What does it mean to give spiritual care? To shepherd a soul?
These are the most basic questions of pastoral ministry, yet they can sometimes be difficult to answer.
Few have given clearer, more pointed answers than Eugene Peterson. Eugene founded Christ Our King (Presbyterian) Church in Bel Air, Maryland, and served as its pastor for twenty-nine years. He has written many books about ministry, including Working the Angles; Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work; and The Contemplative Pastor (all Eerdmans).
Four years ago, Eugene became professor of spiritual theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. He divides his time between teaching and translating the Bible into a popular, contemporary rendering known as The Message (NavPress).
Leadershipeditor Kevin Miller visited Eugene and his wife, Jan, in their apartment just a block from Regent College, which sits on the lush, evergreen campus of the University of British Columbia.
We soon found that to talk about pastoral care requires defining what it means to be a pastor.
Today, people come to pastors for help with addictions, abuse, incest, and other complex problems that didn’t seem as common a generation ago. What can a pastor do for someone that a mental health provider cannot?
Peterson: I guess I want to question the premise: Do pastors face more difficult problems today than in previous generations? I know this is a mixed-up, difficult, damaged generation. But it’s arguable that the main difference today is not how much people are hurting, but how much they expect to be relieved from their hurting. The previous century suffered just as much; in fact, probably much more. Just think of all the illness, death in childbirth, infant mortality, plagues. The big difference today is that we have this mentality that if it’s wrong, you can fix it. You don’t have to live with any discomfort or frustration. And the pastor is in the front line of people who get approached: “Make me happy. Make me feel good.”
What do you do, then, when a parishioner assumes you can fix his or her problem?
You have to go back a step and ask, “Why am I a pastor? What is my primary responsibility to this congregation?” The most important thing a pastor does is stand in a pulpit every Sunday and say, “Let us worship God.” If that ceases to be the primary thing I do in terms of my energy, my imagination, and the way I structure my life, then I no longer function as a pastor. I pick up some other identity. I cannot fail to call the congregation to worship God, to listen to his Word, to offer themselves to God. Worship becomes a place where we have our lives redefined for us. If we’re no longer operating out of that redefinition, the pastoral job is hopeless. Or if not hopeless, it becomes a defection. We join the enemy. We’ve quit our basic work.
My guess is that the average person coming for pastoral care doesn’t understand that.
In large parts of North America, leaders of the church have advertised, “The church is a place to get your problems met. Come, and we’ll show you how to be successful in your life and family. Meet a lot of good friends.” They’ve abdicated this primary call to worship, in an attempt to satisfy the consumer.
So what should pastors promise people?
I’m not sure pastors or the church are in the business of promising anything. That’s not what we were called to do. We’re called to be witnesses, to call people to discipleship, to engage in the formation of a spiritual life in Christian character. There’s an element of promise in the nature of the gospel, but it’s usually so different from what people expect that they don’t see it as a promise.
Say a parishioner comes to your office deeply troubled about her marriage. What is your role?
Nobody just shows up in my study to ask about her marriage. She’s already part of a congregation. I’m not starting from ground zero; I’m starting from a commitment, membership in a body of Christ. My task as pastor, then, is to get to know her better and to give her life dignity. I listen. I understand. That’s not an insignificant thing in itself. But always, I’m trying to pull people back into the worshiping community. I want to tell people, “This problem is not the whole world. It feels like the whole world, but it’s not. You’ve got a golden opportunity every Sunday morning to reorient yourself.” I don’t ever want to convey that our primary job as pastors is to fix a problem. Our primary work is to make saints. We’re in the saint-making business. If we enter the human-potential business, we’ve lost our calling.
How do you develop an ear for what’s going on spiritually in a person? Did you know how to do it when you began pastoral work?
No. I didn’t have the faintest idea how to do it.
How did you learn?
I took Sunday morning absolutely seriously. I wanted to be a preacher, an intercessor. I wanted to baptize and give the Eucharist with integrity. I wanted to gather people to that place. Whenever I started to deviate from that center during the week, I knew it: This isn’t what I was called to do. I’m doing good work, but this isn’t the gospel.
What were you doing when you were deviating?
I was trying to meet people’s needs on their terms, helping them with their marriages, trying to make sure the church was successful. I wanted a stewardship campaign that worked, I wanted to get Sunday school teachers, I wanted to get a youth group going. I never quit doing any of those things, but when that became my work, when that defined my work, I knew it. The problem was, I hadn’t learned a way to live organically out of Sunday. I had two models, and neither could help me.
What were the two models?
I grew up in one in which, when the enthusiasm starts to flag, you turn up the fires-work a little harder, talk a little louder, do something that will excite people. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t live on emotion and on hype and on advertising. The other was the institutional model: giving leadership to an organization that was stable and responsible and successful, that would meet people’s religious needs. That was good, but it bored me to death. It was religious, but it wasn’t the gospel. I didn’t sign up for that.
Where did you go for help?
