Pastoral Leadership for Faith as a Way of Life
The following is an excerpt from “Faith as a Way of Life: A Vision for Pastoral Leadership,” by Christian Scharen, Foreword by Miroslav Volf, to be published by Eerdmans, Winter 2007-2008.
Pastoral leadership, at its best, operates in the creative tension that exists between God’s free gift of abundant life and the vagaries of our human selfishness. But if pastoral leaders lose hold of either the truth of their actual circumstances or God’s gift of another way, that tension grows slack, and pastoral leadership bends every which way in response to the variety of impulses.
It is very difficult to maintain the tension between the new life proclaimed in the Gospel and the actual circumstances in which we live and lead. Two main forces cause the tension to slacken: the social differentiation of spheres of life that make our lives feel so fragmented and the culture of individualism that misleads us into thinking that we can find meaning and purpose in a self-maximizing model for success. These obstacles to living and leading faith as a way of life translate, in turn, into two main problems.
First, when the church becomes simply one sphere among various spheres, offering its relevance in terms of something people need in order to be complete, the tension slackens between the version of life offered in the Gospel and the oft-troubled realities of our lives. Too many people—Christians or not—imagine Church and its Sunday morning worship as offering a respite, a moment of peace and reflection in the otherwise frenzied week. They imagine it as a place to draw energy, or a “haven in a heartless world.” 1 Such an understanding of church has largely given in to the compartmentalization of life: worship and the church are used in the service of other spheres of life, especially work and the economy. When church is viewed this way, parishioners use Sunday as a well from which to draw energy or peace for the hard work of making ends meet in the rest of the week. The pastor in this model of church becomes the manager of the “spiritual sphere,” an expert who both assures adequate exposure to things religious for the membership of the organization and provides spiritual services to the membership.
The second way slack develops between the God’s intention for our lives and the realities of our everyday failings comes from the cultural dominance of America’s primary language—individualism. Here, in a way that intertwines with the structural separation of the church as a separate sphere, churches and their worship services become “lifestyle enclaves” where likeminded groups gather for succor and solace, common sense advice on marriage, or an inspiring groove that lifts the spirit. In an effort to be accessible and not offend the ideas of genuine seekers, the church enables what amounts to little churches of one, all worshipping in their own way to their own gods, yet sharing common seating and sanctuaries. The pastor in this model becomes the therapist who is always available and yet has nothing to offer but a loving God and personal reassurance that seeks always to provide what is desired by the parishioners, as if their demand for spiritual products simply mirrors their demand for life-enhancing products in any other sphere of their lives.
These two portraits of slacker churches and pastoral leadership within them are caricatures, of course, but they represent types of dysfunction all churches struggle with. In so far as these dysfunctions hold sway, they make faith impotent and the church only faithful to half its mission—which is to say, not faithful at all.
Creative pastoral leadership is about ways of reeling in the slack, thereby recovering a mode of pastoral leadership that fosters faith’s guiding impact on daily living. Earlier, I’ve given examples of four congregations and the Christian practices their pastoral leaders have fostered. These pastoral leaders are each, in their own way, recovering pastoral excellence as we’ve defined it here: shaping communities for living faith as a way of life. What is distinctive about their work when compared to traditional modes of pastoral leadership? I want to try to answer this question as a means to answer the larger question of how to most effectively tighten the slack between God’s call to abundant life and the social and cultural obstacles that prevent us from answering with our whole lives.
A variety of ways exist to speak, write and think about pastoral leadership. Some, such as the Rev. Kate Harvey, writing on the SPE Web site, have used the classical “Threefold Office of Christ,” that is, the understanding of Jesus’ ministry as inhabiting the offices of Prophet, Priest, and King as a means to speak of pastoral leadership. Others, such as Gregory Jones and Kevin Armstrong, have called upon a more modern triptych: office, profession, and calling.
