Pastor: The Theology and Practice of Ordained Ministry

340 Pages·2002·1.32 MB·English

by  William H. Willimon

PASTOR
The Theology and Practice of Ordained Ministry
William H. Willimon
Abingdon Press
Nashville
Copyright Information
To
Patricia Parker Willimon
Companion in Ministry
Acknowledgments
My thanks to David Wood and the Louisville Institute for a generous grant that
enabled me to bring this work to completion and to convene a group of
distinguished colleagues in ministry to offer me critique and correction as this
work was in progress. Martin Copenhaver, Sam Lloyd, Peter Marty, David
Byrum, Nicholas Hood, Frank Brosend, Michael Turner, Tripp York, David
Hansen, David Dragseth, Kathryn Bannister, Wes Avram, Jim Antal, Allan Poole,
Nancy Sehested, John Cook, Thomas Frank, C. G. Newsome, Martha Forrest,
William Trexler, Robert Ratcliff, Nancy DeVries, Charlene Kammerer, Kelly Clem,
and Luonne Rouse participated in two national convocations on the manuscript. I
also owe a debt of thanks to my faculty colleages at Duke Divinity School:
Gregory Jones, Jackson Carroll, Willie Jennings, Richard Heitzenrater, Albert
Mosley, Keith Meador, Nancy Ferree Clark, and Jenny Copeland. I am especially
indebted to my able graduate assistant, Jason Byassee, for his extensive help in
the research and writing of this book.
Introduction
Take a Christian, a follower of Jesus by virtue of baptism. Put a stole around the
neck of this Christian and you are on your way to making a pastor. This stole,
once the necktie of Roman nobility, becomes now, in the hands of the church, a
sign that reminds of the yoke put around the necks of oxen or other beasts of
burden. Of course, Jesus reassured us that his yoke was easy and his burden
light (Matt. 11:28-30). Still, by this world’s standards, having a yoke hung around
your neck is an odd way to begin a job.
Before the altar of God, at the bedside of the sick, in conversation with troubled
souls, befuddled before the biblical text, there is the pastor. Standing in that
fateful intersection between God’s people and God, at that risky transaction
between Christ and his Body, the church, stands the priest. It is no small thing to
be in mediation between God and humanity, to offer the gifts of God’s people, to
intercede for the suffering of the world in prayer, rightly to divide the Word of
God. With trembling and with joy, the pastor works that fateful space between
here and the throne of God. This yoke, while not always as easy as Jesus
implies, is often quite joyful. It is a joyful thing to be a pastor, to have one’s life
drawn toward dealings that are divine; to bear burdens that are, while not always
light, at least more significant than those that the world tries to lay upon our
backs. It is a joy to be expended in some vocation that is greater than one’s self.
This book is the fruit of my now thirty years of pastoral ministry and almost as
many years preparing people for that ministry in seminary teaching. This is my
loving, grateful, but not uncritical meditation upon the ministry of the ordained.
For experienced pastors, I hope that this will be a remembrance of the origins, a
recalling to the blessings and the high adventure of ministry. For those preparing
to be pastors, may this be a sort of textbook, a kind of manual that will guide in
their preparation. For all, I pray that this book will be part of what Paul might call
“a ministry of encouragement” (Rom. 15:5; 1 Thess. 5:11).
The pastoral ministry is a gift of God to the church. It is not an easy vocation, this
calling full of peril. Yet it is also a great gift to have one’s life caught up in such a
pilgrimage. This book hopes to do justice both to the difficulties and to the joys of
ministry.
We begin with investigation of who pastors are, as a means of understanding
what pastors do. At its best the church believes that the most secure basis for the
pastoral ministry is theological rather than personal or social. It all begins in the
vocation of God and the church, and ends there too. Therefore this book begins
with theology and with history, in the confidence that if pastors know whose they
are, where they come from, and why they are here, they will better know what to
do, here, now.
Because of its nature, pastoral identity is never secure. In every age the church
must ask, What are pastors for? Reflecting upon an earlier crisis of ministerial
identity, H. Richard Niebuhr wrote:
Whenever in Christian history there has been a definite, intelligible
conception of the ministry, four things at least were known about the
office: what its chief work was and what was the chief purpose of all its
functions; what constituted a call to the ministry; what was the source of
the minister’s authority; and whom the minister served.1
This book attempts to raise and to answer each of Niebuhr’s criteria, though in a
somewhat different way from Niebuhr. We shall conduct our reflection upon the
pastoral ministry in tandem with a reading of the Acts of the Apostles, which I
interpret as an early Christian narrative of the challenges of church leadership.
