Can A Pastor Be A Family Man?
Imagine you are a pastor. You schedule an appointment to see a parishioner for an early meeting, requiring you to miss breakfast with your family. You rush through Sunday dinner to put the finishing touches on the evening Bible teaching—which calls for more uninterrupted time with the family. You leave a sick spouse at home to teach a premarital seminar. You cancel a family day at the beach to officiate a funeral, where you praise the deceased as a man who never let his business interfere with obligations to family.
This is one of many paradoxes pastors face: They are called to preach and teach and pastor a congregation to adopt, among other things, family values, and the better they do that, the less time and energy they have for their own families.
We are becoming increasingly aware of what this reality can do to pastors’ marriages (estrangement, infidelity, and divorce seem to be more common these days), to their children (the resentful PK is a stereotype for a reason), and to themselves (burnout from ministry has become a cliché).
To help douse the flames of this three-alarm fire, a spate of books and articles has come out in the last few years. Most are aimed at pastors, to help them deal with the pressures of ministry, but we laypeople, who have an enlightened self-interest in the spiritual and psychological health of our pastors, do well to listen in.
The problem, of course, is complex. But one key to pastoral health seems to be the ability to set boundaries between work and home. That entails a certain perspective that, for instance, the church isn’t the Alpha and Omega.
B. John Hagedorn, in an essay, “Clergy Families: The Struggle to Be Free,” from Surviving in Ministry, edited by Robert R. Lutz and Bruce T. Taylor (Integration Books), puts it bluntly: “The clergy family needs to free itself s from the job in order to be a place of refuge for the clergy and therefore an aid to surviving in ministry.”
Of course, this perspective must incarnate itself in some healthy habits if it is to make a difference. Paul Mickey and Ginny Ashmore in Clergy Families: Is Normal Life Possible? (Zondervan) explain: “Most pastors give more than they should.… They need to negotiate for days off each week, at least two weeks’ vacation, and opportunity for continuing education and study. They should not involve themselves in church-related meetings five nights a week.”
Establishing clear boundaries can go a bit far, of course. In some of these psychology-of-clergy books, there seems to be a concerted (and probably unintentional) effort to divorce so completely the spheres of work and family that the pastorate is transformed into but another job. One essay in Surviving multiplies rabbitlike the boundaries allegedly needed—between the family and the congregation, between the clergy and his/her spouse, and between the individual members of the clergy family—and then suggests that the pastor’s family might even want to find their own church: “It might be awkward for the pastor’s spouse to be a member of the church down the street, but it might be more spiritually freeing.”
Indeed.
Mickey and Ashmore show more realism, however: “The pastor can never make stress on the family go away because the boundaries between private and public or professional life are not clear-cut.”
In The Psychology of Clergy (Morehouse), H. Newton Malony and Richard A. Hunt agree: “At some level the ordained minister will encounter a fundamental conflict between [the wedding vow and the ordination vow].”
Which leads us to a more holistic conclusion than the psychological bias of most of these books would suggest. The pastor and family may, to some degree, have to lose their lives, but the biblical promise is that, if done in the right spirit, this sacrifice leads to life. Given that pastors are human, setting boundaries can help; but as spiritual beings, the key seems to lie deeper.
Mickey and Ashmore discovered anew this lasting biblical truth after tabulating results and comments they solicited from over 1,400 clergy: “Across the board, comments from respondents show that the most fulfilled, contented, satisfied ministers at home and in the church are those who look upon the call to ministry as a spiritual, vocational summons and not as a profession.” And further, “The mind of Christ resident in the pastor’s heart is the greatest guarantee of both pastoral and family satisfaction and success.”
Restoring the joy of the pastor’s vocation, of course, is partly the responsibility of pastors themselves. In the end, there is no one in charge of their schedules but themselves. Then again, the issue is complicated by laypeople who, unaware of the tremendous demands on their pastor, keep the pressure on by suggesting they start one more program and call on one more newcomer and visit one more member in the hospital.
In any case, an understanding and supportive congregation goes a long way toward ensuring a pastor’s health.
By Mark Galli, associate editor of CHRISTIAN HISTORY magazine.
Looking For Forgiveness
Saint Maybe,by Anne Tyler (Knopf, 337 pp.; $22.50, hardcover). Reviewed by Katie Andraski, a poet and writer who lives in Rockford, Illinois.
