Who would want to be a pastor these days? We see publicized pastoral malpractice and abuse, religious decline, growing demands upon clergy, and vitriolic division all around us. Studies show increasing pressures on ordained ministers related to burnout, congregational criticism, social isolation, financial strain, diminishing respect for church ministry, overall low vocational satisfaction, and increased risk of anxiety and depression. With these challenges, many clergy feel disillusioned and desire a change in vocation. While some religious groups still hold ordination in high regard, it seems that for many in secularizing western societies, pastoral and parish ministry retains less of the appeal it once offered.
I live in St. Andrews, a coastal village filled with young, aspiring, cosmopolitan students for nine months each year. They come to study at Scotland’s oldest university. In recent years, our church noticed a surprising trend. In the past, we made a point to teach that ordained ministry is no more valuable than other vocations. Following Luther’s example, we proclaimed that God is every bit as much at work in the vocation of the milkmaid—or investment banker—as through ordained clergy. I still believe this, but we made a pastoral miscalculation.
Prior, pietistic generations needed to hear that all of life, even the portions that seem “secular,” is a theater wherein the glory of God is displayed. But the ambitious young people I meet now are all too aware. Those keen on influence enter into politics. Those passionate about activism enter the nonprofit sector. Those aiming to transform lives enter therapeutic practice. Those who want a clear connection between their faith and work pursue medicine. Year after year, very few graduates from our privileged context pursue ordained ministry.
Upon reflection, this isn’t surprising. Among all the reasons we have noted for the decline in respect and appeal of pastoral ministry, we might add one more: We have forgotten what pastoral ministry actually is. Yes, we have seen people with titles such as minister, vicar, priest, or reverend performing pastoral and liturgical functions, but many of us have lost a sense of what a minister uniquely does in distinction from others. We might have firmer views regarding what ministers should not do. Common statements include: Ministers aren’t trained counselors or therapists. They aren’t academics who should lecture regarding scholarly consensus. They should not fancy themselves political policy experts. And if they do speak on matters of public life, they must do so in a manner that confirms rather than challenges our political views.
Given all we expect a minister not to do, what is a pastor uniquely—or essentially—qualified to do? What separates a minister from a biblical scholar, therapist, spiritual director, or any other Christian called to a life that witnesses to God?
A pastor is ordained to the ministry of Word and sacrament. This somewhat antiquated and potentially confusing phrase cannot be avoided if we want to explain the spiritual—and therefore theological—essence of ordained ministry. Ministry shouldn’t be defined pragmatically, as if a pastor were merely a hyperproductive Christian, missional entrepreneur, purveyor of social care, or motivational speaker. Yet a minister’s role isn’t limited only to presiding at the Lord’s Table or preaching sermons. Being ordained to the ministry of Word and sacrament means serving as a guardian of the church’s very existence.
For traditions descending from the Reformation, the church is a creature of the Word. As Karl Barth says, it’s the “crater” formed by the explosive arrival of God’s grace in Jesus. The church consists of those who, touched by God’s gracious acts in Christ and the Spirit, live as redeemed pilgrims and witnesses to a coming city where all things are made new (Rev. 21:5). That’s what the church is: God’s sign set in the midst of this “sad world,” as the Heidelberg Catechism says, that “everything sad might come untrue,” as Samwise Gamgee says. A line of persons, stretching back to the apostles, have been set apart by God—or “called”—to safeguard this grace which is the church’s lifeblood.
These guardians are not lords but servants, lovingly keeping the church true to her task of being a place where the grace of God is offered and received in a broken world. This is the heart of the ministry of Word and sacrament, because Word and sacrament are where God graciously gives himself to a needy world.
