Called to the Excellence of God’s Glory
The following is a sermon delivered by the Rev. Dr. John R. Wimmer at the Evangelical Covenant Church Midwinter Conference, Feb. 8, 2007, in Denver, Col.
Text: 2 Peter 1:3-11 (RSV)
3 His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, 4 by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, that through these you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion, and become partakers of the divine nature. 5 For this very reason make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, 6 and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, 7 and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. 8 For if these things are yours and abound, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 For whoever lacks these things is blind and shortsighted and has forgotten that he was cleansed from his old sins. 10 Therefore, brethren, be the more zealous to confirm your call and election, for if you do this you will never fall; 11 so there will be richly provided for you an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Pastoral excellence. It’s a provocative pair of words. You won’t be surprised to learn there’s been quite a bit of debate among our grantees about the meaning of these words. Thousands of times at the beginning of this program we at Lilly Endowment were asked, “So, what do you really mean by pastoral excellence?” And here was our best, most carefully crafted reply: “We don’t know…”
Part of the purpose of launching Sustaining Pastoral Excellence was to initiate a conversation about what it means to be a pastoral leader. And not just any kind of leader — an excellent pastor!
But that word — excellence — conjures all kinds of secular images, none of them very appealing from the standpoint of the gospel.
- Football locker rooms around the country have signs — Commit to Excellence —for the players to read before they run out on the field to win one for the Gipper. So excellence is about winning, right?
- Tom Peters has at least four books about business leadership with excellence in the title, beginning with his best-seller, In Search of Excellence. So excellence is about making tons of money, right?
- And certainly you’ve seen all those plaques and posters from Successories, each one with just the right inspirational quote to motivate people on to that next great business triumph — so excellence is about success, right?
These ideas rightly grate on our Gospel nerves: How can the followers of a crucified Lord advocate an understanding of pastoral excellence that is about winning, profit, or success?
But more to the point for pastors: is pastoral excellence only about those with the biggest churches, the largest salaries, or the positions of highest prestige? We all know plenty of things about ministry cannot be quantified — so excellence can’t just mean the biggest, the largest, and the most in ministry any more than it can mean winning, money, or success. We’re rightly suspicious of all this talk about excellence.
On the other hand, are our standards so low about what we offer to God in ministry that whatever sermon a pastor throws together at the last minute is just fine? Does being a pastor mean that if we just show up, say we are called by God, and are NICE to everybody — does such mediocrity truly serve the glory of God? Do we think God does not care if we never reach out as pastors or congregations to welcome the stranger, or that new Christians are not burgeoning in many of our churches? Do we think that we honor God when the stewardship in our churches is so low that out pastors must delay health care treatments because they can’t afford them, or they cannot send their children to college, or are threatened by abject poverty in their retirement years? By the way, our studies show that all these dangers are true for many pastors right now.
As I said earlier, although we didn’t know what we meant by pastoral excellence, conversation and theological reflection about its meaning was part of the design of the program. Because of the good work of people like you, the careful thinking of people like Greg Jones and Kevin Armstrong who wrote the book, Resurrecting Excellence — we now know a lot more about what pastoral excellence means.
In fact, I want to say that excellence as a Christian and excellence as a pastor — these are termswe can claim with biblical and theological integrity.
In that light, let’s look at this marvelous passage from the first chapter of II Peter.
Right out of the gate — immediately after the traditional opening salutation — the writer begins with these words in verse 3:
“His divine power has granted us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence….”
Glory and excellence — in Greek, δόξη (doxa) and άρετή (arete). These words have a long history in the ancient world, though for quite differing reasons. Because δόξα and άρετή were well-known words — and are never used together in the Bible other than here — I think they were deliberately paired, in the context of this entire passage, to tell us something fresh about the Christian life.