Instead of drawing on classic paradigms, I wish to draw out of the examples earlier in the book a particular trait both ancient and necessary for contemporary communities of faith. It is, however, not a model traditionally associated with the person of the ordained clergy, but with the process of their leadership. The role, developed within the initiation process of the early church, is that of “sponsor” or “spiritual guide.” While the role of spiritual guide for those new to the faith was very important in the early church’s process of Christian initiation, its role contracted as the church moved into the long Constantinian era, when infant baptism became the norm and parents were the de facto spiritual guides for children as they grew in faith. However, with the recovery of more robust rites of Christian initiation in recent decades in the face of a largely post-Christian North Atlantic West, we now also need a revived model of the spiritual guide.
The sponsor or spiritual guide might sound similar to contemporary talk of pastors as “coaches”.2 The model of “coach” evokes the idea of one-on-one mentoring and encouragement about specific aspects of an overall performance for the sake of a larger goal—winning the game. While I like aspects of the “coach” model, especially its focus on teaching performance, its main reference—to a game—does not have the same historical and biblical resonance as does a way or journey. It is true that the Apostle Paul used language of “running the race” as an analogy for the Christian life (cf. Hebrews 12:1-2). However, such references are few. They also may play into the idea that “religion” like “sports” is an aspect of life one can “take up” and “work on” as a weekend pursuit. Faith, however, is not an add-on in the search for a full life; it is life itself. Such “coaching” language, while attractive and to some extent fruitful, ultimately does not resonate as deeply in Scripture as the idea of Christian life as a way or journey. From God’s call to Abram in Genesis and the Exodus and wilderness journey of the Israelites to the call of Jesus to “follow me,” the foundational stories of faith speak of our pilgrimage of faith in this life.
While the disciples turned from their former lives and followed Jesus, we are called to faith, incorporated into the body of Christ through baptism, and learn to “walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4) as part of this community. The very earliest stories we have of conversion show that guidance for those new to faith was offered by sponsors—spiritual guides whose double-edged job was to witness to the community regarding the fitness of the candidate while guiding the candidate in the way of life practiced by the community. Theodore, an early church father, wrote that in preparing for baptism the candidate needed to be released from “citizenship in an earthly and political city [to] citizenship in the heavenly city and kingdom.” From the time of enrollment for baptism, sponsors served as spiritual guides to this way of life in the heavenly city. Theodore writes:
A duly appointed person inscribes your name in the Church book together with that of your godfather who answers for you and becomes your guide to the city... This is done in order that you may know, long before the time and while still on earth, that you are enrolled in heaven, and that your godfather who is in it is possessed of a great diligence to teach you, who are a stranger and newcomer to that great city, all the things that pertain to it. 3
While Theodore sounds like he is rejecting the world, he is only in the sense of qualifying its authority so that Christians learn to live as citizens of heaven in the midst of the earthly city. Using sponsors in the initiation process has a new importance in many churches today as they seek to reinvigorate mission in post-Christian North-Atlantic societies.4
The revival of Christian initiation and its use of sponsors developed over the last thirty years alongside the revival of the notion of spiritual direction within faith communities. Spiritual direction has had a long history within monastic communities but had waned in the west as therapy overtook traditional priestly guidance.5 However over the last thirty years spiritual direction has come back as a major emphasis within mainstream Christianity.6 Pastor and spiritual writer Eugene Peterson has contributed to this revival with his many books on pastoral leadership and the spiritual life.7 His comments include both an encouragement and a warning:
I’m a little bit uneasy about the professionalization of spiritual direction. Granted, the training and counsel can help us do this work better. But basically it’s not a specialized thing. It’s very much a part of the Christian life and should be very much a part of the pastor’s life. In my view, spiritual direction is a conversation in which the pastor is taking the person seriously as a soul, as a creation of God for whom prayer is the most natural language.8
Guiding a person as a soul, as a creation of God, into the deeper journey of prayer and faithfulness in their day-to-day life: This is the model of spiritual direction called for in Peterson’s writings and asked for by countless persons of faith today.