There will be “Interludes”, short reflections upon selected topics of the pastoral
ministry. There will also be periodic celebrations of the witness of those who
have preceded us in this vocation.
Here, at the beginning, are my guiding assumptions for this exploration of
Christian ministry:
1. Ministry is an act of God. Service, self-giving love, is God’s idea before it is
ours. Ministry is one aspect of God’s determination to have a human family, then
to maintain that family into eternity. The Scriptures bear eloquent testimony: God
will have a family of priests, a holy nation that shall be a blessing to all the
nations, no matter what it costs God to get it.
It is of the nature of the Trinity to be creative, communicative, to evoke a world
out of nothing, a family out of nobodies. One thinks of how Luke begins the story
of Jesus, not with Jesus, but with John the Baptist, who comes to “prepare the
way of the Lord” (Luke 3:4). “Get ready, God is coming!” is John’s laconic
message. To those who took comfort in the securities of the old order, saying,
“We have Abraham as our ancestor” (Luke 3:8), “My family founded this church”,
“I tithe”, John warned, “God is able from these stones to raise up children to
Abraham.” God will have a family, one way or another. If God must raise up a
family out of the stones in the Jordan River, God is able.
God had done it before. From those as old and unfutured as stones, Sarah and
Abraham, God announced, “Look toward heaven and count the stars. . . . So
shall your descendants be” (Gen. 15:5). From out of nothing, God promises a
people. This is the way God gets a family, through promise, vocation. This is the
way, you will recall, God got a world, through nothing more than a word; “Let
there be light” (Gen. 1:3), and there was. Other gods get what they want through
war, or procreation, or violence. This God works through the Word, in call, by
vocation.
And because [God] loved your ancestors, [God] chose their
descendants after them. (Deut. 4:37)

It was not because you were more numerous than any other people that
the LORD set [the Lord’s] heart on you and chose you—for you were the
fewest of all peoples. It was because the LORD loved you and kept the
oath that [the Lord] swore to your ancestors. (Deut. 7:7-8)

You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and
bear fruit, fruit that will last. (John 15:16a)
Divine creativity is the basis for both the church and its leaders. Thus one story of
vocation has been paradigmatic for Christians: Luke’s account of the call of Saul
in Acts 9. Saul, the very one who breathed “threats and murder against the
disciples of the Lord” (9:1) is knocked down on the road to Damascus, blinded by
light, must be led by the hand (9:1-9), and for three days is entombed as one
who can neither eat nor drink.
“Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” asks the voice (9:4). Saul has been
persecuting the church, not Jesus. Yet there seems to be such an intimate
connection between the risen Christ and the church that an injury against one is
an insult to the other. Saul’s is a story of conversion and vocation. In biblical
narratives of vocation, usually someone’s name is called at least twice, for the
call of God is rarely self-evident. In a world determined to listen to other voices,
God must get our attention: “Saul, Saul . . . ”
The story turns to a disciple named Ananias (9:10-17). He is called by God to go
to Straight Street and there to greet one named Saul. “Did you say ‘Saul’? Not
the same murdering persecutor who has ravaged the church?”
The voice says to Ananias, “Go!”
So here we have two call stories in succession. The Lord explains to Ananias the
rationale for going to this church enemy number one:
“Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before
Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel” (9:15). Saul has been called
for a mission. Then God says, “I myself will show him how much he must suffer
for the sake of my name” (9:16).
Those who think the call of God is for privilege or prestige, think again. Saul may
think that he knows suffering. But no, he is called for suffering that was
previously unknown to him, for it is suffering in service to the crucified Christ
(9:16).
These two vocation stories from Acts 9 are thick with meaning for those of us
who are called to ordained leadership. Let us simply say, here at the beginning,
that ministry is at the Creator’s initiative, God’s evocation, and is strategic for the
way God intends to win back what belongs to God. Some have suggested that
Acts should more aptly be named “Acts of the Holy Spirit.” Thus, when Charles
Williams wrote his classic history of the church, he named it Descent of the
Dove.2
This is all meant to remind us that ministry is not a profession. It is a vocation.