There are few better exemplifications of the unique essence of pastoral ministry than the end of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. The prodigal, Jack Boughton, is leaving town as his father is dying. No one among Jack’s family or friends can comprehend this insensitive act of abandonment, except his father’s friend and fellow minister, Ames. Why can Ames, who throughout the story disapproves of Jack the most, possess this capacity for empathy? Jack and his father cannot seem to understand one another despite their best efforts. Yet Ames, at the end, understands that Jack’s puzzling departure is not an act of moral insanity but of duty to a new family of his own, shrouded in scandal and secrecy. Ames also possesses insight into the heart of Jack’s father. He perhaps alone understands that if Jack’s dying father could, he
would abandon all those handsome children of his, mild and confident as they are, and follow after that one son whom he has never known, whom he has favored as one does a wound, and he would protect him as a father cannot, defend him with a strength he does not have, sustain him with a bounty beyond any resource he could ever dream of having. If Boughton could be himself, he would utterly pardon every transgression, past, present and to come.
How does Ames know all this? Not because of an abundance of virtue, but because Ames doesn’t just know about the people in this family conflict—he truly knows them.
The minister John Ames, for all his faults, is called to something a therapist is not just discouraged but forbidden to do. He must perform a duty no doctor or social worker is allowed to do according to the rules of their profession, though countless films invariably show them doing precisely this. A pastor must be willing to say with the apostles: “We were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well” (1 Thess. 2:8).
If ministers of Word and sacrament have a unique call to keep the church faithful to the divine grace which is its very essence, then part of the minister’s calling is to keep the Father’s heart for prodigals central to church life. Yet the tools ministers employ in this task do not allow them to serve from a distance, as if they were only shepherds and not also among the sheep under the care of the One who is “the great Shepherd” (Heb. 13:20).
Living among people and having the courage and discernment to insist—sometimes to the point of offense—that Christ’s grace remains central over-and-against all the subtle ways we displace it requires opening one’s home, heart, and very life to others. Only by sharing one’s very self can a minister, like Ames, truly “understand” one’s fellows.
It has always been this way. Pastoral ministry involves many days when nearly anything else sounds better than what Eugene H. Peterson calls “long obedience in the same direction.” Yet pastors must keep going, hoping they might be an Ambrose to some young Augustine.
Augustine, on his torturous pilgrimage to faith says that he “was led to him by you, unaware that through him, in full awareness, I might be led to you.” What made the bishop Ambrose an essential way station on Augustine’s restless passage to faith? It was not his rhetorical finesse or academic rigor. No, as Augustine says: “I began to like him, at first indeed not as a teacher of the truth, for I had absolutely no confidence in your Church, but as a human being who was kind to me.” Ambrose shared himself with Augustine, which made what he preached worth attending to.
This is what ministers offer: The grace of God distilled through the “crooked timber” of our all-too-human lives. Only when we have shared our very selves is there any plausibility to our sharing of Word and sacrament.
At the end of Gilead, Ames meets Jack on his sad journey out of town to his secret family, seemingly abandoning his dying father. In a moment of inexplicable, uncharacteristic honesty, Jack takes up the role of parishioner to pastor. He does something our hearts long to do with a minister, even in a secular age: Jack confesses.
He confesses that despite all his legitimate justifications and rationalizations, he cannot help feeling, “I’m doing the worst possible thing again.” Ames does the one thing only a pastor can do in response to such a confession. He offers this prodigal God’s blessing. Jack takes off his hat, falls to a knee in the street, and as Ames places his hand on Jack’s head, he “did bless him to the limit of [his] powers,” pronouncing the Aaronic blessing: “The Lord bless thee and keep thee.” Ames concludes: “I’d have gone through seminary and ordination and all the years intervening for that one moment … This is why we have lived this life!”
While I suspect most ministers sometimes wish they could do something else, I cannot deny that when my eyes fall upon an old saint, whose loss and heartache I know too well, and those familiar words roll off my tongue—”the body of Christ given for you”—I cannot help but feel, at least for a moment: “This is why I have lived this life.”
Jared Michelson is a Presbyterian minister and a research fellow in the divinity school at the University of St Andrews (Scotland).
