrine as the primary task to which a pastor should devote himself. This is what the Bible was and what it was for. It was doctrine and instruction for God’s people, and it should be taught, no matter what the season or circumstance.

On the other hand, I got the idea that routine pastoral visitation like my childhood Methodist ministers did as a regular part of their work, was something only “liberals” or Catholics did. In the view of my teachers, these shepherds had sacrificed truth for love. My profs did not emphasize caring for people, they emphasized teaching people, building people up in the truth, using the Bible to get people to develop correct theology. People didn’t need visits, they needed strong preaching and teaching. The mission was discipleship. The personal and pastoral work of caring for people was greatly deemphasized.

Now, that’s not to say that I and the evangelical pastors I knew didn’t visit people in the hospital, provide support to hurting people and families, or conduct funerals. Life and pain and death has a way of interrupting the minister while he’s in the study trying to prepare that sermon or Bible study. But I have to tell you, we were not well-equipped for that! I guess it was assumed we’d figure it out, that it was just common sense or something.

The first funeral I did was that of a five-month old baby who had died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. I was all of twenty-two years old, recently married, just recently installed in my first church in a little place on a mountain in Vermont. Five months earlier, in October at my first church board meeting, the father had come to the door to announce the baby’s birth — his firstborn. Then, in March on one of the most miserable weather days I’ve ever seen — a foot of snow on the ground and a cold, icy rain falling — I gathered with the people of the community and conducted a service at the graveside for his little one. To add to this, the father’s family was one of the notable unbelieving clans in our little village. And it was my job to provide pastoral care and words of comfort to them and the rest of the town.

I can’t remember what I said that day, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t have words that were of much lasting value. I can only hope that my own broken heart, a spirit of love toward this family, and perhaps a word of hope and support somehow touched them. What I can tell you is that nothing I had ever learned in Bible college prepared me even remotely for that experience. I found out right away that knowing and teaching the Bible was not all that ministry is about.

That little church, where I served for about five years, gave me experience after experience like that. I recently had the chance to preach there again, and I told the congregation that they were the ones who made me a pastor.  By the time I left there to get my seminary degree, I was still young and lacked a great deal of understanding, but something had changed inside me. The idea of practicing love and exercising pastoral care was beginning to catch up with the concept that had been so ingrained in me — that being a minister was mostly about studying and teaching the Bible.