Take the term, glory — God’s δόξα — the word from which we get Doxology. The Bible is brimming with descriptions of glory. Glory portrays God’s splendor, God’s honor, radiance, and grandeur — it conveys how praiseworthy God is. In Advent and Christmas, we hear about the Glory of God, in scripture, liturgy, and song. Think of all the hymns about God’s glory we sing at Christmas. And for those of you who listen to or sing Handel’s Messiah, there’s that great chorus, “Blessing and honor, glory and power be unto Him, be unto Him….”
But glory can also convey what it means for humans to be in the utter, holy presence of God: The face of Moses was never the same after he beheld the glory of God on Sinai. In the New Testament, this glory includes Christ, as in Luke’s Transfiguration story when Jesus appeared in all his glory with Moses and Elijah. And in the Epistles, the community of the church and the communion of saints participate in the eschatological glory of God through the Risen Christ. Paul captured this by repeating the Christ Hymn in Philippians 2, a passage already associated by the young church with the Second Coming:
9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, 10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
We have been so steeped in this glorious understanding of glory that we don’t know how unusual it was for the Bible to speak of it this way. For the word glory in ancient secular usage meant something that was actually rather drab by comparison — glory simply meant one’s opinion, or reputation. Someone’s so-called glory was little more than what you thought of them. But in the Bible, the word glory is transformed by its usage to refer almost entirely to God. In fact, the great Old Testament scholar, Gerhard von Rad, said that glory has a meaning that is exclusive to the Bible. He said that glory is above all about the Being of God — God’s unique reputation — and about the participation of the Christian community in the splendor of God’s own self through Christ.
But then we come to this passage in II Peter, where all this rich history and meaning is compressed into the word glory, and then it is paired with the word excellence — άρετή in Greek. I said before this is an odd coupling of words. For this word, άρετή, was the very term that many schools of Greek philosophy used to express the very core of life’s purpose. As you know, the great Greek philosophers attempted to answer such basic questions as: What is a good life? What is happiness? What virtues must one practice to live a good life? When Aristotle described the cardinal virtues in his famous Nicomachean Ethics— these virtues are άρετή — the way to moral excellence, he used the same word we find in II Peter. Correspondingly, the great Roman Stoic writers — Epictetus, Cicero, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius — when they spoke about happiness as the central aim of human life, they did not mean bodily comfort as did the Epicureans. Happiness is only found through goodness, godliness, and moral excellence— again, the word they used to describe this was our term, άρετή.
“His divine power has granted us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence ….”
This unique pairing of words — the only time they are used together in the Scriptures — was not fluke or a casual choice. They were deliberately placed alongside each other to tell the readers of Peter’s letter, and us today, something particular about excellence in the Christian life — and therefore something singular about pastoral excellence.
If glory is about participation in God’s very Being, then to be called into “his own glory and excellence” is to say that excellence as a Christian is not about winning as the signs say; it isn’t about profit in the way Tom Peters writes; and it isn’t about success. No, it is about Glory and excellence. We are called by God to participate in the excellence of God’s own glory. Our moral excellence is not an achievement or an award, but a gift. And what’s true for all Christians is no less true for the pastoral leaders of God’s church: sustaining pastoral excellence means we are called by God — as pastors, as leaders in the church, as shapers of a Christian way of life in congregations — to participate in the excellence of God’s own glory, God’s splendor and radiance, God’s own love and life-giving grace. That’s what we mean by pastoral excellence!
But let’s read on about what II Peter has to say:
5 For this very reason make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, 6 and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, 7 and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. 8 For if these things are yours and abound, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 For whoever lacks these things is blind and shortsighted and has forgotten that he was cleansed from his old sins. 10 Therefore, brethren, be the more zealous to confirm your call and election, for if you do this you will never fall; 11 so there will be richly provided for you an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
In studying this passage, I discovered a striking parallel. One of the things I have admired about the Evangelical Covenant’s Sustaining Pastoral Excellence project is how it has been structured around the key components of Character, Competence, and Constancy. In fact, these three components are almost exactly how this passage from II Peter is structured.
