Pastoral Excellence and Competence
Editor’s note: The following is a sermon delivered by Bishop William H. Willimon Feb. 5, 2007, at the Midwinter Conference of the Evangelical Covenant Church. The theme of the conference was “Sustaining Pastoral Excellence: Pastoral Competence and Congregational Vitality.”
It’s great to be back among you. Last time I gathered with you was in the Hyatt in Chicago, best I can remember. I remember Dick Lindeman’s son, Bryan, a student at Duke, coached me a little bit before that gathering.
And I said, “Evangelical Covenant. Not many of them in South Carolina. Who is this?”
And he said, “We’re Lutherans, sort of. We’re evangelical, but we don’t want to hurt anybody.
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And I said, “Good. I like that.”
And I remember they’re coming into the Hyatt and we had a great procession leading into the ballroom at the service that night, and a great orchestra, and a processional coming in, and just as I’m getting ready to go in, this woman comes up to me and says “I’ve come all the way from Des Moines to hear you, and I love your work and your books. This is just such a joy.”
And I thought, “Wow that’s amazing.” And I thought about her as I spoke that night. And then we recessed, and as we were standing out there in the lobby, she comes up to me again and she says, “You’re not Frederick Buechner!”
And that’s all I remember of that.
Well, I’ve been asked to speak on sustaining pastoral excellence. Fostering ministerial competence. That’s a problem, “excellence.” That’s a pagan virtue. Aristotle talked about excellence, but the Bible hardly ever talks about it. “Competence.” I’m from Alabama. I don’t know if I can be helpful with that.
But, how do you sustain ministry?
I know as a seminarian, I was a gofer at the ecumenical continuing education center at Yale, where pastors came back for continuing education. I quickly found that pastors would sign up for these weeks on “What’s New in New Testament Study” and “Recent Trends in Theology,” but generally the main reason they were always there was “How do you keep keeping on?” How do you sustain ministry over the long haul?
Don said you’re here this week to work on your sickness and to work on your loneliness. I’m looking over at this young pastor seated next to me, starting a new church in Chicago, and he didn’t’ look that lonely, but hey, he’s only been in it six months. Give him time. He’ll look as sick as I look in 35 years.
Ministry is peculiarly demanding, and to stay at it, how do you do that? I don’t think sustaining ministry is your problem. I think that’s God’s problem. The only good reason for staying at ministry is theological. Christian pastoral ministry is just too tough to do it by yourself. And I expect that there are some of you who are hoping this week to find a technique, some knockdown argument for the faith, some new program. Well, forget it. The Kingdom of God is just too demanding to be encapsulated in a technique. If you’re not careful in ministry, you get to where you substitute a program or a technique for the invasion of the living God, and then you just don’t end up with much.
I remember when I was in graduate school at Emory, a friend of mine did his doctoral project on racism and preaching, and he studied the sin of racism and then he studied why people change their racial attitudes. And so, armed with this knowledge, he devised a series of four sermons at his church in Georgia on bringing the Christian tradition on racism. And he tested people to get their degree of racism before he gave these sermons and then he tested after he gave the sermons. And the result of his study, they were 0.3 points more racist at the end of the sermon series than they were at the beginning.
It’s tough. And you need a living God to do what you’re called to do.
Which brings us to tonight’s Scripture: John 3, Nicodemus’s nocturnal visit to Jesus. Nicodemus is introduced to us not simply as a member of the synagogue but a ruler of the synagogue. He is a member of the Sanhedrin, the high council of Israel. He is not just a believer, but he is in charge of believers. He is a teacher, and he comes to Jesus by night and he says, “Teacher, we know you’re sent from God because nobody could do the things you’re doing unless God is with him, and we know . . .”
He’s big on knowing because he’s a teacher and that’s what teachers do. They put people in the know. The teachers have the answers. They explain things. He’s a ruler of the synagogue.
“We know. We know. Because nobody could do. . . .”
And Jesus blurts out, “You got to be born from above.”
And Nicodemus says, “Uh. Uh, like I was saying, we know that your teaching is very interesting and . . .”
“The wind blows where it will, and you can hear the sound of it, but you don’t’ know where it comes from. You don’t know where it’s going.”
And Nicodemus says “How. . . how do you do that? How can this be? Can you climb back in your Mama’s womb and be born again? How can that be?”
Jesus: “Nicodemus, I use the word anothen here. It doesn’t mean ‘again.’ It means ‘from above.’ You’ve got to be born from above. You’ve got to be done over from top to bottom. Top down. Anothen.”
