The Internet Monk Archives

IM Book Review: The Sin of Certainty

When you grow up believing that your religious worldview contains the key to absolute truth and provides an answer to every question, you never really get over the disappointment of learning that it doesn’t. It’s a lonely, frightening journey and most of us are limping along as best we can.

• Rachel Held Evans

Sooner or later we all find ourselves faced with some serious challenge to how we think about God. Don’t we all eventually come to a crossroads where familiar beliefs don’t work very well and we just don’t really know what we believe anymore? Even if we have never verbalized it to ourselves (let alone to others), don’t we all at some point have a nagging background noise of doubt, a deep undercurrent of cognitive dissonance, where what we were once certain about evaporates like a dream?

• Peter Enns

• • •

One reason I appreciate Pete Enns so much is because he is not only an outstanding Old Testament scholar but also an honest brother who is willing to talk about his life and matters of faith in down-to-earth terms. Pete has been on a journey from belief to trust, and he writes about it in his new book, The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our “Correct” Beliefs.

This is a “wilderness journey” that should ring true to many who read Internet Monk; I know I can relate to it intimately.

When I left congregational ministry eleven years ago, my familiar and comfortable world was turned upside down. The experience brought to the surface a host of nagging doubts that I had suppressed regarding many aspects of the evangelical world in which I had lived for decades. The social structures of that world, which had kept me upright and functioning for a long time, had been withdrawn. I was down and I was out. In the wilderness. In many ways I still am. I find myself less certain about any number of things; less willing to pronounce dogmatic “answers” or certitudes about God or life. I am also less impressed by the oh-so-serious guardians of the right who do express such surefire convictions, less willing to accept that their “truths” are as unambiguous and authoritative as they claim, more convinced that their bold assertions are rooted in something other than “the clear teaching of the Bible.” I’m much less patient with that attitude and approach than with those who hunger and thirst and are curious, open to mystery and discovery.

I also find I’m more at peace, more patient with and accepting of the dissonances of life, less frantic about having it all together in a neat package tied up with a bow. I can even laugh at myself a little bit. Perhaps that’s why I resonate with Pete’s book and the journey it describes.

The big idea of The Sin of Certainty is the difference between “belief” and “trust.”

Enns notes how Christians talk, using these terms. We discuss what we believe in. We say whether or not we believe that. We focus on what we believe.

“What” and “that.” Almost as a reflex, believing is a “thinking” word, a word to describe the content of our thoughts: I believe that God exists (and atheists don’t believe that), I believe that God created the world (not random chance), I believe that Jesus is God’s Son (and not just another Jewish carpenter), and so on. Church creeds and ten-point statements of faith emphasize content, thoughts about God to be listed and agreed with. (p. 93)

Trust is different. Trust is a “who” word, not a “what” word. We trust God. Trust is a covenant word, a relational word, a word about personal devotion, faithfulness and active loyalty.

Like God the Father and God the Son, we are also called to be faithful. On one level, we are faithful to God when we trust God. But faith — pistis — doesn’t stop there. It extends, as we’ve seen, to faithfulness toward each other — in humility and sacrificial love.

And here is the real kick in the pants. When we are faithful to each other like this, we are more than simply being nice and kind, though there’s that. Far more important, when we are faithful to each other, we are at that moment acting like the faithful God and the faithful Son.

Being like God. That’s the goal. And we are most like God not when we are certain we are right about God, or when we tell others how right we are, but when we are acting toward one another like the faithful Father and Son. (p. 101f)

Don’t mistake Peter Enns. He insists repeatedly throughout the book that he is not making an absolute divide between sound thinking and trusting God. Faith (believing, trusting) has real content, and after all Enns has devoted his professional life to learning about the Bible and about God. However:

What I’m after here is how faith [is] taught and modeled — as a preoccupation with correct thinking, which feeds on the mentality that knowing (especially the Bible) is central to faith. That message [has been] as clear as a bell. Knowing what you believe places faith on solid, unshifting ground. At least that was the plan. (p. 31f)

That background didn’t prepare Pete Enns for what he encountered — life. As he lived into his thirties and especially into his forties, life got messy. He discovered that simply “knowing what he believed” was not adequate for what life threw at him. “Sooner or later,” he writes, “that tank runs empty.” Enns found himself living in the Wisdom books of the Old Testament, especially Psalms, Job, and Ecclesiastes. The laments and sayings in these writings make the poignant point that “answers” for the vagaries of life are not enough; in fact, in most cases they are not available, even to those who are wisest and most certain in their beliefs. If there is a “what” to believe, humans are too limited to grasp it.

Furthermore, the fact that these books (and other such texts) are in the Bible should cause us to stop for a moment and ask something profound. Is it possible that it’s God himself who wants me to question, to wonder, to doubt, to accept uncertainty? Perhaps that’s the way of wisdom, the path of trust. Perhaps the way is made by walking, not through understanding, at least in the way we normally conceive it.

I was listening to one of Michael Spencer’s podcasts the other day that included his comments on the Gospel text in Matthew 11:1-6. This is the passage where John the Baptist, having been thrown in prison, sends messengers to Jesus and asks him, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

Here’s what Michael said:

At one time John was apparently very certain about Jesus. This is the person who baptized Jesus and the Spirit revealed to him, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” This is the one who said of Jesus to his own disciples, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

…So here’s a guy who was at one point very certain about Jesus, and now, under different circumstances, seems to develop some real doubts and questions. “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?” Those are questions of which John was quite certain at one point.

And I was reflecting on this as somewhat descriptive of that concept of our personal faith journey. Many of us come from traditions that say, well, the way it’s supposed to happen is that you are baptized as a child or you come into the church as a child, and you simply grow in your faith through different experiences, through Christian nurture, Christian education, and you grow into a mature Christian from that initial being brought into the faith as a child.

Those of us who are from more evangelical, revivalistic traditions have that whole “Damascus Road” experience thing — getting saved out of an experience of being lost. That is how we conceive of a faith journey (or at least we’re told we’re supposed to)….we’re supposed to experience a great turnaround and grow from there.

I think both of those models do a lot to describe an ideal that just hardly ever occurs. What you see there with John the Baptist I think is much more likely to be what many of us go through. That is, at one time in our lives we’re very sure of some things and at another time we’re not sure at all. The fact of being convinced doesn’t mean we’re always convinced.

So, what do we do when certainty flees like that? Well, John went to Jesus with his questions. In Peter Enns’s terms, when his “beliefs” got shaky, he exercised “trust.” When he couldn’t lean on his own understanding, he leaned on Another.

Trust is not marked by unflappable dogmatic certainty, but by embracing as a normal part of faith the steady line of mysteries and uncertainties that parade before our lives and seeing them as opportunities to trust more deeply. (p. 205)

One of my biggest complaints against the religious status quo is that it often leads us away from being fully human rather than helping us move toward a more realistic, fuller human experience of life in this world, with all its delights and all its debris.

I highly recommend this book as an antidote to the often undiagnosed spiritual malady of trusting our own thoughts about God rather than trusting God. Pete Enns will guide you through recent church history to explain why and how we came to intellectualize faith. You’ll swim in the mysteries of the biblical Wisdom books with him. You’ll hear his own personal stories of distress and doubt, and how they helped him on the journey from belief to trust. As always, his writing is conversational, breezy, often funny, and consistently honest and generous. You won’t feel alone anymore.

The Sin of Certainty deserves an honored place on my shelf of post-evangelical books. What Pete is really writing about here is the theology of the cross and how it opposes one aspect of the theology of glory — an insistence on the “winning” quality of dogmatic certainty as the mark of strong faith.

