Pastoral work that is seldom seen

Most pastors are very busy people with a lot of responsibilities.  If you ask most Christians what their pastors do you will hear that they preach, teach, visit people, and handle the administrative tasks required by the church.  These are the things that people most often see pastors doing, and these are the things by which most pastors are evaluated.  When I have conversations with people unhappy with their pastor the usual complaints I hear are that the pastor is not a good preacher or that he or she doesn't visit people, or that they are unorganized and the church is not being well-managed.  The interesting thing about each of these tasks is that once a person has been in ministry for even a short period of time he or she can do a decent job in each of them without any reliance on God.

Eugene Peterson makes this point in his book Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity.  He refers to the tasks I mentioned above, with the exception of visitation, as the visible lines of ministry, but he goes on to say that these lines must be connected to the proper angle or they lose the God-given shape they should have.  Those angles are prayer, Scripture reading, and spiritual direction.  If the angles are given their proper place, the lines of ministry will fall into place, but if the angles are ignored we will eventually no longer have pastoral ministry.  We may have a professional ministry, but we won't enjoy a pastoral ministry.

Professional ministers can meet people's expectations of what a minister should be, but that often leaves us feeling like something is lacking.  Peterson writes, "We can impersonate a pastor without being a pastor.  The problem, though, is that while we can get by with it in our communities, often with applause, we can't get by with it within ourselves."

I can recall times during my pastoral ministry when I felt like RoboPastor.  Dial my phone number and I will appear in your hospital room.  Punch a button and out pops a sermon.  It didn't take long to find out what made my congregation happy and how to produce that.  But, those times of ministry were never satisfying.  I may have been meeting the expectations of the congregation, but deep within myself I knew I was not meeting my expectations of what a pastor should be.  I was also not meeting God's.  Those times always felt empty.  Even before reading Peterson's book, the way I got out of those empty times of ministry was to return to the angles: prayer, Scripture reading, and spiritual direction.

But, to set aside time for such things is not easy for many of us.  People want us to be involved in their lives.  Much of the time we hear it as that they need us involved in their lives, and many pastors need to be needed.  When the phone rings we are too quick to run right over to someone's house because they need us.  It keeps us visible before the congregation and often results in appreciation from the one who called, and who doesn't want to be visible and appreciated?

However, if the time we spend with our parishioners is to have any real value it will come after we've worked the angles.  We will have spent time in prayer, in reading the Scriptures, and in spiritual direction, and then when we minister to others we will do so with the ability to offer them something solid and lasting.  Otherwise, we will, to use another of Peterson's terms, be putting plastic flowers in people's lives.

The thing I have to remind myself, and what I want you to remember, is that God called us to be something before he called us to do something.  We are called to be disciples.  We are called to be growing in our faith.  Our best doing will come out of our being, but if we are not working the angles it won't be long before we really have nothing left to give others except our professionalism.