Examples offered earlier in this book present two key components of this notion of spiritual guide as a model for pastoral leaders. First, the pastoral leader as spiritual guide offers direction and guidance in enacting a practice. Here, pastoral leaders can guide communities into practices that embody the wisdom of how Christians live in the world, both now and over the centuries. Such pastoral leadership came to the fore in Gardiner, Maine, when Rob Webb and his pastor, David Wood, realized that, for their congregation, eating together as Christians meant eating together with the poor and the lonely rather than simply with those they like. Learning how to engage in the practice, both in disposition and in the nuts and bolts of getting it done, came directly from the spiritual guidance Rob and David provided. It was absolutely essential that the meal be shared, rather than served by some to others, and essential as well that it be in their home, so to speak, as a congregation rather than some other place they didn’t care about. Opening their church home, preparing a good meal, and sharing it with the stranger marked the shape of this Christian practice.
Likewise, the other pastoral leaders we’ve cited each in their own ways gave direction and guidance to congregational practices that deepened their ability to connect faith to aspects of their lives day to day. Whether through testimony, discernment, or other practices, these pastoral leaders each found a practice that, even if practiced by the congregation gathered together, developed habits of heart and mind that take God’s vision for life as the plumb line as they scatter into the world. Such practices, done together and over time, with wise guidance and focused rehearsal, equip the people of God with means to live faith day to day.
The second key component, however, is essential and integral to the first: the pastoral leader as spiritual guide frames the meaning of the practice as the community enacts it. In doing so, he or she draws resources from the biblical and theological languages of the Christian tradition to make sense of what the community is doing. This not only keeps the practice from being easily co-opted by the social and cultural obstacles the practices seek to overcome, it also allows the community to see how such practices have parallels in other spheres of their lives. The meaning, then, is not the meaning of this practice alone but the logic it unfolds in an interconnected way throughout one’s life. Again, in Gardiner, Maine, David Wood framed the meaning of table fellowship in terms of the eschatological kingdom of heaven, rooted in parables of Jesus in Scripture as well as prophetic and apocalyptic visions of God’s Kingdom as it will be in its fullness. David’s framing also evokes the interconnection of tables and how our faith practices break open all the places where we eat together—from the parish hall tables where the community supper takes place, to the table in the sanctuary where they share the Lord’s Supper to their tables at home where their families gather for daily meals. Such framing expands the imagination and gives a potentially broad impact for the simple practice of eating together.
Just as David seeks to unpack the theological meaning of the communal practice of eating together at First Baptist, the other pastoral leaders whose examples I describe earlier in the book each in their own ways model theological reflection on the practices they encourage and lead. In each case, these pastoral leaders reflected theologically on ordinary things the congregations do—work, read the newspaper, play and listen to music—pointing to the threads of our Christian faith already woven into daily actions and calling the congregation to practices through which God transforms their way of life.
In the reflecting and the pointing, these pastors become spiritual guides, leading their congregations to faith as a way of life.
1 The phrase comes from Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995). Obviously, Lasch here attaches the phrase to family. While Lasch argues for the merits of such a view of the family, his conclusions are dubious for the family and impossible to accept for the church.
2 Among recent titles, see Liz Creswell, Christ-Centered Coaching: 7 Benefits for Ministry Leaders (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2006); Tony Stoltzfus, Leadership Coaching: The Disciplines, Skills, and Heart of a Christian Coach (Charleston: BookSurge Press, 2005).
3 Theodore, quoted in Timothy A. Curtin, The Baptismal Liturgy of Theodore of Mopsuestia, Studies in Sacred Theology 222 (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University Press, 1970), 92.
4 An excellent example of this is Lester Ruth, Accompanying the Journey: A Handbook for Sponsors (The Christian Initiation Series) (Nashville: Discipleship Recourses, 1997).
5 A classic description of this trajectory is E. Brooks Holifield’s A History of Pastoral Care in America: From Salvation to Self-Realization (Nashville: Abindgon, 1983). See also Chapter three above.
6 See for an example of this trend the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation (http://www.shalem.org)
The Rev. Dr. Christian Scharen is director of Faith as a Way of Life, a Sustaining Pastoral Excellence Project sponsored by the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School.