Blessed are those who can say, “I don’t know,” or better yet stay silent altogether, as they commit themselves into the care of a merciful God.

• • •

The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our “Correct” Beliefs
By Peter Enns
HarperOne (2016)

Civil Religion Series: The Fundamentalists, Then and Now

Rev. T. T. Martin, Dayton, Tenn., circa July 14, 1925, during the Scopes Monkey Trial. (Herald & Examiner photo) (Chicago Tribune historical photo)....OUTSIDE TRIBUNE CO.- NO MAGS, NO SALES, NO INTERNET, NO TV, CHICAGO OUT, NO DIGITAL MANIPULATION... — Rev. T. T. Martin, Dayton, Tenn., circa July 14, 1925, during the Scopes Monkey Trial. (Herald & Examiner photo) (Chicago Tribune historical photo)

I hope we answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ.

• Mike Huckabee, 1998

• • •

Civil Religion, part five
The Fundamentalists, Then and Now

Presidential election years in the U.S. provide American Christians an opportunity to reflect upon our faith and how it applies to our lives as citizens and to the public issues that affect us all. We are taking many Tuesdays throughout 2016 to discuss matters like these.

We are looking at material from three books, the first of which is Richard Hughes’s Christian America and the Kingdom of God.

Earlier posts:

☆

Although the 1800s have been characterized as the “Christian” century in the United States, during those years strong forces of modernity were also rising up and threatening to flood the land. The nation was becoming increasingly diverse because of immigration, humans were accomplishing more through innovative technological and industrial means, the cities were growing and offering a different ethos than rural and small town life , science was discovering facts about the world, the universe, and life itself that seemed to contradict what many felt were the plain teachings of the Bible. Furthermore, some began to apply principles of “evolutionary” theory to the Bible itself, giving birth to the discipline of biblical criticism, which seemed to attack the very nature of scripture as “God’s Word,” its authority and credibility.

These dramatic changes that overtook the United States at the end of the nineteenth century are crucial for understanding the rise of American fundamentalism. For these were more than changes. These were ruptures in the fabric of traditional American life— the rural, Protestant, and Anglo-American way of life— that had dominated the United States since the Second Great Awakening. Christian America— as the nineteenth century had defined Christian America— was rapidly disappearing into a vast sea of immigrants, Catholics, alien folkways, and organized labor….and startling new developments in modern science.

(p. 140)

In the early 20th century a movement developed to defend the “fundamentals” of the faith. These boiled down to five propositions:

The inerrancy of the Bible
The virgin birth of Jesus Christ
The substitutionary atonement
The bodily resurrection of Jesus
Jesus’ imminent return

Richard Hughes makes the cogent observation that placing a statement about the Bible first in this list is telling.

Earlier generations of Christians, reaching all the way back to the ancient church, had understood the Bible as a theology text— that is, a book that probed the mysteries of God and the meaning of human life in the light of God’s work as creator, sustainer, and redeemer. That age-old understanding of the Bible made room for paradox, for ambiguity, and for meaningful reflection on the mysteries of God and the mysteries of the universe. It also made room for metaphor and symbolic expression— qualities essential to Christian theology if, as Christians have always claimed, God as the Infinite One is beyond human comprehension.

But the fundamentalists’ understanding of the Bible as an inerrant text, both scientifically and theologically, robbed the Bible of all its symbolic and metaphoric qualities. It therefore placed God, the Bible, and the entire Christian tradition in an intellectual straightjacket. Either the Bible was true or it was false. Either you believed it or you didn’t. And, of course, since the Bible always said what it meant and meant what it said, there was only one way to understand it. Such assumptions lent to American fundamentalism a rigid and brittle quality that made it uncomfortable with dialogue, ill at ease with diversity, and suspicious of pluralism.

(p. 143)

The fundamentalists were minor players on the national stage throughout much of the 20th century (with notable exceptions, such as during the Scopes trial). They separated themselves from public culture, from universities, and from Christian denominations that they accused of compromising with “modernism,” creating their own denominations, churches, Bible schools, and missions.

After World War II, a movement arose that summoned fundamentalists to become less separatistic, to engage with the world and its ideas once more. This was “evangelicalism.” Its intellectual leader, Carl F.H Henry, edited the evangelicals’ flagship publication, Christianity Today, and the popular face of the movement was evangelist Billy Graham. In essence, as Hughes notes, evangelicalism was a call to return to the Christian spirit of the nineteenth century that grew out of the Second Great Awakening. This included engagement with American culture and participation in social concerns that the fundamentalists had abandoned for fear of losing their dogmatic identity and slipping into the “social gospel.”

It was in the 1970s and 80s, Hughes observes, that segments of evangelicalism and fundamentalism began merging and emerging into a new cultural force, this time in reaction to the social upheavals of the 1960s. Formerly non-political fundamentalist leaders such as Jerry Falwell summoned their people “out of their cultural isolation, to mobilize them for active involvement in American politics, and in that way, to renew the vision of Christian America that had dominated the nineteenth century” (p. 152). Moral Majorities, Christian Coalitions, and the Religious Right were born.

Thus, fundamentalist separatism became transformed into public activism as many of its spokespersons led a new charge, this time not so much against theological and doctrinal errors, but against the social and cultural degradation they saw happening in the U.S. Issues such as abortion, the breakdown of the nuclear family, women’s liberation, and later gay rights, motivated them to action. Joining with evangelicals and Roman Catholics and others with conservative moral positions, they “did something relatively new.” They “entered foursquare into the political arena and sought to achieve its objectives chiefly through the exercise of political power” (p. 153).

The rise of the Christian Right may be chronicled from the “Year of the Evangelical” in 1976 through the Reagan years in the 1980s through a time of building coalitions and electing candidates until it reached its zenith in the presidential terms of George W. Bush. In 2000, 68% of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians supported Bush, and in 2004 that figure rose to 78%.

…the majority of fundamentalists and evangelicals viewed George W. Bush as one of them. He was, after all, a born-again Christian, converted by the evangelical preacher and pastor to presidents, Billy Graham. And though he belonged to a mainline denomination whose theology ranged from moderate to liberal— the United Methodist Church— Bush had far more in common with fundamentalism than he did with his denomination. Fundamentalists and evangelicals understood that well, and when they voted for George W. Bush in 2000, they voted to place in the White House a Christian whose theology, style, and demeanor reflected familiarity with— and even affection for— a fundamentalist-evangelical perspective and worldview.

…At a Bush reelection rally, Gary Walby from Destin, Florida, told the president, “This is the very first time that I have felt God was in the White House.”

(p. 158f)

Richard Hughes suggests that the Bush administration advanced the myths of a “Christian America” that we have discussed in this series. “In their view,” he writes, “America embraced the right, her enemies embraced the wrong, and God stood on the side of the United States, leading her in the redemption of the world” (p. 163).

Hughes is critical of that perspective. As he argues throughout his book, nations may claim to be “Christian,” but they act like nations. And nations by nature function in ways that resemble Babylon more than Jesus.

Like that ancient empire [The Holy Roman Empire], the United States abounds in Christian trappings. And yet the United States embraces virtually all the values that have been common to empires for centuries on end. It pays lip service to peace but thrives on violence, exalts the rich over the poor, prefers power to humility, places vengeance above forgiveness, extravagance above modesty, and luxury above simplicity. In a word, it rejects the values of Jesus.

(p. 186)

Mondays with Michael Spencer: April 18, 2016

Note from CM: For the next several weeks, we will hear some of what Michael Spencer had to say on the subject of eschatology — the last things. We begin with a post from a series in 2008 called, “Too Much Heaven?”

