Calling up the Called
There are countless ways to describe the marks of an excellent pastor. Numerous lists of desired pastoral attributes can be found in books, journals, Web sites, and elsewhere. Some are couched in the language of seminary-educated people, in abstract concepts that typically fail to result in action and concrete results. Others, especially those from congregations, are highly specific, typically focusing on skills such as preaching, worship leadership, visitation, administration, and stewardship. Still others—some of the most influential in fact—are not written down anywhere, but are contained in the minds of many churchgoers, mental templates of their ideal pastor. (In many Protestant denominations, that template is likely to be a 32-year-old married man, with 15 years’ pastoral experience, a piano-playing, stay-at-home wife, 2.5 children and a desire to fit with the congregation just as it is.)
But for me, one of the most useful descriptions of pastoral excellence can be found in something I learned about long before I entered the doors of seminary in response to God's call: the munus triplex , the three-fold office of Jesus as prophet, priest and king. As we seek new leaders for God's Church of tomorrow and work to sustain excellence in the leaders of God's Church today, let us focus on the goodness, truth and beauty found in these three roles that were modeled by the One who calls us.
How do we recognize such leaders when we see them? What are the discernible attributes of a leader called to and capable of such ministry?
I. Prophet
The truth is always that we have never been this way before — never more so than today, it seems. We are in a new land. Giants are before us. Who knows what more terrors tomorrow will bring? In times such as these, the prophet wrestles with current challenges in light of Scripture and tradition; connects what is with what might be and discerns a way forward; sees signs and portents and imagines a new thing.
Craig Dykstra of Lilly Endowment Inc. lifts up pastoral imagination as key to leadership for the Church's future. Ronald Heifetz, founder of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University, focuses on adaptive capacity, the ability to face challenges that have no known answers and lead a body to discern and execute strategies that will lead beyond. Peter Senge, founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning, says that we are between stories because the ways Western culture has framed the world are failing, and we need a new story to serve a new community of thought, or at least new ways to frame the old story's power for a new world.
Here is what we seek in the prophet: one who is reflective and contemplative, has a rich inner life, ruminates constantly over life events and their meaning, and both can and will take action. The dreamer must be a doer.
Melissa Wiginton of the Fund for Theological Education describes our first paradox this way: “In this strange and difficult time the Church needs leaders who are superior in both efficiency and the mysteries of the hidden life.” 1
II. Priest
To be a priest to the body is to stand in the gap between what is and what ought to be, to bear all the pain of that place yet cast a hopeful vision of what shall surely someday be. To be a priest is to know in the depths of one’s being both truths of Revelation 12:12: “Woe to you earth and sea. The devil has come down in great wrath because he knows his time is short.”
Our current reality is spiritual warfare. Much evil is about, yet good shall prevail. As a parishioner in my first church liked to say whenever trouble struck, “My favorite verse of the Bible is, ‘It came to pass.’”
To be a priest in the Church of tomorrow requires something new and something old. First the new: to stand in the gap means knowing where you are. Today, that requires an understanding that the worldview shaped by the Enlightenment project has failed. Whether or not one studies quantum physics and its implications for humanity, whether or not one has probed postmodern philosophy, one who would serve as priest understands that people come from different places with different perspectives that must be honored rather than subsumed under one interpretative framework. The priest understands that the fundamental unit of reality is not the individual or the isolated particle but the web, the field, the relationship, and that human beings are connected by a relational web.
While this web of human relationships is imbued with great beauty, allowing us to effect great good in the world, it also has its negative side. As Walter Wink has pointed out, the “powers and principalities” come from within that same web of human relationships, from the collectivities where our lives are joined for God’s good purposes. While those collectivities are created good, they can also fall into a spirit that wreaks havoc. To be a priest in the Church of tomorrow, the pastoral leader must stand in the gap between what is and what ought to be, fully aware of the dynamics at work.
Standing in the gap, the priest also requires something old: the capacity to hear the groan of God in creation. In a sermon published in Awakened to a Calling: Reflections on the Vocation of Ministry,2 the incomparable Fred Craddock tells the story of a brilliant seminary student who could offer up the most exquisite Greek translations with ease but who had little insight or understanding into what those words were trying to convey. Once, Craddock asked the student what he thought of a particularly difficult passage in Romans 9, which the student had translated as “I could almost wish myself to be lost if it would save them.”
“It’s not professional to get that close to people,” the student replied. “Pretty soon their problems are your problems. You should keep your distance from people.”
“For a moment,” concludes Craddock, “I almost envied him. I don’t know if he went into ministry as a professional and is still doing it as a professional. But I felt heavy about it, because if he did he would miss that almost unbearable joy of almost hearing, every once in a while, the groan of God and trying with all your art and craft to do something about it.”