Nicodemus: “Are you using the word ‘pneuma’ here, in the ordinary word of ‘wind’ or in the more theologically sophisticated sense of ‘spirit?’”
Jesus: “Yes.”
And he says, “And you are a teacher of Israel? And you don’t know this? Huh. Isn’t that interesting?”
The wind. Isn’t it interesting that Jesus speaks to Nicodemus, he uses two of the most uncontainable, uncontrollable, unpredictable of human phenomena: birth (“What did you do to get born the first time?”), wind, (“Oh, you hear the sound of it. You don’t know where it’s coming from. You don’t know where it’s going).
Hmm.
When I am at a gig like this, I get to the hotel, I always put out my toiletries, the toothbrush, toothpaste, razor and all, just like they are at home. I lay them out there in the hotel room because, you know, you’re dislocated and it’s just good to have a few things tied down, a few things that are predictable. And maybe I want more of that the older I get, because the older you get, the more things are unpredictable.
Or maybe it’s because I’m clergy.
I got this friend. Midlife crisis. He goes to buy a motorcycle. He’s an Episcopal priest. He goes in there and is looking at the Harley store and this salesman says, “Now this baby here, this can outrun anything on the highway. No cop can touch you when you’re on this thing. You can put this throttle down and it’s zero to 80 in a few seconds.”
And so then he asked my friend, “So what do you do for a living?”
And he said, “Well, I’m an Episcopal priest.”
And the salesman says “Uh, what you got here is a very safe motorcycle.”
“Jesus, we know that you’re a great teacher. We know that the wind, the wind could just rip through here, blow you around, toss you around.” You got to be born from above.
Here’s what interests me tonight. In all the New Testament, by my reckoning, this is the only time that Jesus ever tells anybody that they need to be born from above. It’s the only time Jesus says to somebody “You should be born again.” And the person he says it to is a church official, a theologically trained religious professional.
Somebody who looks like me.
And he told his disciples, these unlettered laypeople, “Follow me.” Told the one caught in adultery, “Go. Sin no more.” He told the young rich man, “Go. Sell everything you have. Give it to the poor.”
But when he was face to face with somebody that looks like me, a church official, a credentialed, accredited keeper of doctrine, he said, “You know, I’ve never seen anybody that needed to climb back into his Mama’s womb any worse than you do.”
He was a leader of the synagogue. He was a man in the know. He was an explainer of divine ways. He had answers. And then Jesus blurts out: “You. You got to be born. Anothen. You got to be ripped up, top to bottom. Done over. Turned upside down.”
“How can this be? How in the world can you go back into the womb? How can you? What is the program? How can you be?”
And Jesus says, “Relax. The wind blows where it will. You can’t control it. You can hear the sound of it, but you don’t’ know where it’s coming from, and you don’t know where it’s going to take you.”
Just you stay with this leadership thing long enough, the wind will get you. The pneuma blows where it will.
Did Jesus mean that? The pneuma blows where it will? Did he mean it as a threat or a promise?
The only person he ever had this conversation with was a religious official.
Now, reading the program, all you “pastors, staff ministers, missionaries, seminary students, chaplains, institutional leaders, laypersons exploring full time ministry, pastors thinking about becoming Evangelical Covenant pastors,” you got to be shook up, top to bottom. Pneuma. Rip up. Rip off.
I sometimes tell them on Sunday morning “If you’ll notice, we helpfully bolt down the pews, one of the only human gatherings you come to where the furniture is bolted to the floor, because we have found it helpful when you’re working with a Trinitarian God to just have a few things tied down so that we’ll know where we’re going to be by noon. At least you’ll be sitting in the same place.”
I was at a clergy conference and this pastor of a big church—I know, size doesn’t matter, but still, big church—and was in the third building program at this church. “And you know, I don’t mean to brag,” he said, “but we’re in our third multi-million dollar building plan, and I don’t mean to brag, but we’re up to our fourth service on Sunday morning.”
And a pastor spoke for all of us on the way out when he said, “That was the most depressing hour I have ever spent.”
And I was thinking, “You know, it’s been a long time since I need somebody, since I met somebody that needed so bad to get a little pneuma.”
Rip him up, rip him off. Turn him upside down.
I got this group of business guys that meet with me periodically and help me with my work. I tell them administrative, managerial things I’m doing. I’m saying, “I’m in a job where I have a lot of administration to do. I have no training in administration. I have no vocation to administration. Help me. Guide me.”
