Any venture into leadership is hazardous. The long and well-documented Christian tradition confirms this. Leaders are necessary, but woe to those who become leaders. In leadership, possibilities for sin emerge that previously were inaccessible, possibilities exceedingly difficult to detect, for each comes in the form of a virtue. The unwary will embrace immediately a new “opportunity to serve the Lord,” innocent of the reality that they are swallowing bait, which turns, soon or late, into a curse. “Let not many become teachers,” warned James, who knew the perils firsthand.
The temptations we face in the early years of our faith are, if not easily resisted, at least easily recognized. If I kill a man, I know I have done wrong. If I commit adultery, I have the good sense not to advertise it. If I steal, I make diligent effort not to get found out. The so-called lower sins, the sins of the flesh, are obvious.
But the higher sins, the sins of the spirit, are not so easily discerned. Is a certain instance of zeal energetic obedience or human presumption? Is one person’s confidence a holy boldness inspired by the Holy Spirit or merely arrogance instigated by an anxious ego? Is this suddenly prominent preacher with a large following a spiritual descendant of Peter with five thousand repentant converts or Aaron indulging his tens of thousands with religious song and dance around the golden calf?
It is not easy to tell. Deception is nowhere more common than in religion. Wiser generations than ours did not send men and women into this perilous country without a thorough briefing of the hazards and frequent check-ups along the way. Even then shipwreck was frequent enough.
The foolishness of our times is no more apparent than in the naivet with which we grant leadership and the innocence in which we rely on leaders’ sincerity and motives. The religious leader is the most untrustworthy of leaders; in no other station do we have so many opportunities for pride, covetousness, and lust, and with so many excellent disguises to keep such ignobility from being found out and called to account.
Since becoming aware of the dangerous mission on which I and my friends have been sent, I keep a sharp lookout for guidance. I have found the provocative and amusing Book of Jonah a friend in this work.
Jonah’s story is familiar. The first movement shows Jonah disobedient; the second shows him obedient. Yet both times, by God’s reckoning, Jonah fails. He never does get it right. But the lessons of his life fit well the contours of the pastorate.
Buying Passage to Tarshish
When Jonah received his prophetic call to preach in Nineveh, he headed the other direction to Tarshish. Tarshish is Gibraltar, or Spain, or some place in that general direction-the jumping-off place of the world, the gates of adventure.
Jonah’s journey to Tarshish is initiated, ironically, by the word of God. Jonah does not simply ignore the word and stay in Joppa. Nor does he hunker down into his old job, whatever it is, anesthetizing his vocational conscience with familiar routines. He goes. He’s obedient-kind of. Except he chooses the destination.
Ironies abound in the pastoral vocation, and here is another: Jonah uses the command of the Lord to avoid the presence of the Lord. Lest we miss the irony, the phrase Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord occurs twice in one verse.
Why would anyone who has known God’s voice flee from his presence? Because a curious thing can happen to us when we get a taste of God. It happened first in Eden, and it keeps happening. The experience of God-the ecstasy, the wholeness-is accompanied by a temptation to reproduce the experience as God. Then the taste of God becomes a greed to perform like God.
It happens in ministry. I flee the face of God for a world of religion, where I can manipulate people and acquire godlike attributes to myself. The moment I entertain the possibility of glory for myself, I want to blot out the face of the Lord and seek a place where I can develop my power.
Anyone can be so tempted, but pastors have the temptation compounded because we have a constituency with which to act godlike. Unlike other temptations, this one easily escapes detection, passing itself off as a virtue.
If we speak the Word of God long enough and often enough, it takes no great leap to assume the pose of the One who speaks the Word. If the pose is reinforced by the admiring credulity of the people around me, I will continue to flee the presence of the Lord, for that is the one place I would be exposed as a pretender.
Why Tarshish? For one thing, it is a lot more exciting than Nineveh. Nineveh was an ancient site, with layer after layer of ruined and unhappy history. Going to Nineveh to preach was not a coveted assignment for a Hebrew prophet with good references. But Tarshish was something else. Tarshish was adventure, the exotic appeal of the unknown. First Kings 10:22 reports that Solomon’s fleet of Tarshish fetched gold, silver, ivory, monkeys, and peacocks. Scholar C. H. Gordon says that in the popular imagination it became a distant paradise. Shangrila.
Yearning for Shangrila is familiar enough to those of us in ministry. We are called by God to a task and provided a vocation. We respond to the divine initiative, but we quietly decide our preferred destination. We are going to be pastors, but not in Nineveh for heaven’s sake. Let’s try Tarshish. Let’s be religious without having to deal with God.