• • •

I grew up and was formed in a version of the Christian tradition that practiced a remarkably simple form of Christianity.

It was about going to heaven.

This life was preparation for heaven. God was preparing a place called heaven with lots of mansions. People who accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior by praying a prayer to ask him into their heart had their names written in a book reserving a place in heaven. One day, they would die (or Jesus would return) and go to heaven. Later, they would get their new bodies and live in a city described- literally- in the book of Revelation as a super-sized cube with streets of gold. In that city they would be with all their friends, relatives and Bible characters forever, where they would worship Jesus for all of eternity without illness, pain or death.

If you accepted Jesus- ever, even once- you were going to heaven because once saved, always saved. If you didn’t accept Jesus you were going to hell. Any day at any time, Jesus would return and take his people to heaven in the rapture, leaving the lost people to be ruled over by the anti-Christ until Jesus returned to judge the world and end everything.

The people who were going to heaven went to churches where this is what you talked about all the time. You sang about it. You read about it in the Bible. Preachers preached about it. Nothing was more important. The reason you were on this earth was to “witness” to other people, which meant present them with the plan of how to get to heaven. If they prayed to go to heaven, then you were a “soul winner,” which was the best thing you could ever be in life.

Christians were happier than other people because they were going to heaven. They said “No” to everything the devil wanted them to do, because they were going to heaven, so they didn’t sin as much. They enjoyed church more than anything else, and they went to church as much as possible.

Life on this earth was worthwhile only because of heaven later. If you were a real Christian, like Paul, you wanted to leave this world and go to heaven as soon as possible. In fact, when Paul was caught up to the third heaven, he no longer wanted to be on earth, but to be in heaven. People who were in car wrecks and came back from death always had stories about heaven that included how much they wanted to go there and not go back to earth. But if God made you go back, you’d do it for a little while.

This was the Christianity that shaped and formed me. I heard it preached again this week, plainly and forcefully. It made me realize that I am not the same person I used to be. This is not the center and heart of my faith any more.

I don’t think about heaven as the primary reason for my faith. My faith is centered around Jesus and what it means to know God through Jesus now. I am a person to whom Jesus said “The Kingdom of God is upon you,” and I believe it. Jesus is king, now and forever. I believe in heaven and hell, and I always tell those who hear me preach and teach that God will take his people to a new creation, while those who refuse God’s love and forgiveness will go to hell.

Heaven is where God is. It is as close as a heartbeat. It is the center of reality, not a place “up there,” but the reality I cannot see with my senses but which nonetheless surrounds me. I believe Jesus and his kingdom will “appear” and we’ll realize how close heaven was to earth all along.

When I think of death, I think of going to be with God, to rest in him; to be safe in him and his love. I look forward to the new creation and to resurrection, but it is so far outside of my ability to conceive of it all that I never try to understand much about it. Big books on heaven bore me. Near death experience books actually offend me. They make me feel manipulated.

When someone implies that real Christians want to go to heaven now, I have absolutely no resonance with that sentiment at all. I am a person of this world, and the goodness of God that I know has come to me in the land of the living. I believed in God’s promises for a new creation, but I don’t want to go there now. I want to see my dad and mom again, yes. But I want to be with my beautiful wife and wonderful children, go to work, read a good book, enjoy a ball game and walk my dog.

When it comes to this subject, give me Judaism any day.

All the beauty I know of heaven, I know through the beauty of this world. I can’t reject this world and understand anything of a new creation. All I know of love, I know through the love I have experienced in this world. My body, my mind, my emotions—all are at home in this world. If I was made for another world, that world is not found in rejecting this world, but in the longings for things this world cannot give or satisfy.

Is there too much heaven in some versions of Christianity? Was Jesus as much about heaven as my faith tradition told me? Is rejecting this world and longing for heaven the normal Christian life? Is there something wrong with those of us who are rooted in this world and find our joy in God here now?

Do churches that concentrate on “winning souls for heaven” really represent the Gospel of Jesus?

Sundays in Easter with Henri Nouwen: April 17, 2016

Sundays in Easter with Henri Nouwen
On the Eucharistic Life

On the remaining Sundays in Eastertide, we will provide some brief readings from Henri Nouwen on the eucharistic life. Our main source will be Nouwen’s book, With Burning Hearts: A Meditation on the Eucharistic Life.

In the book’s introduction, Henri Nouwen tells why he wrote this book and what the approach shall be.

This little book is an attempt to speak to myself and to my friends about the Eucharist and to weave a network of connections between the daily celebration of the Eucharist and our daily human experience. We enter every celebration with a contrite heart and pray the Kyrie Eleison. We listen to the Word — the scriptural readings and the homily — we profess our faith, we give to God the fruits of the earth and the work of human hands and receive from God the body and blood of Jesus, and finally we are sent into the world with the task of renewing the face of the earth. The Eucharistic event reveals the deepest human experiences, those of sadness, attentiveness, invitation, intimacy, and engagement. It summarizes the life we are called to live in the Name of God. Only when we recognize the rich network of connections between the Eucharist and our life in the world can the Eucharist be “worldly” and our life “Eucharistic.”

As the basis for my reflections on the Eucharist and the Eucharistic life, I will use the story of the two disciples who walked from Jerusalem to Emmaus and back [Luke 24:13-35]. As the story speaks about loss, presence, invitation, communion and mission it embraces the five main aspects of the Eucharistic celebration.

(p. 12f)

Nouwen speaks here of daily celebrations of the Eucharist, which many of us do not practice. However, many of us do practice weekly or otherwise regular worship gatherings at the Lord’s Table, and the thoughts he leads us to consider should resonate to all who treasure the sacrament of communion and seek to live in its nourishment.

Saturday Ramblings: April 16, 2016

Happy Saturday! This week some friends of ours are at the Grand Canyon, enjoying the magnificent views. When I was kid back in the day our family made the prototypical vacation trip west to visit relatives in Arizona and I’ll never forget how impressed I was with the western landscapes.

So here’s an old ad encouraging people to go to the Grand Canyon in a new 1904 Rambler. I’m not sure how good the roads were then, since the U.S. government didn’t even enact a plan for national highway construction until 1925 and the designation “66” wasn’t assigned to a Chicago to Los Angeles route until 1926. Heck, old Route 66 wasn’t even completely paved across the country until 1938. To say the least, a trip out west at the turn of the 20th century would have been a long and difficult adventure.

Who knows how far afield we’ll journey today, but at least we can probably find a paved road that will take us there. Come on, hop in and let’s ramble!

Kerry at the original ground zero…

Secretary of State John Kerry took a longer trip last week, rambling across the Pacific to become the first Secretary of State ever to visit the atomic bomb memorial site at Hiroshima, Japan.

Kerry called it a “gut-wrenching” experience and said that everyone should see the museum there, including President Obama, who is due to visit Japan next month. Kerry joined ministers from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan in laying wreaths at the site.

“Going through this museum was a reminder of the depth of obligation that every single one of us in public life carries — in fact, every person in position of responsibility carries — to work for peace,” Kerry said.

A pictorial journey to India…

Over the past few weeks, we’ve had the opportunity to see a dear friend from India who is here visiting folks around the U.S. Made me pull out some of the old pics from our journeys to that complex and mysterious land. Thought I’d share a few of them with you today. Most of these are from trips we took in the 1990’s.

A new job for angels?…

“I put it in God’s hands. Someone asked me, did I pray before and my prayer really was God, your will be done. And I think that’s what happened. I think this was all God’s plan, God’s will. So to God be the glory,” said Sissac who celebrated with fist pumps in the air after he made the shot.

