More thoughts about being the pastor...

This may be something like a broken record - or a CD with a scratch on it - because I want to share a few more evolving thoughts about being a pastor in the 21st century.  Like Eugene Peterson has pointed out over and again, the contemporary American church has become enslaved to the market place as both our dominant conceptual metaphor as well as our key for organizing ministry. Gone is the body of Christ in St. Paul's writings - and don't even mention the bride of Christ from St. John! No, we are a group of consumers now looking for spiritual commodities (whatever that really means?!?)

Mostly that translates into a church committed to entertainment - bread and circus the Romans used to call it - where we are distracted for an hour or so with vaguely heavenly music and up-lifting and relevant words (with some drama and humor thrown into the mix, too.)  The current formula for success for pastors throughout the USA is to:  a) abandon all tradition; b) create a positive, soft-rock environment; and c) share self-help strategies that pay lip service to Jesus.  And so the church has become a product to be purchased and consumed rather than a community seeking the sacred presence of God made flesh in Jesus Christ. 

That means pastors had better understand that we are now in competition with all the other local and media driven "religious franchises" for consumers:  the pastor is now both entrepreneur and CEO rather than one who supports the cure of our soul.  This not only isolates pastors from their colleagues, but limits the church to an institution to be managed. Peterson puts it like this:

In "running" the church, I seize the initiative. I take charge. I take responsibility for motivation and recruitment, for showing the way, for getting things started. If I don't, things drift. I am aware of the tendency to apathy, the human susceptibility to indolence so I use my leadership position to counter it.

By contrast, the cure of souls is a cultivated awareness that God has already seized the initiative. The traditional doctrine defining this truth is provenience: God everywhere and always seizing the initiative. God gets things going. The Lord had and continues to have the first word. Provenience is the conviction that God has been working diligently, redemptively and strategically well before I appeared on the scene, before I was aware there was even something her for me to do.

Reclaiming the "cure of the souls" model in our consumerist culture is liberating.  Not only does it allow me to "rest" in the trust that Christ Jesus promised (Matthew 11: 28-30) - for I know that God is in control so I don't have to be - it gives me permission to listen and wait. Peterson says, "Running-the-church questions are: what do we do? How can we get things going again? While cure-of-the-souls questions are: what has God been doing here? What traces of grace can I discern in this life? What history of love can I read in this group? What has God set in motion that I can get in on?"

Do you sense the importance of this distinction?  I first began to see this at work in our church band.  I used to think it was all dependent on me - picking the songs, running the rehearsal, pushing for excellence, getting the equipment right, fighting battles with the old guard, blah, blah, blah - but not so much any more.  Sure, I have to send out reminders and work to coordinate our music with the themes of the year and the biblical texts, but watching and waiting for the right band members to show up - and trusting the Spirit of the Lord within and among us all - has changed everything. 

For example, we're going to play this Saturday night at a CROP Walk Rally to End Hunger. Two other bands will be sharing the bill - and once I found out who among us could be present I asked:  What songs do you sense we should share?  A few of us thought Collective Soul's "Shine" would work - a few others shouted out Tom Waits' "Come On Up to the House" - we played around with a few other until one of the quieter members suggested, "Wouldn't it be fun to do the feminist setting of the 23rd Psalm we did a few weeks back? It would be such a contrast!"

And now we have a GREAT set-list - maybe we'll try another Clapton suggestion tonight, too - all built by listening and trusting.  Such is the approach I've been trying to take with programming and worship themes over the past four years.  I keep praying and preaching and when I think I sense the urging of the Spirit here or there, I bring others together and we listen and test it together.  If it rights true, then we make it happen together - like raising funds for women's education in Afghanistan or bringing songs of peace to Turkey.  If not, then we let an idea rest for another time.

My job as pastor is NOT to solve problems.  It is not to initiate new programs or fix something that is broken.  And it certainly has nothing to do with deepening our addiction as consumers. No, the job of the pastor has to do with listening and waiting for God's Spirit:

Life is not so much a problem to be solves as a mystery to be explored... life is not something we manage to hammer together and keep in repair by our own wits; it is an unfathomable gift. We are immersed in mysteries: incredible love, confounding evil, the creation, the cross, God.... If pastors become accomplices (with the culture) in treating every child as a problem to be figured out, every spouse as a problem to be dealt with, every clash of wills in choir or committee as a problem to be adjudicated, we abdicate our most important work, which is directing worship in the traffic, discovering the presence of the cross in the paradoxes and the chaos between Sundays, 'calling attention to the splendor in the ordinary" and, most of all, teaching a life of prayer to our friends and companion in the pilgrimage.

(For more go to: http://www.churchleaders.com/pastors/pastor-how-to/153576-eugene-peterson-the-jesus-way-vs-the-american-way.html)

And now I'm off to band practice... I can't wait!