To all the pastors lined up at the travel agency in Joppa to purchase a ticket to Tarshish, someone needs to say that Tarshish is a lie-that pastoral work is not a glamorous vocation.
Pastoring consists of modest, daily, assigned work. It is like farm work, involving routines similar to cleaning out barns, mucking out stalls, spreading manure, pulling weeds. This is not, any of it, bad work in itself, but if we expect to ride a glistening black stallion in daily parades and return to the barn where a lackey grooms our steed for us, we will end up severely disappointed and resentful.
Much in pastoral work is glorious, but the congregation, as such, is not glorious. The congregation is like Nineveh: a site for hard work without a great deal of hope for success, at least not as I want it measured. But somebody has to do it, to be a faithful representative of the Word of God in the daily work and play, virtue and sin, of a congregation.
People who glamorize congregations do us grave disservice. We hear tales of glitzy, enthusiastic churches and wonder what in the world we are doing wrong. Why don’t our people turn out that way under our preaching?
On close examination, though, it turns out there are no wonderful congregations. Hang around long enough and, sure enough, there are gossips who won’t shut up, furnaces that malfunction, sermons that misfire, disciples who quit, choirs that go flat-and worse. Every congregation is a congregation of sinners. And if that weren’t bad enough, each has a sinner for a pastor.
Yes, in a congregation there are moments of splendor. Many and frequent. But there also is squalor. Why deny it? Every honest pastor is deeply aware of the slum conditions in the congregation-the unending tasks of clearing out garbage, finding space for people to breathe, and getting them adequate nourishment-and ventures into the streets day and night, risking life and health in acts of faith and love.
We ministers experience this week after week, year after year. These are the identical conditions Moses faced at the foot of Sinai, and Jeremiah in the streets of Jerusalem. Paul faced them in the lecherous pews at Corinth, and John among the bruised reeds in Thyatira.
Some propagandists in the land are lying to us about what congregations can be. They are lying for money. They want to make us discontent with what we are doing, so we will buy a solution from them that, they promise, will restore virility to our impotent congregations. The profit-taking among those marketing these spiritual monkey-glands suggests that pastoral gullibility in these matters is endless. Pastors, faced with the failure of these purchased procedures, typically blame the congregation and leave it for another.
The Devil, who is behind this smiling and lacquered mischief, so easily makes us discontent with our work that we throw up our hands, disgusted, and go on to another parish that will appreciate our gifts in ministry and our devotion to the Lord.
Responsiveness or Restlessness?
When I began, at age 30, at my present congregation, I determined to stay there for my entire ministry. Nothing was particularly attractive about the place; it was only a cornfield at the time. But I had been reading St. Benedict, pondering his radical innovation, which struck me as exceedingly wise. As abbot in a community of monks, he added to the three standard counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience a fourth-the vow of stability.
In St. Benedict’s century, the sixth, monks were on the move. The monastic movement had started in the Egyptian desert 350 years earlier among solitary men and women seeking a holy life. Through the years the movement attracted hundreds of men and women who wanted to give their lives to God to redeem the age and save the world. Beginning as a loose gathering of hermits around outstanding exemplars of austerity and prayer, the monasteries developed into communities of prayer and work all over Europe, Syria, and North Africa.
The monks were not “group” people; they were spiritual anarchists, not easy to rule. In the third century Pachomius had written a rule for community living. It gave a semblance of order to these bands of intense and ardent seekers after God. The vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience disciplined them into powerful agents of social action and contemplative prayer. They developed into high-energy communities. But their latent anarchism combined with their quest for the best made them liable to spiritual wanderlust. It was not unusual for monks to seek another monastery, supposing themselves to be responding to a greater challenge, attempting a more austere holiness. But was it really more of God they were after?
By Benedict’s time, this restlessness disguised as spiritual questing was widespread. When the monastery in which the monks lived proved less than ideal, they typically went looking for a better one with a better abbot or prioress and more righteous brothers or sisters. They thought that if they just got into the right community, they could have a more effective ministry.
Benedict put a stop to it. He introduced the vow of stability: stay where you are.
When I learned of this as a new pastor, it seemed wise counsel, and I took it. Earlier, I had been inducted into the pastoral career system: get career counseling, work out career patterns, work yourself up the career ladder. It struck me at the time as glaringly immature, the kind of thing that spouses do who never grow up, leaving the partner who proves no longer gratifying.