This was the reaction of Pastor Joseph Sissac, senior pastor at the Center of Praise Ministries in Sacramento after making a half-court shot at a recent Sacramento Kings game. The shot won the pastor a new car. But don’t call him lucky. The pastor had quipped in an earlier text message that he was hoping angels would take the ball through the hoop after he threw it up, and when asked about it afterwards, he said, “You know I think that’s exactly what happened.”

For a minute there I thought I was going to take a cheap shot at the prosperity gospel.

But then I read that Sissac decided to donate his winnings to charity. He won a $15,000 Ford Fiesta but announced Tuesday that he and his wife will chip in $2,000 and get a Ford Focus instead and raffle it off, hoping to raise $30,000. He plans to split the money between Center of Praise’s math and literacy camp and the Hoops to Hopes program, which focuses on education, homelessness and human trafficking.

The angel thing is still silly, but it sounds like the outcome will be Jesus-shaped.

A behemoth of a boomer concert…

The Los Angeles Times is saying that the organizers of Coachella, the lucrative rock festival that opened Friday, are making arrangements for a massive event to take place at a venue in the California desert on October 7-9.

The concert will reportedly include six of the biggest acts of the boomer generation — The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, The Who, Neil Young and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd.

I’ll be turning 60 in less than a month, and I may just be too young for this concert!

Maybe they’ll let me in with a parent or guardian.

Cold case even colder now…

From CBS Chicago: A 76-year-old man who a prosecutor says was wrongly convicted a few years ago in the killing of an Illinois schoolgirl was released Friday shortly after a judge vacated his conviction. The 1957 case of the murder of Maria Ridulph had been the coldest cold case on record. Now it’s back in the cold case file.

Jack McCullough was sentenced to life in prison in 2012 in the death of 7-year-old Maria Ridulph in Sycamore, about 70 miles west of Chicago. In a review of documents last year, a prosecutor found evidence that supported the former policeman’s long-held alibi that he had been 40 miles away in Rockford at the time of Maria’s disappearance.

Maria’s disappearance made headlines nationwide in the 1950s, when reports of child abductions were rare. She had been playing outside in the snow with a friend on Dec. 3, 1957, when a young man approached, introduced himself as “Johnny” and offered them piggyback rides. Maria’s friend dashed home to grab mittens, and when she came back, Maria and the man were gone. Forest hikers found her remains five months later.

At trial, prosecutors said McCullough was Johnny, because he went by the name John Tessier in his youth. They said McCullough, then 18, dragged Maria away, choked and stabbed her to death.

McCullough’s long-held alibi was that he had been in Rockford, attempting to enlist with the U.S. Air Force at a military recruiting station, on the night Maria disappeared. Newly discovered phone records proved McCullough had made a collect call to his parents at 6:57 p.m. from a phone booth in downtown Rockford, which is 40 miles northwest of where Maria was abducted between 6:45 p.m. and 6:55 p.m.

Maria Ridulph’s family has said that they remain convinced of his guilt.

Justice may have been served in the case of Jack McCullough, but a little girl’s blood is still crying out from the ground nearly sixty years after her death.

The doctor is uncomfortable talking about this…

Here’s something right where I live and work each day.

First: Patients and their families increasingly want to talk about end-of-life care with their physicians well before facing a terminal illness, studies have shown. Most also want to die at home rather than in a hospital, although cultural differences influence end-of-life preferences.

Second: Medicare now reimburses doctors $86 to discuss end-of-life care in an office visit that covers topics such as hospice, living wills and do-not-resuscitate orders. Known as “advance care planning,” the conversations can also be held in a hospital.

Third: A recent poll suggests doctors are having a hard time having these discussions. A national poll of 736 primary care doctors and specialists, including 202 in California, examined their views on advance care planning and end-of-life conversations with patients. Among the findings:

While 75 percent of doctors said Medicare reimbursement makes it more likely they’d have advance care planning discussions, only about 14 percent said they had actually billed Medicare for those visits.
Three quarters also believe it’s their responsibility to initiate end-of-life conversations.
Fewer than one-third reported any formal training on end-of-life discussions with patients and their families.
More than half said they had not discussed end-of-life care with their own physicians.

Kaiser Permanente in Northern California is a health care system that doesn’t shy away from the subject. There, physicians receive training in end-of-life discussions and have time to carry them out, said Dr. Ruma Kumar, the HMO’s regional medical director of supportive care services. Kaiser Permanente looks to nurse practitioners, registered nurses and social workers to work with patients on various stages of what the HMO calls “life care planning.” The HMO also offers a website to guide people through the process.

Kumar said Kaiser encourages both doctors and patients to think of end-of-life planning “as a routine part of care, just like you’d get a mammogram or colon cancer screening.”

As far as I am concerned, that’s just good stewardship of one’s health and of one’s family’s well being.

Governor vetoes Bible as Tennessee state book…

Governor Bill Haslam of Tennessee, a Christian, vetoed legislation on Thursday that would have made the Bible the state’s official book.

In his decision, Haslam said that the designation would trivialize the Bible, which he considers a sacred text, and would violate the religious freedom provisions of the both the U.S. and Tennessee constitutions.

“If we believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God, then we shouldn’t be recognizing it only as a book of historical and economic significance,” the Republican governor said. “If we are recognizing the Bible as a sacred text, then we are violating the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Tennessee by designating it as the official state book.”

Supporters have argued that the designation would highlight the economic and historical impact the Bible has had on Tennessee, noting that printing the Bible is a “multimillion-dollar industry” for the state. Opponents argued the bill formalized a governmental endorsement of Christianity, while others, like Haslam, argued the move would trivialize the Bible by placing it next to the tomato — the state fruit — and raccoon — the state animal.

Sponsors of the bill plan to override the veto. It would take only a simple majority in both houses of the Tennessee legislature to do that.

He’s back, and more wrong than ever…

James Dobson never was one for analysis and nuance. Pretty blunt and straightforward, that guy. His January 2016 newsletter, edited into a slightly less alarmist opinion piece for Christianity Today, warns America of the terrible consequences of “under-population,” and it is fully in character.

Americans are starting to realize, perhaps for the first time, that we are facing a demographic nightmare. Our problem is not too many people but a plummeting birthrate. There are more single women today than those who are married, and the birthrate has been declining steadily. If it were not for immigration, this nation would be below zero population growth.

…Historically, children and young adults have greatly outnumbered the old and feeble. Those of a marriageable age have produced a vigorous birthrate for 300 years, which continually swelled the size of the population. Most of the elderly, on the other hand, had a short lifespan and were dying faster than babies were born. Thus, the population has been depicted as a pyramid, with the young being represented across its broad base and fewer older individuals nestled at the pinnacle. Now, we’re witnessing an inversion of the pyramid, where there are many more older people at the bottom and a smaller number of younger people and babies at the top.

A falling birthrate is occurring throughout Europe, parts of Asia, in Central and South America, and elsewhere. This inversion is a worldwide phenomenon.

Well, Tobin Grant at RNS has taken Dobson to task, calling his piece “so factually and logically flawed” that he had to respond. Here, in bullet points, are his answers to Dobson’s claims (read the article for argumentation and details).