Here is what we seek in the priest: one who comprehends what is at stake in the spiritual warfare that is our reality, is passionate about the work, and has a characteristic that Jackson Carroll calls resiliency: “a toughness combined with elasticity that enables one to endure without breaking when one is facing the tough challenges and difficult tasks that constitute pastoral ministry today.” 3
This is the second paradox: the Church needs leaders who are soft enough to enter into the pain and tough enough to take it.
III. The Leader of God’s Reign Realized
Clearly, the role of today’s pastoral leader is neither “king” nor “queen,” at least not in the way the world understands those terms. Instead, I would offer Gabe Fackre’s description of the work of Christ the King: “The continuing work of reconciliation in this world is one in which Christ saves from evil and death and brings wholeness to the fractures of this world.” 4
The person called to serve the Body of Christ is a leader who galvanizes the body to engage the work of the Kingdom, the reign of God realized.
Therefore, the pastoral leader is not a lone hero or heroine who makes all the decisions and makes everything happen. Theologically, the Church is a body, and, therefore, its ministry is a communal project. Practically, the leader acting alone cannot accomplish anywhere near what God’s people can when their gifts are joined together and multiplied.
From this simple truth flow two implications concerning the nature of the called. First, the pastoral leader’s primary goal is not to achieve “greatness” or “success” in ministry skills or to “make a name” but to build the body and empower the people for ministry. Second, the spirit of true pastoral leadership is collegial rather than “Lone Ranger.”
In calling up the called, listen and watch to assess aspirations and relational habits. Is this person a Barnabas who will lift up, encourage and delight in the ministry of the people? As Jackson Carroll has noted, a major shift has taken place over the past generation or so, from a pastor-centered model of ministry to an ecclesial model that understands ministry to be the calling of the whole people of God. While the pastoral leader performs the same duties as before, i.e, preaching, leading worship, pastoral care and so forth, he or she now does so for the dramatically different aim of building up the Body of Christ, “teaching and empowering lay members to claim and use their spiritual gifts as part of a ministering community.” 5
Whether the paradigm is clerical or ecclesial, pastoral leadership requires the building of a relational web with persons outside the context of our ministry. Pastors inherently exist within a web of human relationships, Barbara Brown Taylor contends. Parishioners, Taylor says, will watch everything a pastor does, whether it’s running a meeting, holding a baby, driving a car or biting one’s fingernails
“They will do this because you are their parson — their representative person — who stands on the tipsy edge between God and God’s people, having promised to be true to them both.” Taylor writes. “People will watch you to see what a life of faith really looks like. They will watch you because they want to see Jesus, or at least one of Jesus’ best friends” 6
How ironic that the leader at the center of the body, the one placed at the heart of a web of relationships, may be without friends. In the hard work of building community, the pastoral leader can be lonely, indeed “some of the loneliest people in church,” William Willimon has said
In that space of loneliness lie the dangers of burnout and misconduct. They are the reason why so many religious organizations, including the Ministers Council of the American Baptist Churches USA, which I serve as executive director, and the various SPE projects nationwide are working to change clergy habits, helping them to stop “going it alone” and instead develop and nourish collegial relationships and take part in covenant support groups.
This is what we see in the leader of God’s reign realized: an intention to build up the Body of Christ so that it may engage the work of the kingdom and strive toward the reign of God realized and a commitment to a body of friends whom one encourages and by whom one is encouraged.
Here is the third paradox: the Church needs leaders who are complete enough to give away the glory of being the one and only hero or heroine at the center of it all, yet empty enough to need true friendship.
Conclusion
God is calling us to call up and equip pastoral leaders for the Church of tomorrow. We do not know the shape of tomorrow’s Church but we know where it heading — to that day when all things are made new and a great celebration unites every nation, language, tribe and people. The Spirit is stirring up leaders for the next stage and expects us to do the work of seeking them out and speaking up
The Rev. Kate Harvey is executive director of the Ministers Council, American Baptist Churches USA, and project director of Together in Ministry, a Sustaining Pastoral Excellence program
1. Melissa Wiginton, Who Should Be Our Pastors? January 8, 2003
2. Awakened to a Calling: Reflections on the Vocation of Ministry, Ed. by Ann M. Svennungsen and Melissa Wiginton, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2005
3. Jackson Carroll, The Earnest Cadman Colwell Lecture at The Claremont School of Theology, September 12, 2002, p. 1
4. Gabe Fackre, The Christian Story, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1978, p. 142
5. The Colwell Lecture, pp. 10-11
6. In Awakened to a Calling: Reflections on the Vocation of Ministry, p. 52