Somehow, without us noticing it, the pastoral vocation was redefined in terms of American careerism. We quit thinking of the parish as a location for spirituality and started thinking of it as an opportunity for advancement-Tarshish, not Nineveh, was the destination. The moment we did that, we started thinking wrongly, for the vocation of pastor is to live out the implications of the Word of God in community, not sail off into the exotic seas of religion in search of fame and fortune.
The Right Destination
One day, while reading Benedict, I came upon a passage about the spiritual vocation and found myself substituting pastor for monk and congregation for monastery. With my substitutions the passage reads like this: “What is useless and destructive is to imagine that enlightenment or virtue can be found by seeking for fresh stimulation. The pastoral life is a refusal of any view that will make human maturity before God dependent on external stimulus, ‘good thoughts,’ edifying influences and ideas. Instead, the pastor must learn to live with his or her own darkness, with the interior horror or temptation and fantasy. Salvation affects the whole of the psyche; to try to escape boredom, sexual frustration, restlessness, unsatisfied desire by searching for fresh tasks and fresh ideas is to attempt to seal off these areas from grace.
“Without the humiliating and wholly ‘unspiritual’ experiences of parish-life-the limited routine of trivial tasks, the sheer tedium and loneliness-there would be no way of confronting much of human nature. It is a discipline to destroy illusions. The pastor has come to the parish to escape the illusory Christian identity proposed by the world; he or she now has to see the roots of illusion within, in the longing to be dramatically and satisfyingly in control of life, the old familiar imperialism of the self bolstered by the intellect.”
After reading this, I began to understand my place as a location for a spiritually maturing life and ministry. I saw that the congregation is not a mere job site to be abandoned when a better offer comes along.
The congregation is the pastor’s place of ministry: we preach the Word and administer the sacraments, we give pastoral care and administer the community life, we teach and we give spiritual direction. But it is also the place in which we develop virtue, learn to love, advance in hope. By providing us contact with both committed and frustratingly inconstant individuals, the congregation provides the rhythms, the associations, the tasks, the limitations, the temptations-the conditions-for our own growth in Christ.
Ecclesiastical Pornography
People view the parish variously, but most tend to either glamorize or repudiate it.
Parish glamorization is ecclesiastical pornography-displaying carefully posed photographs (skillfully airbrushed) of congregations without spot or wrinkle. These provocative pictures are usually devoid of personal relationships. The pictures excite the lust for domination, for gratification, for uninvolved and impersonal spirituality.
My own image of the desirable congregation was shaped by just such pornography-a tall-steeple church with a rah-rah congregation. Even though I long ago quit looking at the magazines and lining the walls of my vocational imagination with the pictures, I am still vulnerable to parish lust.
Parish repudiation takes place more subtly, often by imagining alternate structures. How many of us, at the end of a long day, dream of starting a retreat center where only hungry and thirsty people come, or forming intentional communities where only highly motivated people are let in, or escaping to a seminary or university where the complexities of sin and the mysteries of grace are no longer vocational concerns, replaced by the still formidable but more manageable categories of ignorance and knowledge?
All such fantasizing, however, withdraws energy from the realities at hand and leaves us petulant.
Not everyone is called to be a pastor-numerous and diverse ministries exist in the church of Christ-but those of us assigned the pastoral vocation must accept the nature and conditions of our work.
St. Paul talked about the foolishness of preaching; I would like to talk about the foolishness of congregations, God’s choice of venue. Of all the ways in which to carry out the enterprise of church, this has to be the most absurd-a haphazard collection of people who somehow get assembled into pews on Sundays, half-heartedly sing a few songs most of them don’t like, and tune in and out of a sermon according to the state of their digestion and the preacher’s decibels, awkward in their commitments and jerky in their prayers.
But the people in those pews are also people who suffer deeply and find God in their suffering. They make love commitments, are faithful to them through trial and temptation, and bear fruits of righteousness, Spirit-fruits that bless the people around them. Babies, surrounded by hopeful and rejoicing parents and friends, are baptized in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. The dead are offered up to God in funerals that, in the midst of tears and grief, give solemn and joyful witness to the Resurrection. Sinners repent and take the body and blood of Jesus and receive new life.
And these two realities are mixed, impossible to separate.
Furthermore, in the Bible I find no other form of church. Nothing in Israel strikes me as terrifically attractive. If I had been church shopping in the seventh century B.C., I think Egyptian temples and Babylonian ziggurats, or the lovely groves dedicated to Asherah, would have been far more attractive. If I had been religion shopping in the first century A.D., I am sure that the purity of the synagogue, the intriguing rumors surrounding the Greek mystery religions, and the Hellenic humanism tinged with myth would all have offered far more to my consumer soul.