In her best-selling novel Saint Maybe, Anne Tyler poses the question: Could God’s mercy “soothe not just grief but guilt? Not just guilt but racking anguish over something impulsively done that could not be undone?” It is a question every Christian considers at some point in his or her life.
Tyler does not formulate steps to follow. She does not quote chapter and verse. She does what Jesus did. She tells stories. And in so doing she looks at forgiveness from the perspectives of a child, a parent, a pastor, and a penitent.
Ian Beldoe considered himself at 17 “a medium kind of guy.” He also felt he had the answers. Suspecting that his brother’s wife, Lucy, was unfaithful, even giving birth to someone else’s child, Ian impatiently blurts out his suspicions to Danny, his brother. Minutes later Danny slams his car through a wall. Several months later Lucy takes an overdose and three children are orphaned. All from just a handful of words.
The bulk of the narrative is Ian’s search for forgiveness. A pastor tells him, “Jesus remembers how difficult life on earth can be. He helps with what you can’t undo. But only after you’ve tried to undo it.”
One of the wonderful things about reading Saint Maybe is Anne Tyler’s perceptive, loving eye. She sees people clearly in all their frailty and humanity, but with deep, deep love. Anne Tyler draws a picture of righteousness—not the flashy, ecstatic kind, but the gritty, day-to-day tedium of loving, “not in word but in deed and in truth.” She makes grace something we can know.
“Yes, The Trinity Loves Me …”
Systematic Theology, Volume 1,by Wolfhart Pannenberg, translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Eerdmans, 473 pp.; $39.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Roger E. Olson, associate professor of theology, Bethel College, St. Paul, Minnesota.
The appearance of Wolfhart Pannenberg’s systematic theology marks a milestone in twentieth-century theology. The last truly great multivolume Protestant system was Helmut Thielicke’s The Evangelical Faith, which, unfortunately, has largely been ignored. Many observers of the theological scene think the era of theological giants and their systems is gone. Will there ever be another dogmatics to rank alongside those of Barth, Brunner, Tillich, and Thielicke?
Pannenberg is well into providing the answer. He is gathering the diverse strands of a lifetime of theological reflection and tying them together into a tightly woven, three-volume system of thought that promises to rival those mentioned above.
Every systematic theology has a central, unifying concept around which everything else revolves. For Pannenberg it is the insight that God’s very essence is infinite love. Divine love is not one of God’s attributes but the essential nature of God himself. This cannot be understood in any non-Trinitarian sense. What is true of the divine love as God’s essence is true of every theme and problem of systematic theology: “Only in trinitarian terms can we think it through consistently.” Therefore, God as infinite love and God as triune constitute the two foci of a single unifying concept in Pannenberg’s system.
Readers who possess a passing acquaintance with Pannenberg will approach his magnum opus with two presuppositions: that it will be rationalistic and that it will focus on eschatology. Both assumptions are partially validated and partially corrected by this volume.
Pannenberg makes absolutely clear that personal faith in the reality of the God of the Bible as Creator and Redeemer of the world is legitimate as such, and is not another name for proven rationality. Theology, however, must acknowledge the genuine debatableness of God’s reality in history and present its truth claims as rationally justified hypotheses that can only receive final proof in the eschatological kingdom of God. Nowhere does he suggest that one cannot believe until proof is available—a common distortion of his Christian rationalism.
Both God and his full self-revelation are still considered eschatological by Pannenberg. However, for the first time he makes clear that in his view, God is truly eternal in the sense of being simultaneous to all times. Only for us who are locked in temporality is God future. As the absolute future, all time is equally present to God: “All time is before the eyes of God as a whole!” Interpreters who have considered Pannenberg’s theology somewhat akin to process theology will be surprised by his discussion of God’s attributes in this volume.
From an evangelical point of view, the weakest aspect of Pannenberg’s systematic theology (so far) is his rejection of any special inspiration or authority of Scripture. In fact, he almost completely neglects these concepts in favor of revelation as history. God reveals himself indirectly in ordinary and special events of universal world history, and their status as divine revelation is discoverable by reason, not established by authoritative propositional revelation in Scripture or tradition. Of course, this raises a question often asked by evangelicals of Barth, Brunner, and Thielicke: Why is Scripture then treated throughout as if it were some specially inspired, authoritative source and norm of doctrinal reflection?
Who should read this volume? Not everyone. Not even every theologian! It is not light reading or very practical. Few sermons will result from it. It ought, however, to be read by Christians who have a taste for theological masterpieces and who believe that stimulating and stretching their minds can be a way of worshiping God.
