Metaphors for Church and Ministry
In a class I’m teaching this semester, “The Local Church in Mission to God’s World,” I asked students to use metaphors to describe congregations where they worshipped or worked as a student pastor or pastoral intern. The images were revealing.
Among the more positive metaphors were “family,” “body,” “garden,” and “field.” But most images the students offered connoted death, weakness, impotence, scarcity, and hypocrisy. One student, for example, who attends a large historic church, said her church was best described as a carnival mirror: “Its image of itself is distorted, making it look bigger than it really is.”
The most graphic image, however, was from a student pastor who described his small rural congregation as “road kill.” “It is nearly dead but there is still some quivering life left in it. I don’t know what to do with it. Shall I just drive on by? Do I try to revive it? Do I put it out of its misery? Or, do I call the veterinarian?”
As you can imagine, the student’s “road kill” metaphor sparked a lively discussion about the church’s mission and the role of the pastor. The metaphor resonated with many class members, who expressed frustration, discouragement, and even anger with the current state of the congregations in which they participate.
I suggested that the pastor’s role includes helping congregations develop compelling metaphors for their life and mission. I reminded them that the Bible is full of such metaphors—body of Christ, people of God, holy priesthood, new creation, household of God, ecclesia, and flock, just to name a few.
The pastor’s metaphor for church determines his or her metaphor for ministry, I said. If the church is “road kill,” what is the pastor? The driver of the vehicle that runs over the creature in the road? The road crew that clears the carcass from the highway? The veterinarian who treats the injured? The indifferent motorist who dodges the wounded or dead?
A perceptive member of the class chimed in.
“Should pastors see themselves as rescuers of the church?” she asked. “We are constantly being told by our professors that we are the ‘people of promise’ who must change the church. That is a heavy responsibility.”
The students then talked at length about the burden that they believe faculty place upon them to be the ones who will transform the church. They challenged my metaphor of “pastor as creator of metaphor” as insufficient to motivate and empower them as pastors.
It has since occurred to me that most metaphors we use for church and ministry emerge from a theology of deficiency. The institutional church’s weaknesses, failures, and inadequacies shape our images and metaphors for both the church’s mission and the role of the pastor. Language of effectiveness, efficiency, growth — yes, even “excellence” — can take on connotations that focus more on scarcity and deficit than abundance and plenty.
When Lilly Endowment Inc. set out to call forth, form, nurture, and sustain Christian ministry in the United States, the compelling metaphor they offered was “excellence.” The Endowment invited grant proposals based on a theology of abundance. That is, the Endowment presumed the existence of vital congregations led by creative and faithful pastors.
The compelling metaphor for the SPE initiative was and is Excellence. But it is a particular image of excellence. It is not the excellence of personal achievement derived from individual ingenuity and superior intellect. It is Resurrecting Excellence, a participation in God’s life and mission incarnate and victorious in Jesus Christ and experienced in Christ’s new community, the Church.
Maybe “road kill” has merit as a metaphor for church and ministry. After all, God is no stranger to the thin quivering thread between death and life. But remember that a world that treats the embodiment of God’s presence and mission as “road kill” is being transformed into a new heaven and new earth. God’s response to the road kill of the Cross is the Resurrection. Even “road kill” has been given a new future.
Kenneth L. Carder is professor of the practice of pastoral formation at Duke Divinity School and a senior fellow with Pulpit & Pew: The Duke Center for Excellence in Ministry. He was bishop of the Mississippi Area of the United Methodist Church from 2000 to 2004 and the Nashville Area of the UMC from 1992 to 2000.