A bare sixty or seventy years after Pentecost, we read about seven churches that display about the same quality of holiness and depth as any parish in America today. With two thousand years of practice, we haven’t gotten any better.
Every time we open a church door and take a careful look inside, we find them there again-sinners. We also find Christ, of course, but he’s inconveniently and embarrassingly mixed into this congregation of sinners.
Frequently, certain persons arise with designs to purify the church. They propose to make the church something that can be an advertisement to the world of the attractiveness of the Kingdom. With few exceptions these people are or soon become heretics, attempting to fashion a church so well-behaved and efficiently organized that there is no need for God.
They abhor the scandal of both the Cross and the church. They want nothing to do with Nineveh. They are going to Tarshish.
It is the very nature of pastoral work to embrace this scandal, accept this humiliation, and daily work in it. Not despising the shame; not denying it either.
To listen to many pastors talking to other pastors, you’d never suspect they work amid scandal. Every report glows with successful programs and slick conversions. I used to hear such stories and be impressed. No longer. I think it far more likely that these people are presiding over some form of Greek mystery religion or Baal shrine.
The Joppa Travel Agency
In 1962, as the organizing pastor of a new congregation, I arrived with my wife and 2-year-old daughter in a small town that eventually would become a suburb of Baltimore. I was determined to develop a congregation that would be clean and intense. We were going to avoid all the trappings of religion and culture, and live out the gospel in gutsy commitment and passion.
It didn’t take many months to find myself mired in something very different. I was in Nineveh. Here people were in trouble, sick with illusions, inconstant, bored, fitful in devotion. I had naively supposed that in a new congregation-meeting for worship in the basement of our house, holding church school in family rooms and basements all over the neighborhood, and financing and constructing a church building-all the inconvenience would filter out the half-hearted, the superficially religious, the God-drifters.
In a year I had collected something far more like the congregation at Ziklag. You will remember that David, out in the wilderness and persona non grata in the court of Saul, gathered an outlaw band for survival. “All the worthless and discontent fellows of Israel joined him.” They established their base at Ziklag. That was what I saw on Sunday mornings.
I had to revise my imagination: these are the people to whom I was pastor. They were not the ones I would have chosen, but this was what I had been given. What was I to do? “Master, someone sowed tares in the night.” I wanted to weed the field. The Master’s response was targeted to me: “Leave them to the harvest. Let them grow together.”
Wise counsel, for my untrained eye could not have discerned the difference between young weed and young grain. In fact, I still can’t tell the difference. So, I gradually gave up my vision of Tarshish and settled into the realities of Nineveh.
But not easily, and not all at once. I wish I could boast of keeping my vow of stability, but I cannot. Three times I broke it. Three times in the past twenty-seven years I have gone to the travel agent in Joppa and purchased a ticket for Tarshish. Each of these times I had come to a place where I didn’t think I could last another week. I was bored. I was depressed. There was no challenge left, no stimulus to do my best. The people did not bring the best out of me. The things that I was gifted in were not recognized or valued. Spiritually, I was in a bog-a spongy, soggy, suburban wasteland. No firm ideas. No passionately held convictions. No sacrificial commitments.
Preaching to these people was like talking to my dog-they responded to my voice with gratitude, they nuzzled me, they followed me, they showed me affection. But the content of my words meant little. The direction of my life was meaningless. And they were still easily distracted, running after rabbits or squirrels that promised diversion, excitement.
I was certain that I was with the wrong congregation. I was a pastor, with the eternal gospel on my tongue and the radical love of Christ in my heart, and here I was surrounded by wimps. They were nice wimps-kind, friendly, appreciative-but their lives were shaped by comparative pricing and commercial comforts. They didn’t match the faces in the travel posters I had seen about beckoning churches.
So I decided to leave for Tarshish. I read the travel folders (in my denomination they are called Church Information Forms). I bought my ticket (this is called “activating your dossier”). I wasn’t denying my calling to be a pastor, but I respectfully asserted my right to determine the locale. Assertion was a key word in my vocabulary those days.
I did that three times. Each time, I gave up and went back to the work to which I already had been assigned, to Nineveh. I never did get to Tarshish, but I can take no credit. I tried. But I was rejected for passage.
Something interesting happened each time, however. After swallowing my pride and accepting my frustrations, I found new depths in my own life and depths in the congregation that I had no idea existed. Each time I grew up a little more. At least some of that growing up was “in Christ.”