I started discovering people who did it-Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Bernard, Newman, Alexander Whyte, Samuel Rutherford, a lot of the Puritans, and in particular, Dante. These became my mentors, my teachers, my professors. I lived with them. We’ve got this wonderful history of Christian spirituality. We’ve got two thousand years of people who have been listening, writing, doing this. You’re in a company of saints who have done this, and they’ve done it with great freedom and goodness. These people weren’t gullible. They developed a scent for sanctity; they were alert to the way holiness works, which hardly ever fits the stereotypes. Some of it’s an art, but if you live with these people through their writings, you develop the sense of proportion, a scent for truth.
How long did it take to learn pastoral care from these mentors?
After five or seven years, I realized, I can do this. There is a way to live as a pastor during the week that is congruent with the gospel I proclaim on Sunday. This is a pastor. This is what I want to be. I love this life. I don’t want to paint a picture that I got it all straight. It’s not something you “get”; it’s not like a diploma you can hang. This is a way of life in which you keep re-immersing yourself.
What, in essence, is the pastoral life? What does it mean to shepherd another person’s soul?
I begin with the conviction that everything in the gospel is experience-able. As a pastor, whatever the person’s situation, you’re saying to yourself, This person can experience the gospel here. I haven’t a clue how it’s going to happen, but I’m willing to slog through whatever has to be slogged through and not give up. I will continue to keep the gospel clear on Sundays; I will continue to be a companion with this person on Fridays.
Many pastors would say, “I really don’t have time to slog through many things with many people, or my whole week collapses under the weight.” What would pastors have to give up in order to make time for this?
They’re giving up efficiency. They’re giving up control. They’re giving up quick returns. They’re giving up the satisfaction of pleasing people. I don’t think those are great things to give up; they’re terrible things, and giving them up results in a wonderful freedom. Pastors are better off without them anyway.
So let me clarify. You’re asking a pastor to give up a sense of control, productivity, and effectiveness in order to embrace slow, hard-to-measure work that people don’t necessarily want.
That’s true.
That’s a tough sell.
And not many are buying. But remember, that’s not the whole story.
What’s the other part?
That there’s nothing quite as exciting or satisfying as being the one who proclaims the gospel, the one who’s there to pray. “Can I pray for you?”—to be in that spot is glorious. When you do this, there’s a sense of being in on something original and creative in people’s lives. You’re watching something happen that is resurrection life. But you can’t produce the resurrection; it never happens when you’re looking or when you think it ought to be happening. When we left Christ Our King Church after twenty-nine years, both Jan and I were totally surprised by the people who said to us, “Remember when you said this? Did this? That changed my life.” We didn’t remember any of what they mentioned, because it was nothing we had done deliberately.
For example?
I think of a person who was quite depressed. I referred him to somebody, but the medication didn’t do much good. Six or eight months later, I was at the end of my rope; I didn’t know what to do. I said to him, “I don’t know where this depression is from-this might be genetic or chemical or societal or familial. Some people have to live with this their whole lives. You might have to. But it’s possible to live with it your whole life.” We talked about that, and then I laid hands on him and prayed for healing from the depression. Three or four years later, he said, “Remember when you prayed that time? About eight or nine months later, the depression left and hasn’t been back. Do you suppose there’s a connection between praying and nine months later, a healing?” I said, “Well, there are a lot of examples of nine-month waiting programs.” There was a resurrection. It surprised both of us. That kind of thing is not uncommon. But it was so unconnected with anything I did.
When would you refer someone to a counselor?
Some pastors don’t have the luxury of referral. When I started in ministry, I didn’t. Later, when I had people to refer to, my process was to refer—but not too quickly. I always spent at least two or three times with people, regardless how bad their problem was or how out of my depth I was. I wanted to get to know them. They deserved a pastor who knows them. Then I would say, “What you’re dealing with-the depression, the spouse, the kids, the job—can be helped, and I have three or four friends, acquaintances who spend their time doing this.” Then I’d ask them, “Call me every month and tell me what you’re doing. It’s going to be hard work, and I want to pray with you. I’m going to be your pastor through this. When you get this straightened out, I want to start working on the real thing: How do you live in this grace and how do you live obediently and in freedom in this gospel?” I sometimes used analogies: “If you came in here with a broken leg, I wouldn’t try to teach you how to dance. Go get your leg fixed. Then we’re going to dance! There are more important things to do than to get your leg mended, but there’s nothing more urgent than to get your leg mended now.”
A wonderful analogy. How do you teach dancing once the person gets the cast off?
The first thing is not what you do when they’re sitting beside you, but what you do before they get there. The pastor is responsible for leading a congregation in worship, for making the Word alive and immediate and local to these people. Nobody in our society has anything that matches the sanctuary on Sunday morning with its incredible repertoire of hymns and anthems and prayers and Scriptures. A counselor doesn’t have that kind of stuff to work with. A psychiatrist doesn’t. A doctor doesn’t. A business executive doesn’t. Nobody else gets that kind of gift and context to work in. So it distresses me greatly that pastors today, it seems from my nonstatistical observations, really don’t take it that seriously.
Most pastors I know would say that worship is critical and Sunday is very important to them. How could they begin to move away from that?
The defection starts subtly in what you do when people are not asking you to do anything. After three or four years in ministry, you realize that nobody is asking you to pray, and they are asking you to do a lot of other things, so prayer starts to erode.
(Second of two parts; click here to read Part 2)
1997 by Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.