One could not pay pastors for what is routinely expected of them. One must be
called in order to do it.3 Although pastors may struggle with exactly what it
means to be called by God to lead a church, they must have some sense that
they are in ministry because God wants them to be. Time and again, amid the
challenges of the pastoral ministry, this divine, more-than-subjective
authorization is a major means of pastoral perseverance. To know that our
ministry is first and finally validated not by our feelings, or even by the judgments
of the bishop, but by God; this is great grace. To assert that, in our ministry, we
are representatives of something more significant than the denomination, that we
are accountable to some criterion of judgment higher than our personal opinion;
this is empowerment. To believe that we are in ministry as God’s idea, rather
than our own sense of occupational advancement; this is the submission, the
yoking that is the source of true freedom (2 Cor. 3:17). Time and again, the main
thing that keeps our ministry specifically Christian is to be able to assert with
conviction, “We must obey God rather than any human authority” (Acts 5:29).
We fear loss of control. We have anxiety over what life is like to be accountable
to someone other than ourselves. It is somewhat frightening to construe our lives
in such a theonomous cast, to have our lives lived in constant reference to the
purposes of God. But it is also invigorating to receive the freedom and the
dissonance of living the called life in a world where too many people are
answerable to nothing more than their own ill-formed desires.
Sometimes the call comes early. Jeremiah felt it from his time in the womb
(“Before I formed you in the womb . . . before you were born” [Jer. 1:5]).
Sometimes it comes late as with Abram and Sarai (Gen. 17). Whenever the call
comes, in saying yes to the summons we begin to march to the beat of a different
drum, to the “drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling.”4 We yield to the
adventure of a life free of the ideology of personal autonomy that so enslaves this
culture.5 We are owned, commandeered for God,6 yoked to a manner of service
wherein is perfect freedom.
2. Ministry is an act of the church. The Acts of the Apostles begins rather
dramatically with the ascension of the risen Christ into heaven (1:6-11). But then
the very next episode is a rather humdrum description of the election of Matthias
as a replacement apostle (1:15-26). Perhaps this ecclesial business meeting
seems anticlimactic after so wonderful an event. Yet here is testimony that there
is no church without leadership. From the first, leaders were needed in order for
the church to be faithful to its divine vocation to be “my witnesses in Jerusalem,
in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (1:8).
Ministry arises from the top down, from the action of God through the Holy Spirit
in calling us. Yet the story of the selection of Matthias also demonstrates that
ministry arises from the bottom up, through the call of God working through the
church.7 As John Calvin noted, God calls, but the church also must call for there
to be leadership in the name of Christ.
At times in the history of the ordained ministry there has been a tendency to
disjoin the pastoral vocation from the community—as if the call to ministry were a
personal possession of the pastor, as if the work of pastors is intelligible apart
from the work of the church that necessitates pastoral work. This is a singular
perversion of the pastoral vocation. The call to be clergy has more in common
with the call of Paul in Acts 9, in which someone is summoned for a specific task
within the church’s mission (“Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to
bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel” [Acts
9:15]), than with the call to Cornelius to be a disciple (Acts 10). Damage is done
to the unique quality of the pastoral vocation when it is conflated with the
vocation of all Christians to follow Jesus. Thus we have those who come to
seminary not because they are called there to train to be pastors, but rather
because they have received a call to be a more thoroughly committed Christian.
Sadly, the church often does such a poor job of fostering the ministry of all
Christians that there is nowhere to take a sense of vocation except to seminary.
This is a judgment upon a church that seems not to know what to do with those
who desire more faithful commitment to their baptism.
All Christians, by virtue of their baptism, are called by God to witness, to teach, to
heal, and to proclaim. All Christians are amateurs so far as their relationship to
God is concerned.8 Yet from the ranks of the baptized, some are called to lead.
As Luther noted, because not every Christian can do all the church’s tasks every
time the church gathers, for the sake of good order the church has found it
helpful to ordain some from among the baptized to witness, to teach, to heal, and
to proclaim to the church on Sunday so that all the baptized may witness, teach,
heal, and proclaim during the rest of the week. Those who are called by God and
the church to lead us in this way are called pastors, priests, ministers. Therefore,
you will note in this book a preference for referring to clergy as “pastors” or
“priests”, rather than simply “ministers”, in order to differentiate between the
ministry of all baptized Christians and pastoral leadership that exists “to equip the
saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ” (Eph. 4:12).