Character
I mentioned that the Greek word άρετή has a long and illustrious history. Part of this is because it carries with it meanings such as “moral excellence” and “virtue.” In fact, when Aristotle listed the virtues he believed were necessary for a good life and character, the ones that form the structure of his famous Ethics —what he called the άρετή — he listed courage, temperance, magnificence, patience, friendship, and righteousness. Now hear again II Peter — just after the “glory and excellence” verse we’ve been discussing:
5 For this very reason make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, 6 and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, 7 and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love.
Faith, virtue, knowledge, self-control, steadfastness, godliness, brotherly affection — in Greek, φιλαδελφια — and finally love, άγάπη. Even though it sounds so much like Aristotle, it also sounds like a pretty good list of what it takes to form Christian Character. After all, Thomas Aquinas called Aristotle “that most Christian of philosophers…”
Competence
Let's continue with the next verses of II Peter:
8 For if these things are yours and abound, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 For whoever lacks these things is blind and shortsighted and has forgotten that he was cleansed from his old sins.
“That you may not be ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of Jesus Christ…” This is a particularly striking phrase to me, given what I have elsewhere called the mediocrity of the church masquerading as faithfulness.
It is a perpetual danger for limited humans who believe in a God of grace and forgiveness to let too much mediocrity creep into our thinking, thus baptizing our laziness and failure of nerve with a thin veneer of piety. This is exactly what Bonhoeffer meant by cheap grace.
But the writer of Peter has already set forth for us the alternative: Competence. Not confidence in our own ability; not faith in our own virtue; competence not in a worldly sense of winning, making profit, or whatever the world considers to be success.
No. Character and Competence come from the excellence of participating in God’s glory! Faith, virtue, knowledge, self-control, steadfastness, godliness, brotherly affection, love — these are the marks of excellence to which we are called by God’s glory. Competence, Character — pastoral excellence — are nothing if they are not connected to God’s glory, the very Being of God’s own self, revealed in Jesus Christ.
But just as there can be no excellence as a Christian apart from participating in God’s glory, there can be no pastoral excellence apart from a set of communities that surround a pastor in his or her work.
At Lilly Endowment we have had continuous conversations with partners such as the Pulpit & Pew Project at Duke Divinity School, and others, about pastoral excellence and how we might support what we are beginning to call a “well-lived pastoral life.” Our growing conception of the well-lived pastoral life includes not only clergy health, but issues of clergy compensation, access of clergy and their families to education, cultural activities, travel, and leisure, time for spiritual growth and true friendships. But central to this growing understanding about what is needed for pastors to be truly excellent is belonging to a set of what we are calling “communities of shared competence practice.”
Belonging, or membership — as poet and writer Wendell Berry understands the term — in a community of shared competent practice means that excellence can not be sustained in isolation. It takes membership, deep belonging, in a community that shares a practice in order for us to be shaped and formed into the competencies of that practice. It must be a community that tries to engage continuously in a practice, but is also not totally satisfied with itself in that practice. Therefore a community of practice is constantly seeking greater and greater competence. It does so by trial and error. Experiments that sometimes fail and sometimes succeed, but from which we learn and change. A community of shared competent practice builds on the riches of the past, but is always growing, learning, and improving its practices.
Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the greatest preachers of the 20th Century. But part of the reason he was such a superb preacher was that be belonged to a long tradition in the Black Church that was a community focused on the shared competent practice of preaching. Richard Lischer’s marvelous book, The Preacher King, tells some of this story. Martin Jr. sat at the feet of one of the greatest preachers of the generation in front of him — his own father, Martin Luther King, Sr. But with others who were studying for ministry at Morehouse College, he was mentored by people like President Benjamin Mays. In his work toward becoming a licensed preacher in the Baptist Church, in his seminary training and beyond, King was part of a large group of pastors who listened to each other preach. They imitated and critiqued each other. They experimented with new techniques, all while holding fast to the tried and true. But more than all that, they were connected to the generations before them who were themselves part of a community of shared practice around preaching.