One of these people, the CEO of a big company, was saying he thought the singular most important leadership characteristic in these times is flexibility. Suppleness. A joy of risk.
And I said, “Well, you know I’m a Methodist. We got this whole thing sealed down where that I can live my life, I can do this for years, and I’ll never have to risk.”
And he said “Well, I’m sorry but you’re working with Jesus. That must make it awful difficult to be a Methodist.”
Sometimes, I get too big for my britches, spiritually speaking. The longer you’re in this, you master so many mysteries. You figure out a line on so many tough Biblical texts that once confused you. You stabilize the sovereign God, but then by the grace of God, sometimes this disruptive pneuma will blow in and you find yourself knocked down a notch or two where you’re back down to a level where you can receive.
I think it’s just great, this church’s initiative with new church starts and church revitalizations. You really ought to be proud of yourself. The multi-ethnic. The diversity. I think that’s just wonderful. You’re the envy of many of the rest of us for the work you’re doing, carrying that missionary spirit that prompted you in so many areas in another century. Now to turn that spirit here, in this missionary environment. It’s wonderful. It’s going to cure you of your terminal case of Swedishness. It’s going to be wonderful. Trust me. It’s going to make being a pastor in this denomination, being a disciple here, much, so much more interesting.
Jesus looked at Nicodemus, and he said, “Oh, you got to turn and become as a fetus. You’ve got to turn around. You’ve got to go down a notch or two. You’ve got to get dumb and confused. You can’t enter this Kingdom except as a little child who doesn’t know as much as you do.”
“How?”
“Hey, the Spirit blows where it will.”
I’m saying that one of your most sustaining, empowering resources for ministry is the kind of God that we got, or that’s got us. Ministry, and what we are expected to do, is just too ridiculously difficult to do it without a living God that intends to equip those persons who he calls. And the third person of the Trinity becomes for us this constant breeze that blows at your back, propelling you into areas where you didn’t plan to go. But if you’re going to follow Jesus, you have to go.
I was telling the superintendents today at lunch that one of our churches, Church of the Reconciler in Birmingham, serves mostly homeless people and has a wonderful story, doing wonderful work, and, well, they got some money from us, and they were doing a four-week school to make people employable. And they’re going to talk about how to interview, how to present yourself to a potential employer. How to get a job. How to keep a job. And so, with much fanfare, they had their first day, and the pastor says, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if they had the bishop come down and bless them, and this would mean a lot to them to have the bishop.”
So I went down there, and there’s about 30 homeless people gathered for their first class, and I said to them, “You are going to receive the empowerment you need to go out and get a job and keep a job, and you’re going to get the skills you’ve been lacking. Skills that will enable you to present yourself to an employer and . . .”
So I got finished, and this homeless man shouts out, “Where the hell did Jesus ever hold down a job?”
And I said, “Lawton, I didn’t know there would be anybody here that actually read the New Testament.”
I said, “Well, his daddy was a carpenter.”
And he said, “Did he ever help him?”
And I said, “Not that we know of, but . . .”
And then the man said, “Jesus had nowhere to lay his head, and I got no place to lay my head, and I don’t’ want no damn apartment. I’m just like Jesus.”
I got out to my car and I said, “Lord, I guess it’s too much to ask, you know, for a little help when we’re trying to do some good for some people, make ‘em middle class and bourgeois like me.”
I got one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever received last year, when one of our district superintendents—you know Methodists, we appoint people to churches, we send them places—and this district superintendent said he had a pastor, said “I can’t go to that church. That church is dead. That church has been dying for 20 years, and now it doesn’t’ even have a pulse. Y’all cannot do this to me. That church is dying. I can’t go there.”
District superintendent said he replied, “Well, look, why don’t you take it up with the bishop? But let me just warn you. I’ve spent a lot of time with the bishop, and that man believes Jesus was raised from the dead about as deeply as anybody I’ve ever seen. He actually believes in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. So when you come on to him and say ‘It’s dead,’ he sees that as an opportunity.”
And I tell you, we got some dead and boring ministries that some of us are giving our lives to. And the problem is that because we’re serving a boring God. We’ve got God so cut down to our size and so contained, and we need some Katrina to come through there.
Speaking of Katrina, I was down at a church down in Mississippi. And this little church had been nearly blown away by the hurricane and asked me to come down there, and they’re rebuilding and we’ve had work teams down there, working with them about every weekend. And so I went down there and I said, “Lord, what could I do here?”