The ordained ministry is a species of a broader genus called Christian. The
pastoral ministry is always a function of what needs to happen in the church in
order for the church to be faithful to its vocation. The Discipline of The United
Methodist Church defines the pastoral vocation as a particular elaboration of the
vocation of all Christians:
Ministry in the Christian church is derived from the ministry of Christ,
who calls all persons to receive God’s gift of salvation and follow in the
way of love and service. The whole church receives and accepts this
call, and all Christians participate in this continuing ministry. Within the
church community, there are persons whose gifts, evidence of God’s
grace, and promise of future usefulness are affirmed by the community,
and who respond to God’s call by offering themselves in leadership as
ordained ministers.9
Sometimes there are candidates for ordination who resist the notion that the
church has a responsibility to examine their call. Their attitude is, “If I really
believe that God has called me into the ministry, what right have you to question
my vocation?”
Although we may rejoice at the personal inner “call” of someone into the ministry,
historically such personal inner calls from Christ have more in common with the
call to the monastic life than to the ancient presbyterate. Pastors are called by
the church for specific communal leadership, therefore the community has a
responsibility to prayerfully examine those who come forward to be considered
for ordination. Those churches in the congregational tradition always celebrate
their rites of ordination within the congregational context—thereby stressing the
communal congregational responsibility within the call to ordained leadership.
During an ecclesiastical ruckus in Milan, young Ambrose, a rapidly rising attorney
in the city, entered the cathedral to observe the fray. During the confused debate,
someone—it was thought to be a little child—shouted, “Ambrose, bishop!” This
refrain was picked up by others who began to chant, “Ambrose, bishop!”
He protested. He was not even baptized. In quick succession, Ambrose was
baptized then ordained a bishop, and went on to become one of the early
church’s most gifted leaders, the teacher of Augustine. God graciously works
through the church, sometimes (as in the case of Ambrose) through the church’s
children, to call people to pastoral ministry.
Martin Luther King Jr., when asked as a new seminarian to write an account of
his vocation into the ministry, admitted that he had felt no dramatic call to
ordination. Rather, his father was a pastor and wanted him to be one too. He
hoped to please his father by his entrance in seminary.
He was a good student, bookish and conscientious. King hoped to teach in
college, perhaps one day to be president of Morehouse College. Biding his time,
he was called to serve a rather forlorn little church in Montgomery, Alabama.10
Shortly after he arrived, an African American woman was ordered off a city bus
because she violated the city’s laws for racial segregation. A meeting was held at
one of the city’s black churches. The crowd that night was confused, angry,
disheartened. No one knew for sure what to do, though all agreed something
ought to be done. Toward the end of the meeting, someone thought it might be
good if the new young preacher in town would speak.
King rose, began hesitatingly, worked into a rhythm; the congregation joined in,
the Spirit descended. Someone said later, “We gathered as a confused crowd;
we left as a movement.” 11
Ordination is a gift of God, to be sure, but a gift of God through the church, for
the church, that the church might be the church of God. One of our greatest
challenges in seminary is to take people—many of whom may have been rather
poorly formed by their home congregations, many of whom have had little
experience in actual congregations—and form them into leaders of
congregations, officials of the church, bearers of the church’s faith rather than
merely of their own.
Elsewhere I have spoken of clergy as “community persons.”12 The clergy are not
a patrician upper crust set over the plebian laity. The essence of the priesthood is
primarily relational (whom it serves) and functional (what it does) more than
ontological (what it is). Clergy arose because of the church’s need for leaders.
The difference between a pastor who visits, preaches, and baptizes, and any
other skilled layperson who performs these same functions is in the pastor’s
“officialness.” The pastor functions at the authorization of the whole church. The
pastor’s acts are “read” by the whole church in a way that the individual
Christian’s are not.
We work within a culture of rugged individualists and fragmented communities.
We are officially schooled in the notion that we are most fully ourselves when we
are liberated, autonomous, on our own. We live under the modern myth that it is
possible, even desirable, to live our lives without external, social determination.
Ironically, that we think it desirable to live our lives without external, social
determination is proof that our lives have been externally, socially determined by
the culture of capitalist consumption. I did not on my own come up with the notion
that I am a sovereign individual who has no greater purpose in life than to live
exclusively for myself. Rather, this culture has formed me to believe that I have
no other purpose in life other than the purpose I myself have chosen. The irony is
that I did not choose the story that I have no purpose in life other than that which
I have chosen.
The issue is not, Shall I be externally determined by some community of
interpretation and authorization? The issue is, Which community will have its way
with my life? Or perhaps more accurately, Will the community that determines,
interprets, and authorizes me be worthy of my life?