Even without immigration, the replacement rate in the United States continues to be high enough to increase the population.
The birthrate has not been declining steadily.
There never has been nor is there now an “inverted pyramid” of population. Instead:
- In every year, there are fewer older people than younger people. There’s never an inverted pyramid.
- Changes occur during times of war. Watch the number of 18-24 year old men change during World War I and World War II.
- Economics drives procreation. Starting in the late 1920s and continuing until the post-WWII gains in the economy, there are relatively fewer number of young children.
- Then comes the baby boom.
- There is a relative decline in children in the 1960s, but then it stabilized.
- Today, there is a leaf-pattern, a pyramid except for the higher numbers from the baby boom.

James Dobson has even written a trilogy of novels with under-population as a primary theme. They’re called “Fatherless, Childless, and Godless, and they present a fictional account of what he thinks current demographic, sociological, and cultural trends portend.

Folks, it’s all fiction.

Today in music…

Hey U.S. readers, did you file your taxes yet?

Pastoral Care Week: It’s not just about the pastor

The Adoration of the Golden Calf, Chagall

At their courageous best, clergy lead where people aren’t asking to go, because that’s how the range of issues that concern them expands, and how a holy community gets formed.

– G. Jeffrey MacDonald

• • •

Over the years I have been critical of pastors, probably because I have been one and still am in a form of pastoral ministry. Most of the critiques I’ve written come with one finger pointed outward while three others are directed toward myself.

I take this calling seriously, as I think most who pursue it do. For every self-promoting celebrity circus ringleader, there are hundreds of priests, rectors, ministers, and pastors who are quietly going about their business, trying their best to provide spiritual direction and soul care to people in their congregations and communities. Still, as I observe around me every day, the state of our vocation is dismal.

The era through which I’ve lived and served has provided serious and sustained obstacles to the spiritual life, ecclesial life, and pastoral life.

I came of age in small town America in mainline Protestantism — both now utterly changed and nearly unrecognizable. I had a spiritual awakening during the counter-cultural Jesus movement that caused all manner of upheaval throughout society and churches. I cut my pastoral teeth and went to seminary during the heyday of the church growth movement, in a time when an entire subculture called evangelicalism was growing strong. I saw the birth and spread of megachurches. I witnessed the politicization of conservative Christianity in reaction to several “liberation” movements, many of which were themselves rooted in socially aware progressive forms of the faith.

As for my life’s cultural context, the small towns in which I grew up are now shells of their former selves. The heartland has been decimated by sea-changes in our technologies and the economy. Multitudes have fled south to bask in sunnier climes and those who didn’t suffer long commutes and alienation in the cold big cities up north.

Television, in my opinion, has been the single greatest technological life-changer in my generation, altering our ability to personally access entertainment forever. Its impact on transforming our society into one that values individualism, personal choice, and a consumer mindset is inestimable. The ubiquitous presence of screens in our personal lives, homes, and everywhere we go (even at the gas pump! even in church!) has had a dramatic effect on us and the way we “take in” life.

Stop for a minute. I don’t want you to think that I’m merely criticizing today’s world — I for one would rather live in no other era. I’m just trying to trace, in the most general fashion, why pastoral ministry in particular has become so vapid and disrespected in our day. The tsunami of change we’ve experienced and the insufficient ways we’ve tried to keep church “relevant” have made the pastoral vocation seem like a relic that belongs in a museum.

Some, emphasizing a more robust pastoral role, have over-corrected in response. A “shepherding” movement, neo-calvinist and puritan in nature, has sought to restore robustness to the ministry. This emphasizes the pastor’s authority and “ruling” elders in an attempt to revive respect for the office. It seeks to reinstitute forms of hierarchy in the church and society (patriarchal, of course) to restore proper “biblical” order. Some of these groups have been saturated in charismatic teachings, adding “revelations” and “visions” and “miracles” to the biblical text to boost the pastor’s status as uniquely “anointed.” And of course, there are the prosperity gospel preachers, who are simply not to be questioned. They are the faith-full, the ones who hold the secrets, to whom everyone else must say “Amen.”

All these are attempts to seize back the power that has been lost. However, pervasive scandals in which abuse of power has been uncovered have turned an entire generation sour on the idea of the celebrity and/or authoritarian pastor. There are, nevertheless, a lot of people who still stream into their churches and ministries.

And frankly, a lot of what’s wrong with pastoral ministry today has as much to do with those people as it does with pastors and church leaders themselves.

G. Jeffrey MacDonald, a minister in the United Church of Christ, and author of Thieves in the Temple: The Christian Church and the Selling of the American Soul, wrote a piece in the New York Times called, “Congregations Gone Wild.” In it, MacDonald laments that many clergy are suffering from burnout, not only because of their hard work and the natural demands of the vocation, but because congregational expectations in today’s church are forcing them away from their true calling and into work that they are ill-prepared to do.

The pastoral vocation is to help people grow spiritually, resist their lowest impulses and adopt higher, more compassionate ways. But churchgoers increasingly want pastors to soothe and entertain them. It’s apparent in the theater-style seating and giant projection screens in churches and in mission trips that involve more sightseeing than listening to the local people.

As a result, pastors are constantly forced to choose, as they work through congregants’ daily wish lists in their e-mail and voice mail, between paths of personal integrity and those that portend greater job security. As religion becomes a consumer experience, the clergy become more unhappy and unhealthy.

He blames “consumer-driven religion” for this state of affairs. It has become so pervasive that a 2008 Pew Forum poll he quotes reports that 44% of Americans now say they have switched their religious affiliation at least once, or dropped it altogether. The shoppers hold the power in this marketplace. So much so that pastors’ job descriptions have been rewritten. Attracting people and building the organization now takes priority over spiritual direction and proclamation that is designed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

MacDonald speaks from personal experience:

I have faced similar pressures myself. In the early 2000s, the advisory committee of my small congregation in Massachusetts told me to keep my sermons to 10 minutes, tell funny stories and leave people feeling great about themselves. The unspoken message in such instructions is clear: give us the comforting, amusing fare we want or we’ll get our spiritual leadership from someone else.

Pastors, in many cases he says, have become “the spiritual equivalent of concierges” — meeting every customer request for information, entertainment, and religious experience. As Eugene Peterson wrote years ago, this is a natural result when “pilgrims” forget their calling and view themselves as “tourists.” Pilgrims need strength and direction to persevere on the journey. Tourists want to know where they can get the best massage.

To be fair, there are many, many churches that are deeper than that, at least by intention. However, in my experience what they often offer, while it goes beyond a back rub, serves only as a reinforcement of commonly held beliefs and opinions that makes people feel good about having found their “tribe” (or in today’s parlance, their “brand” of choice). I’ve heard pastors toy with messages they think will be “prophetic” and “life-changing,” but more often than not it’s the same thin soup people have learned to live on, and indeed asked to be served.

The pastor’s problem is that this state of affairs doesn’t send him to his or her knees with the same desperation by which Moses grabbed hold of God on the mountain.

The people’s problem is that they really do prefer the golden calf.

Pastoral Care Week: A Funeral Rant

I have been officiating funeral services since I was 22 years old, a young know-nothing pastor in the hills of Vermont.

My first funeral was for an infant who died of SIDS. That service was held on the coldest, rainiest and iciest day I can remember. Outside. At the cemetery. It was pure misery and falling tears, inside and out. I wrote a song in the child’s memory. I’m not sure if I ever sang it for the parents; it might have broken their hearts. I guess in the final analysis I wrote it for myself, as a way of trying somehow to express the desolation of laying a little boy in the ground.

And I have been doing funerals ever since.

That little church in Vermont was more like a parish church, which is true in many rural communities. In that village we had our share of elderly people who lived along the mountain roads, up and down the hills, along the brooks and in the hollers. We also had a good number of vacation homes in the area, some of which had been used by families for generations. Many of them who died had stated their wishes to be buried in our quaint graveyards where their tombstones would look out over the mountains to see the sun rise.