I was told, “Hey, go with a storm. I did a lot of good work during storms. Pick up the storm at sea.”
Wow. That’s great, with the wind and the waves. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I said, “Yeah, that’s right. You’re the one who rescues us. Saves us in the midst of the storm. Good. That’s a great idea.”
But then I did a non-Methodist thing. I actually looked at the text. Preparation of my remarks. First thing I noticed, Mark says, “He made them get into the boat.”
I look it up in the Greek. It’s true. He made them get into the boat. He didn’t invite them to get into the boat. He didn’t suggest they get into the boat. He forced them into the boat.
“Get into the boat.”
And they said, “Well, you know, it’s getting dark, and there’s word of a storm . . .”
“Get in the boat! You’ll be fine. I’m not gonna be there with you, but you go on, across the, you know. . .”
And as you can predict, there is the wind, there is the waves, and we cry out, “We’re sinking! We’re gonna die!”
And look, out of the waves, it’s a ghost!
“No. It is I.”
And then Mark says, it was Jesus, and he intended to walk past them.
What kind of comment is that? “He intended to walk past them?” Where was he going at that hour of the night? On the waves, what possibly more important could he have to do than to save us, his own disciples, in the boat, and so we’re over there, waving, “Jesus! Over here! Please! Over here!”
And Jesus says, “Oh. Oh. All right. Stop it. Be still.”
And I wasn’t sure I wanted to go preach at that little church.
Part of the fun of ministry is trying to work with this uncontainable God that is not our pet, that is not limited to our boat, the one that is always moving out. The one who says, looking at this the other day, “I am the way and the truth and the life and nobody comes to the Father except but by me. Can you say, ‘but by me?’ I am the only way.”
Okay. Good. We can take that. Because we certainly believe that.
“And I got other sheep that are under this fold. And I’m going to bring them in too. You don’t know who they are. But I do.”
And I said, “Wait a minute. What kind of comment was that? We were all settled down here with the way and the truth and the life. Then you tell us you got other sheep out there that you’re gonna be bringing in, that we don’t’ even know?”
One of the things lately that’s really gotten on my nerves in visits to churches is prayer requests. It’s something like I remember from the Army: sick list, sick call. And basically it’s where you stop worshipping and then you have a report of all the physical deterioration going on in the congregation, the replaced hips and the gall bladders and the hysterectomies and . . .
Now of course, we care about these things, but show me where Jesus ever prayed for sick people. He healed some sick people. He didn’t heal many. He didn’t heal most of them, but he healed a few.
He gave us a prayer. And I don’t remember him mentioning sickness in the prayer. Told us to pray for daily bread, but we solved that.
Oh, that’s right. Our physical health is our main, controlling infatuation, and so we have these prayers. We have prayers for the huge injustice that God has brought on us by making us 63 years old ands having health problems. And I’m sitting there, 60 years old, thinking “Oh, I can just hear God say, ‘Look, you’ve lived longer than I intended for you to in the Bible anyway. Don’t bother me with this stuff. I got other stuff.’”
But in the prayer request, someone stood up, an older woman stood up and said, “As you know, I’ve prayed for my bad back for 30 years. Every morning I get up and I pray for this back. And I didn’t pray for myself either. It was ‘Lord, please, give me some relief from this pain. I can be a better disciple if you’ll give me some relief from this pain.’”
And 30 years of praying. And she said, “This week, praise God, I got an answer to my prayer.”
And the pastor said, ‘Praise God. Amen. Well, you look better.”
And she said, “No. No. I got his answer on Thursday when I . . . usually before I can get up and face the day, I was lying in bed and saying, ‘Lord please, I can’t face another day in pain. Take away some of this pain’ And the Lord spoke to me there in the twilight. And the Lord said, ‘Who told you that I was against people being in pain? Read the Scriptures. I love to put people in pain.’”
And I sat there thinking, “Wow. That’s really more of a God than we planned to worship today. We’re mainly here to get our stuff done. We . . . Uh . . . Wow.”
So she said, “Now I’m just gonna have to try to be a disciple in this condition, so I hope He knows what He’s doing. So take me off the prayer list. I don’t feel right.”
Wow.
Nicodemus is going to make one more appearance in the Gospel of John. John 19, when he comes to pay his last respects. This religious ruler, this theological expert. He will come to honor the body of dead Jesus. But not before, in John 3, Jesus attempts to raise dead Nicodemus.
There is something about this Jesus that corpses stand up and start moving whenever he gets to the cemetery.