Looking for and accepting a call to another congregation is not in itself a symptom of escapist irresponsibility. God calls us to different tasks, to new places. Geographical stability is not a biblical goal. God’s people and their pastors move about a great deal: Ur to Canaan to Egypt to Sinai to Kadesh for a start.
Then to Babylon and back. Back and forth between Galilee and Jerusalem. Up to Antioch, over to Athens, across to Rome. And then “to all the world.”
Plenty of times sin or neurosis or change make it so difficult for a pastor and congregation to stay together that it is necessary that the pastor move to another congregation. The pastor who in such circumstances stays out of a stubborn willfullness that is falsely labeled committed faithfulness cruelly inflicts needless wounds on the body of Christ.
But the norm for pastoral work is stability. Twenty- and thirty- and forty-year-long pastorates should be typical among us (as they once were) and not exceptional. Far too many pastors change parishes out of adolescent boredom, not as a consequence of mature wisdom When this happens, neither pastors nor congregations have access to the conditions that are hospitable to maturing in the faith.
In Nineveh: Professionalized Obedience
The first movement of Jonah is the movement of disobedience, sailing off adventurously to Tarshish. The second is the movement of obedience, walking across the hot desert to Nineveh.
We expect this to be a movement crowned with success, but it is not. Jonah obedient turns out to be just as much in violation of God’s will as Jonah disobedient.
Turned from his disobedience by the seastorm and the great fish, Jonah goes to Nineveh as commanded. He preaches the Word of God as instructed. But Jonah is angry. He despises Nineveh. Jonah obeys to the letter the command of God but betrays the spirit of God with his anger.
Jonah is a thoroughgoing professional. If he can’t go to Tarshish to be a pastor without the inconvenience of the presence of the Lord, he will preach with professionalized orthodoxy to avoid the presence of the Lord.
When the Ninevites repent and are mercifully forgiven by God, Jonah’s pouting displeasure betrays his indifference to God and the people who have just become God’s people. Jonah may have a professional reputation to uphold, but he cares nothing for the congregation. He has preached destruction in forty days, and destruction it had better be!
I find this a most alarming and accusing detail in this story. Here it becomes even more autobiographical than in the first movement, for I am more often than not obedient to my call. I do my work. I carry out my responsibilities as a minister of Word and sacrament. I visit the sick and comfort the grieving. I show up in church on time to conduct Sunday worship, pray over church suppers when asked, and play second base at the annual church picnic softball game.
But in this life of obedience, there is a steady attrition of ego satisfaction. As I carry out my work, I find people are less and less responding to me and more and more responding to God. They hear different things in my sermons than I intended. I am offended at their inattention. They find ways of responding to the Spirit of God that don’t fit into the plans I have made, plans in which, if they cooperated, would not only glorify God but rebound to my credit as one of his first-rank leaders.
In myself, and in my colleagues, I find that irritation, anger, and resentment toward the congregation are the sins “crouching at the door” every time I enter or leave the church. I am angry that they are responding to God in ways other than I proclaimed.
Here it is again, one of the oldest truths in spirituality: In our virtuous behavior, we are liable to the gravest sins. When we are responsible and obedient, we most easily substitute our will for God’s will. When we are good pastors, we have the best chance of developing hubris-pride and arrogance.
To give us proper warning, the story shows Jonah obedient far more unattractive than Jonah disobedient, for in his disobedience he at least had compassion on the sailors in the ship; in his obedience he had only contempt for the citizens of Nineveh.
What We in Fact Are
There is a happy ending to this. The wonderful, grace-full surprise here is that in both movements in Jonah’s life, the disobedient and the obedient, God used him to save the people.
In Jonah’s escapist disobedience, the sailors in the ship prayed to the Lord and entered into faith: “Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows” (1:16).
In Jonah’s angry obedience, the Ninevites were saved: “When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God repented of the evil which he had said he would do them; and he did not do it” (3:10).
We never do get a picture of the kind of pastor we want to be in this story, but only of the kind of pastor we, in fact, are. Holding up the mirror and showing us our doubled failure would be a severe burden were it not for this other dimension: that God works out his purpose through who we actually are. He uses our lives-as he finds them-to do his work.
He does it in such a way that it is almost impossible for us to take credit for it, but also in a way that allows us to gasp in surprised pleasure at the victories he accomplishes, whether on the sea or in the city, and in which we have our strange Jonah part.
Copyright © 1990 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