I won’t bore you with a litany of funeral stories, but suffice to say that I’ve done more services than I can remember. To this day, in my work as a hospice chaplain, I still find it one of the greatest privileges of ministry.

Stop and think about it. This is one of the most significant times in a family’s life. And, it is one of the few occasions in our culture when we actually face what we all fear most: death. The funeral is an event where folks expect the pastor to talk about God and life and death and hope and eternal matters. It is an opportunity for ministers to show people they care, that they are interested in hearing their stories, honoring their wishes, and commemorating the life of their deceased loved one. It provides an ideal reason for pastoral visitation and follow-up to give ongoing support to those who grieve. It is one of those situations where we can roll up our sleeves and have genuine, heart-to-heart conversations with people. Isn’t this why we went into ministry?

Why then do so many ministers have no clue about conducting funeral services for people?

Let me give you an example.

A while back, I attended a funeral service that was standing room only. The person who had died had a big family and a large number of friends and acquaintances. He was a veteran. For his career, he had worked as public servant in several different capacities that involved a lot of dealings with people in the community. He belonged to fraternal and service organizations. He was laid to rest in a uniform and his casket was draped with an American flag. His family had cared for him over a long period of time through various illnesses and then in hospice care. He did not practice religion throughout his life, but during his illnesses he expressed faith and always gratefully accepted prayer and pastoral visits. The pictures on the display boards and in the DVD tribute that ran during the visitation showed a man who spent a lot of time with his family, who enjoyed life, who loved to laugh, and was something of a rascal as well.

Now, if that is all I knew about this man, I think I could put together a funeral service that would both honor him appropriately and bring Christian hope to his family and friends.

First, I would meet with the family to talk about the service. I would encourage them during our visit to tell stories and give anecdotes that would help me get to know him and what his life was like. I would suggest that, since they knew him best, it would be appropriate for their voice to be heard in the service. Would there be a family member who might like to speak or share something? If not, would they consider getting together and writing down some remembrances that I could read on their behalf?

I would also ask if they wanted any special tributes spoken by me or someone else about his military service, his careers in public service, his community involvement. Had he received any honors? What made him most proud? In addition, I would ask about his faith and what they knew about that and how we might bring that part of his life to bear on the service. Did he have favorite verses from the Bible? Might there be any music that would enhance the service?

After gathering as much information as I could by spending time personally with the family or someone who represented them, I would also think back about what they had been through when caring for this man. I would try to imagine what their long journey must have been like and how tired they must be now. I would attempt to envision what the future will be like for them without his presence.

Now—put all this in a pot together. Simmer over low heat with thought, prayer, and contemplation. Serve over 30-40 minutes in a funeral service marked by personal concern, family involvement, remembrance of the deceased’s life, words of comfort to those grieving, and proclamation of hope in Christ.

So, what kind of a funeral did this man get?

The only personal touch in the entire service was when a song was sung that the family had chosen for the occasion.
Oh yes, and the obituary was read, which summarized his family and work.
No personal stories or remembrances of his life.
No acknowledgment of his military service, his career in public service, his work in the community.
No recognition of his family for all the support they had given him in the final season of his life.
No words of sympathy for the mourners, no expressions of encouragement for the journey of grief to come.
No acknowledgment of the large crowd that had gathered, even though this death obviously touched a lot of people.
No reference to things he enjoyed doing in life or his love for his family.

Instead, the pastor (who was known to some of the family members)…

Talked exclusively about one or two visits he had had with the dying man when he had asked him about his personal relationship with Christ.
Gave assurance that the man was in heaven based on the answer to one question on one of those visits.
Preached a full Bible study topical message on heaven, how we know it’s real, what it’s like, how we can go there, etc., quoting passage after passage from the Bible.
Gave an invitation at the end to receive Christ during the final prayer.

I call that pastoral malpractice.

Not because it is wrong to talk about knowing Christ and going to heaven, but because it was done without any context, without any sense of pastoral sensitivity, involvement, and concern.

First of all, I can’t ever get over what a privilege it is to be asked by a family to mark the occasion of a loved one’s death. How can anyone possibly summarize a life of 60, 70, or 80+ years and what it means in a half hour service? I think the mere fact that someone made it through this world for that many years is something worthy of attention and awe.

This is one of the most profound events in the world, and I feel like Jacob every time I’m asked to mark the occasion—“‘Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!’ And he was afraid, and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’” (Gen. 28:16-17) A family and friends are saying “goodbye” to a loved one. This is death and the grave. This is the setting in which Jesus himself became overwhelmed and wept.

And a pastor can ignore all of that and not weep himself?

A pastor can fail to give “honor to whom honor is due” for accomplishments in life?

A pastor can forget to comfort the brokenhearted and give them encouragement for their ongoing journey of grief?

A pastor can be so blind to everything but the opportunity to possibly “win a few souls” that he fails to speak the words of salvation personally, in the real human context that is right in front of his face?

I am almost sure that when this pastor went home and his wife asked him how the funeral went, he praised God for the opportunity to preach the Gospel.

He may have used some of the right words. But as far as I’m concerned, he blew it. He missed one of the greatest opportunities ministry affords to be a neighbor, a pastor, a comforter, a friend.

A human being, for heaven’s sake!

Love God, love your neighbor. Is this really so hard to understand?

Pastoral Care Week: Walking the Neighborhood

When Eugene Peterson was in seminary in New York City, Dr. George A. Buttrick was pastor of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, overseeing a large urban congregation. He was renowned for his preaching, and held his position in the church from 1927-1955. He then went on to Harvard and other universities and seminaries as a distinguished professor. Buttrick was known, as a biographer puts it, as one who “combined the scholar’s mind, the pastor’s heart and the preacher’s passion.”

After Sunday evening services each week, he would invite seminarians back to the manse for fellowship and discussions. There was no agenda, just a simple give and take between pastor and students.

I will let Peterson take it from here.

On one of these evenings he was asked by one of the students something about preaching. Something on the order of ‘What is the most important thing you do in preparing to preach each Sunday?’ I think we were all surprised by the answer, at least I was. His answer, ‘For two hours every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, I walk through the neighborhood and make home visits. There is no way that I can preach the gospel to these people if I don’t know how they are living, what they are thinking and talking about. Preaching is proclamation, God’s word revealed in Jesus, but only when it gets embedded in conversation, in a listening ear and responding tongue, does it become gospel.’

– The Pastor, p.86f

That is one of the best and truest sentences I’ve ever read:

“Preaching is proclamation, God’s word revealed in Jesus, but only when it gets embedded in conversation, in a listening ear and responding tongue, does it become gospel.”

A pastor cannot do his/her job unless his/her words and actions are “embedded in conversation.” What happens on Sunday is of a piece with what happens during the week. A romantic dinner with my wife is connected organically to the life we live together when we are relating to each other as we act out our normal routines day by day: ”fixing, eating and cleaning up after meals, going to work, keeping house, paying bills, doing chores, relating to our children, planning our family calendar, watching television. The special occasion celebrates, fortifies, and enhances the relationship that is built in the everyday.”

Without the daily work of marriage, that romantic dinner might as well be a blind date.

Unfortunately, this is how many ministers operate. They want to stand before the crowds on Sundays without walking through the neighborhoods and making visits on Tuesdays and Thursdays. There is proclamation but little conversation. They are not conversant with the lives, families, work environments, daily pressures, relational situations, and personal questions of those who hear them speak each Sunday. They may be knowledgeable about books, ideas, giving “leadership” to an organization and overseeing programs, but how much do they know about you and me? As speakers, teachers, visionaries and motivators, they may be very good at what they do, but they if they do not live attentively among their people cannot rightly be called pastors. “I am the good shepherd; I know my own sheep, and they know me…” (John 10:14).