I did something this past year that I’d never done before. It’s like a lot of Methodist things. We believe in it, but we don’t do it. This pastor asked me to come out to his little church and do a baptism by immersion. I don’t know if y’all do that in the Covenant. Well, okay, it’s not that Midwestern kind of . . . Anyway, so I went out to this little church and he says there was a little boy there that he had put through this baptism membership class and he said, “This kid is just determined that he wants to be immersed. He just wants to. This is how he wants it done.”
And said, “Well, that’s fine. We, the Discipline, permits it. We can do that.”
But on the way out there, I thought, “Why I am going to this church? Couldn’t have more than a hundred members, and I just, it’s so far out here, in the middle of nowhere. I can’t believe I agreed to do this. I got to be more selective where I go and use my time better.”
Got out there, this little country church, and sure enough, there was the pastor standing on the steps and the little boy standing next to him,
So I got out of the car, and I got my crozier, and I got the robes, I got everything, and I come up, and he said, “Bishop, we’re honored to have you at our church today. We haven’t had a bishop here in as long as anyone can remember. This is Nathan. Nathan is the one to be baptized today.”
And I said, “Nathan, good to meet you. It’s great to be here.”
Nathan said, “They tell me you’ve never done one of these before.”
And I said, “Well, I’ve read about them, Nathan.”
And he said, “Well, I’d feel better if we’d run through it one time.”
And I said, “I was going to do that. I was going to suggest that. I was going to suggest that, that we try it, do it, run through a dry run.”
So he had, they had a borrowed Baptistery from the Baptist, a portable Baptistery in the fellowship hall, there in the gym, and somebody put some potted plants around it and there it was.
So Nathan said, “Now, you want me to take off my shoes?”
And I said, “Yeah, that’s right. Just remove your shoes. That’ll be good.”
And he said, “Socks? You want my socks off?”
And I said, “You can keep your socks on. That’s okay with me.”
And he said, “Well, you go through the ritual. Then you take my hand and you lead me up these steps. And you stand over here to the side. And you will lead me down into the pool.”
And he said, “I want to be baptized three times.”
And I said, “Well, that’s the way John Wesley believed in it. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Yeah, I can do that.”
And he said, “I want to go all the way under, too.”
And I said, “You’ll go under. You’ll go under three times. Yeah. Yeah. We’ll do that.”
So we have the service, and it was just great. The little church packed with people. We sang songs about the church. I preached on the meaning of Baptism. And then we processed from the sanctuary, down the corridor, go following the cross, down into the fellowship hall, and the whole church gathered around the font.
And then I stood there, and I went through the Baptism ritual and I asked him the questions, with the whole church gathered around. And I said, then I said, “Now before we do this, Nathan, is there anything you would like to say to the congregation?”
And he said, “Yeah.”
And I said, “All right. It’s time for Nathan to witness.”
And he stood there, and he said,
“You know, I wouldn’t be here today if you hadn’t put me here. I wouldn’t have known that God wanted me to be here if you hadn’t told me. When my parents got their divorce, my world ended, and I just thought I didn’t have anywhere to go. I couldn’t imagine myself without a family. But then you showed me that you were the family. And you took me, and all you people who put up with me in Sunday school and everything, I just hope you feel good about what’s happening today because God did this through you. And I want to tell you that I’m taking this seriously and you’re going to be proud of me. And for all that y’all have done, one day you’re going to be able to say, ‘I had a hand in that. And I helped make him a Christian.’ So, thank you. This really ought to be a day when you feel good. About yourselves.”
So then Nathan turns to me. I’m weeping profusely. And I’m sitting there, saying, “Sing a hymn! Sing a hymn!” You know.
And Nathan is over there, “You think you’re going to get yourself together?”
And I said “Yes, yes. Sing a hymn! Sing a hymn!”
On the way home, we rode in silence for a long way in the countryside, and I said, I just, I said, “I can’t believe Jesus did that to me. I go out to these places. I’m supposed to be in charge of something. And they make me have to go back and get born again. In front of everybody. It’s just . . .”
All you church officials, Bible scholars, mangers of miracles, “pastors, staff ministers, missionaries, seminary students, chaplains, institutional leaders, lay persons exploring full time ministry, pastors thinking about becoming Evangelical Covenant pastors,” the good news is—I think this a promise, but it might also be a threat—the good news is the pneuma blows where it will. You could get done over, top to bottom, before you know what hit you.
Thank God, ministry isn’t something we have to do.
Amen.
The Rev. Dr. William H. Willimon is Bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church.