For pastors to be truly excellent, they need to belong to several “communities of shared competent practice.” So far we have identified four such communities, though perhaps there are more:
- “A Company of Pastors, ” as Calvin sometimes called it — a body of pastors who share competence in their work and who are peers and resources to one another. This includes being part of a staff, relationships with mentors, peer groups, study and lectionary groups. Pastors who care enough about each other and about the common competence of their craft to offer critique as well as affirmation to one another.
- “The Congregation, ” the place where one is part of a community that is practicing a Christian Way of Life. A well-lived pastoral life — true competence in pastoral excellence — can best take place within a congregation that nurtures and shapes practices of a well-lived Christian life for all.
- “The Family.” Not just “married with children” — though we certainly don't exclude that — but rather one's biological family or an “intentional family, ” with whom to share life, its joys and sorrows, its labor and its leisure.
- “The Public/Civic/Cultural.” Finally, well-lived pastoral lives must take place within the sphere of the larger context in which pastors live and minister.
Among the chief lessons we’ve learned in the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence program is that ministry is always in community. Pastors keep telling us that once they experienced the fellowship, friendship, the spiritual direction of their SPE groups they cannot now conceive of doing ministry alone.
But the key here is what the Evangelical Covenant already knew — that pastors must belong to communities of shared competent practice. Again in the words of II Peter: “For if these things are yours and abound, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.” In other words, participating in the excellence of God’s glory helps keep us competent.
Constancy
Character, Competence, and finally, Constancy . Our section of II Peter concludes:
“Therefore, brother and sisters, be the more zealous to confirm your call and election, for if you do this you will never fall; so there will be richly provided for you an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”
Glory and excellence.
Character and communities of shared competent practice.
What does this all add up to? Let me suggest that it adds up to thinking about pastoral excellence as a way of life. Jesus said he came that we might have life. Not just life, but abundant life. It is one of the ironies of our age that we seek to stuff ourselves so full of life’s good things that we are threatened with missing the point of life altogether. And to this pitfall pastors are particularly vulnerable. We can become so deadly busy doing the good work of saving the souls of others that we can lose our own souls in the process. We must sustain a way of life that truly gives life rather than take it away. Sustaining is as important as excellence.
I hope you already know about the work on the Christian Practices being done by Dorothy Bass and a host of others around the country. The book Practicing Our Faith is a good place to start if you don’t know this increasing body of work and books. In the words of my colleague, Craig Dykstra:
Christian practices are not activities we do to make something spiritual happen in our lives. Nor are they duties we undertake to be obedient to God. Rather, they are patterns of communal action that create openings in our lives where the grace, mercy, and presence of God may be made known to us. They are places where the power of God is experienced. In the end, these are not ultimately our practices but forms of participation in the practice of God.
In other words, Christian practices like hospitality, forgiveness, discernment, testimony, keeping Sabbath and a host of others all add up to a way of life, a Christian way of life. But they must be practiced in constancy, with competence, in community . And when they are so practiced, what can be tangibly perceived is a community of shared competence in practicing a Christian way of life.
In the great book on theology and worship, Doxology, Geoffrey Wainwright writes that “All of the Christian life is compressed in the worship of the church.” All that we do — our relationship with God and with one another, our sense of belonging to a true community of faith that partakes of Christian practices — all this adds up to a Christian way of life. Worship represents —is— all of that. So as we commune together this evening, we do so recalling the passage about character, competence, and constancy that we’ve been considering:
3 His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, 4 by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, that through these you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion, and become partakers of the divine nature. 5 For this very reason make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, 6 and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, 7 and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love.
Amen.
John Wimmer is program director in the religion division of Lilly Endowment Inc.