I’m not saying we shouldn’t have people who specialize in public speaking in the church. I am saying we need a whole lot more of them to be pastors. There is no substitute for “walking the neighborhood.”

In one of his classic books on ministry, Eugene Peterson wrote about the pastor’s work between Sundays, calling it, “ministry amid the traffic,” away from the church building and program. He contrasted this with the oft repeated job description, “running a church.”

Today, he might write, “The between-Sundays work of American pastors in this century, though, is growing a church.” As Michael Spencer once pointed out, the ethos of growth has overwhelmed the contemporary pastorate. This has changed the pastor’s role. No longer is he/she devoted primarily to “the cure of souls.” Now the job consists of being an entrepreneur, who not only administrates a corporate entity, but who is also expected to energize and transform it into a brand name enterprise. “The Gospel is a product and the world is a market niche.”

In contrast, Peterson has consistently said, “our most important work…is directing worship in the traffic, discovering the presence of the cross in the paradoxes and chaos between Sundays, calling attention to the ‘splendor in the ordinary,’ and, most of all, teaching a life of prayer to our friends and companions in the pilgrimage” (CP, p.73).

In this sense, I therefore heartily encourage congregations everywhere to rise up and tell their pastors to “take a walk” — around the neighborhood, that is.

Pastoral Care Week: Carl

His name was Carl.

An old New Englander, he was strong and mostly silent. He was always pleasant to me, a young minister who had come to the mountains to take the pulpit in my first church. As with many of the men who lived in those hills, it was his wife who was actively involved in the church. There were notable exceptions, but a majority of those men would rather hang around the volunteer fire department or find some chores to keep them busy on Sunday morning. Carl would attend services with his wife, but I didn’t see him much at church activities besides that.

Still, we did exchange pleasantries often. His wife was the church treasurer, so every Monday I’d stop by their house for my check. At other times, I might have bills or receipts to turn in or questions about some financial matter that took me to their house, so I’d see him out in the yard or in the kitchen. Sometimes I’d sit with them and have a cup of coffee. He mostly smiled and listened as his wife and I talked.

I was young and naive, clueless about adult life, ignorant of the culture where I had just relocated, and wrapped up in moving away from home, getting married, living in a place of my own for the first time in my life, being called to my first church — you name it, everything was new. I was a babe in those hills. What’s more, I had landed among people who were deeply rooted in the rocky earth of those green mountains. The congregation itself had first been established in 1814. The buildings in which we met were over a hundred years old. Most of the folks belonged to families who had been there for generations. I was a fresh sprout among ancient oaks.

I am sure guys like Carl shook their heads in wonder at my youthful brashness, the silly things I said, the social blunders I committed. When you’re twenty-two, you know everything and you’re ready to take the world by storm. I’m thankful I went to a place where people had their feet on the ground. They had seen young pastors come and go, had heard the bluster and dogmatism, had put up with being experimented upon and forced to try newfangled practices. They mostly outlasted ‘em. They would do the same with this young buck.

In my second year at the church, Carl had a stroke.

I did my best to visit the family at the hospital and see them through the critical care period. To be honest, I don’t remember much about those days. What I recall is later, after Carl came home. As far as most of his body was concerned, he remained healthy and active. But Carl could no longer communicate. This strong silent man now had no words to speak at all.

This young pastor began to visit more often. Carl’s wife stayed home more and church attendance became less regular. Social situations could be a bit awkward. You see, Carl would give the appearance of talking and entering into conversations, but he made no sense. It was impossible to tell if he was comprehending anything that was being said to him or in the gibberish he spoke. But Carl would smile and “talk” just as if he was a full partner in whatever discussion was taking place around him. In fact, he may have been more talkative than before.

Sometimes this could be kind of funny. Sometimes it was heartbreaking. All of the time, it was Carl’s new reality, one his wife shared with him. It became hard on her. The partner with whom she had shared words for decades could no longer communicate. She got frustrated trying to help him with any number of simple tasks. She got cabin fever. She didn’t feel as useful at church or in other activities in which she’d been involved. The young pastor had a parishioner who needed regular encouragement.

And so I visited. And there we sat, the three of us. Carl’s wife and I would talk about church, what was happening in the community, our families, and how she was getting along with Carl. Carl sat with us and smiled and made his unique, incomprehensible contributions. I was in way over my head.

The novice minister had come to the end of his tricks fast. I had to learn right then and there that things happen in life I can’t change, fix, or make better. I came to the realization that words don’t solve all problems. I had to admit that I don’t have answers, that I don’t even understand the problems sometimes. I was forced to practice and come to appreciate the art of simply being with someone, sitting, listening, attending to the situation at hand without “working” in any tangible fashion to improve it.

I watched an unforgettable demonstration of love, as a woman kept her promise “for worse” and “in sickness.” Recognizing right away that I had little to offer in the light of such profound devotion, I learned the power of simple encouragement. All I brought to Carl’s home were a few words of affirmation, a couple of Bible verses, and a prayer or two. Such were the rudimentary tools I had to work with in those days. But, to be honest, I probably could have said the same simple things every time I visited — or nothing at all — and frankly, it would have been enough.

I learned that just dropping by, having a cup of coffee, showing a bit of kindness, and sitting for awhile could make a real difference for somebody. Who knew?

And that a pastor, even a young and clueless one, can represent the gracious, healing Word of God to hurting people.

And that pastors are made by means we would seldom choose and might never imagine.

I’m thankful for everything I’ve learned in church, in Bible college, and in seminary. But when it comes right down to it, it is people like Carl and his wife who help me learn what it means to be a pastor.

Pastoral Care Week: Curing Souls or Running Churches?

Pastoral Care Week
Renewing Our Calling to the Cure of Souls

This week I will be re-posting some of the material from the past six years that I’ve written on pastoral/chaplain ministry. I have been looking through it lately and reworking some of it for other purposes, and I thought it might be a good time to take another look at a few of these articles.

If you’ve been reading Internet Monk during these years, then you know that this is a primary interest of mine. And, as I’ve been wont to do, I’ve grounded my perspectives not only in my reading of the Scriptures and my understanding of tradition, but in the contemporary pastoral writings of people like Eugene Peterson.

Until about a century ago, what pastors did between Sundays was a piece with what they did on Sundays. The context changed: instead of an assembled congregation, the pastor was with one other person or with small gatherings of persons, or alone in study and prayer. The manner changed: instead of proclamation, there was conversation. But the work was the same: discovering the meaning of Scripture, developing a life of prayer, guiding growth into maturity.

This is the pastoral work that is historically termed the cure of souls. The primary sense of cura in Latin is “care,” with undertones of “cure.” The soul is the essence of the human personality. The cure of souls, then, is the Scripture-directed, prayer-shaped care that is devoted to persons singly or in groups, in settings sacred and profane. It is a determination to work at the center, to concentrate on the essential.

The between-Sundays work of American pastors in this century, though, is running a church.

One of the first series I did here (May 2010) discussed issues I had with evangelicalism. Pastoral care was among those issues. The remainder of this post reflects that early piece.

First, some background. I have been in pastoral ministry since 1978, when I graduated from Bible college.

I served as an assistant pastor in my home church (Southern Baptist) the summer after I graduated from Bible college.
For five years, I was the pastor of a small (75-100) church in Vermont. It was an American Baptist Church that became independent of that association.
While in seminary, I pastored an IFCA Bible Church in the Chicago area.
We moved to Indianapolis, where I was an associate pastor, responsible for worship and music and other ministries for nine years in a non-denominational, evangelical “community” church.
I then became the senior pastor in a smaller sister church south of Indy.
Now, I serve in a community-based pastoral ministry as a hospice chaplain.
I now practice my faith in an ELCA Lutheran church, and for a time pursued ordination in that body. I am no longer seeking that, but still preach and preside occasionally in Lutheran and other congregations.

At times, I was a good pastor. At other times, I was awful. But through all the years, a few things have remained constant, at least in my understanding of what a pastor should do: (1) leading God’s people in worship, (2) teaching and encouraging people to live in the Story of the Scriptures, (3) working with people personally to encourage their spiritual formation, (4) providing pastoral care to those in need, and (5) helping people participate in God’s worldwide mission of loving our neighbors here and around the world.

Eugene Peterson has persuaded me that we fulfill this calling best when we pay attention to the “angles” of pastoral ministry. He sees the shape of true pastoral work as a triangle, and with a triangle, it is important to get the angles right. The precision of the angles determines the shape of the triangle and the length of each line. If the angles are all constructed equally, the result is a triangle with matching sides, perfectly balanced.

In pastoral ministry, Peterson says there are three angles that form the shape of our work: (1) Prayer, (2) Scripture, and (3) Spiritual Direction. If we properly understand and give attention to these angles, we fulfill our ministerial calling, and the “lines,” which represent the activities in which we engage, will fall into place.

By his definition, then, a pastor is called to be a person who attends to God through:

Prayer: living in a responsive, conversational relationship with God,
Scripture: living a contemplative life that is immersed in the words of the Bible,
Spiritual direction: being with people in community and individually for the care and cure of their souls

If we “work these angles” and let them shape us, the result will be a pastoral ministry that has integrity, depth, and appropriate balance.

In my years as a pastor in local congregations, I saw and lived out some very different incarnations of ministry, pastoral caricatures which would lead one to suspect some poorly drawn angles. Here are a few I have witnessed and experienced:

THE PROFESSOR
Faster than Mr. Answer Man! More powerful than a German theologian! Able to parse Greek verbs with a single glance! I have been the professor. I have attempted to turn small churches into seminaries. Many pastors love to teach. We were trained to teach. We got the idea, somehow, mistakenly, that what it really takes to help people follow Christ is for pastors to teach them Bible stories and Bible facts and Bible passages and Bible themes until their cranial cavities are bursting with sound doctrine. So, sanctuaries become lecture halls.

I believe in deep, sound, faithful teaching, but pastors are not simply professors, and churches are not classrooms. How dull would that be?

THE MASTER OF CEREMONIES
This guy knows how to work a room. With Osteenesque brilliance, this genial host makes everyone feel welcome. Praying in public, he warms each one’s heart. As Master of Ceremonies, he makes certain that the presentation is impeccable, his stage manner flawless. His stories make you feel good. He speaks in sayings that are consistently clever and witty. Did I mention that smile? His sermons may not have depth, but they are eminently listenable. He is always positive, always affirming, always patting little children on the head, always making sure that people leave feeling better than when they came in. He never forgets a name. He could sell sand in the Sahara.

We all appreciate positive, affirming people, and we should. However, being a pastor is not to be equated with being Mr. Personality.

THE SHOPKEEPER
First one in the door, last one to leave. Responsible for each detail of the operation. Familiar with every inch of the property and every last piece of inventory. Takes his work home and burns the midnight oil pouring over the books. Never takes a vacation; in fact, rarely takes a lunch! Eats, drinks, sleeps, and breathes the business. Always working on new ideas to make things better and more profitable. Keeps one eye on the competition at all times. “Workaholic” is an insult; he is more dedicated than that. The answer to every problem is simply to roll up his sleeves and hit it a little harder.

I admire dedicated pastors who work hard. Slothfulness is a sin, and diligence a virtue. But even God stopped working at one point. It doesn’t all depend on you, Mr. Shopkeeper. And will you ever be still enough for God to get your attention or for you to hear the silent cries of the suffering?

THE DRILL SERGEANT
This pastor, on the other hand, calls others to burn out for Jesus and subjects them to a steady diet of Wretched Urgency. Christians have been saved to serve! He issues constant, fervent appeals for folks to get busy for the Lord by getting involved in the church program. His counsel to anyone who has a spiritual problem is to stop focusing on self and start working for Christ. He has no time for spiritual navel-gazing or people who want to waste time. When the house is on fire, you don’t sit around sharing your feelings.

Yes, pastors are called to assist people in using their spiritual gifts for the Body’s benefit and the world’s blessing. However, pastors are shepherds, not sheep dogs.

THE CEO
Natural born leader, remarkably gifted, entrepreneurial, expert in his field, with great capacity for understanding large organizations, an uncanny knack for administrating them, and endless energy to keep it all going, this is the “rancher” that the church growth movement used to talk about. The guy’s ambitious and knows how to build. He could run a Fortune 500 company; instead he runs the incredibly complex megachurch. He is high profile, thrives on new challenges, and earns the respect of the business folks who used to thumb their noses at the church. Finally, they say, a minister we can respect! A guy who can duke it out with the bankers and politicians! He does it the American way and does it right.

Thank God for this pastor’s amazing gifts. The problem comes when he is lifted up as THE model for pastoral success. Then the whole enterprise for all of us becomes about being big and excellent, about having more, and about leading a “great” church.

THE VISIONARY LEADER
The pastor who has regular visions may or may not become a CEO-type. He may not have the stuff to build big, but he sure dreams and talks big. There is always something great on the horizon and his job is to see it and rally the troops in hot pursuit. He is continually challenging his congregation to new heights, ever the cheerleader to spur them on, always ladling out the hot sauce to keep the enthusiasm high. After all, God is in the business of doing new things… today… tomorrow… all the time… everywhere… for everyone! His sermons are rife with military metaphors: conquest, triumph, and victory. He knows how to raise the flag and get the patriots to cheer.

Nothing wrong with enthusiasm or being on the outlook for new direction from the Spirit. However, having my eyes fixed on the horizon may mean missing something right beside me, something not so exciting or dazzling but perhaps even more important. Why not lead the flock beside quiet waters once in awhile?

THE SPIRITUAL TECHNICIAN
Have I got a program for you! Take this discipleship course, and in thirteen weeks, guaranteed or your money back, you will be a mature follower of Christ! Memorize this packet of Bible verses and your mind will be renewed! Follow these nine steps and you will be financially free! Here are some Christian diet suggestions to keep you healthy, a Christian exercise video to keep you fit, Christian clothing so you can be a public witness, Christian music for your CD player to keep you holy while you drive, a Christian Yellow Pages so that you never have to hire someone who doesn’t work “as unto the Lord,” Christian child-raising tips so your kids will turn out just right, a Christian sex video to keep your marriage smoking hot, and our latest church newsletter so you can find something to do at the church building every day of the week. By such means, pastoral ministry morphs into programmatic activity.

The technician pastor believes in a lot of this stuff. He probably has testimonials to back up the claims. It’s simple. It’s easy. It works. Where’s God?

• • •

I’ve seen and known all these types, even been some of them myself. Though they are not unique to evangelical church culture, they seem to thrive there. In the entrepreneurial, anti-tradition, historically ignorant, low-accountability world of evangelicalism, pastors are pretty much free to choose their identity and many end up like the caricatures above.

But the angles are all wrong. “Caring” and “curing” are noticeably absent from the job description.