When my wife, Debbie, and I and another couple arrived at the nursery after the midweek evening program, we discovered our toddlers playing church.
Here’s how it went: The 3-year-old “parents” were taking the 2-year-old “babies” to “nursery,” then the “parents” went to “meetings.” The attendant said they’d played the game over and over all evening.
We laughed out loud, but we glanced at one another’s eyes; we knew how sick it was. Our children’s first word to describe the gospel ministry was “meetings.” It wasn’t a cuss word they’d learned at the neighbor’s. This was home-grown heresy.
I didn’t do anything about it. I started things, I planned things, I taught things, I organized things, I ran things, I built things—of course I had a lot of meetings to go to. Isn’t that ministry? It sounded professional when I said it, but coming from our babies it sounded horrible, like a betrayal. It occurred to me that I was the one playing church.
ALEXANDER WHYTE’S LARGE LIFE
G.F. Barbour’s “The Life of Alexander Whyte” (out of print) began to dissolve the glue that pasted together pastoral ministry and human management technology. This old book about a nineteenth-century Scottish Presbyterian pastor taught me deep inside, wherever things like paradigm shifts occur, that pastoral ministry is not the exercise of a pastoral technique; it is a work of Spirit, soul, gospel, and life.
Whyte was born January 13, 1836, in Kirriemuir, Scotland. He was raised in a single-parent home, an only child, an illegitimate child, in extreme poverty. When Whyte’s mother wouldn’t marry him, his father moved to America where he eventually fought in the Civil War. His mother raised Alexander to work and worship. His first promptings to ministry came before he was old enough to know that his socio-economic situation should have made his vision impossible; he damaged his health with the work and study required to answer his call. Eventually he became pastor of Free St. George’s in Edinburgh, where he served for more than fifty years.
Alexander Whyte worked constantly. On the other hand, and this was terribly attractive to me, he was awesomely free in what he did. He preached and taught and prayed, wrote thousands of letters, read great books, and gave spiritual direction (” … something in his face and bearing attracted those who were passing through deep waters”). He wrote and lectured and called tirelessly on his people in their homes. He suffered from depression, disappointment, and exhaustion, just like the rest of us, but he always seemed, somehow, to be in control of his life in a positive, free manner.
Barbour tells us this wonderful story of Whyte the preacher and man of prayer: “Once, after a singularly solemn New Year’s sermon, a devoted member of Free St. George’s went to the vestry to thank his minister. He ended with the words, ‘It went to my heart as if you had come straight from the Audience-chamber [the throne of God].’ ‘And perhaps I did,’ was the quiet and grave reply.”
Whyte was not patient with laziness: “I would have all lazy students drummed out of the college, and all lazy ministers drummed out of the Assembly.” Yet he was also famous for his long vacations with his family, his love of fishing, nature walks, and mountain climbing. One assistant said of him: “Along the line of duty he is one of the most determined, I would venture to say one of the most dogged, persons whom God ever created. … And yet with this so grim determination—and at times it can be very grim—with this will, built up through a thousand minute victories into strength and liberty, there is a certain tenderness about him, a large sympathy, a sweet and gracious courtesy, that are infinitely attractive and endearing.”
Alexander Whyte’s breadth of reading and acquaintances was remarkable, even by today’s standards. He and his wife, Jane, entertained Salvation Army founder William Booth; he was personally acquainted with and corresponded with Robert Louis Stevenson; he met Cardinal Newman as a young man and studied him his whole life; theologian Baron von Hgel and he were friends. His deepest spiritual passion lay with the Puritans, especially Thomas Goodwin, Samuel Rutherford, and John Bunyan. He gave away literally hundreds of copies of The Pilgrim’s Progress. To say that he was a Dante fanatic might be an understatement.
“Few men with such firm, clear views,” a colleague said of Whyte, “have had such a genuine tolerance, love and understanding for others whose views were very different. He had it because he knew the things that matter, and had an instinct for discerning his brothers under sometimes strange guises.”
TECHNO-PASTOR’S EPIPHANY
Reading The Life of Alexander Whyte I found myself saying to myself over and over: You mean I can really pastor this way?
I wanted to pastor like Whyte long before I knew of him. Actually his ministry captured many of the best qualities of three wonderful mentor-pastors I’d known. But somehow in my training, in seminary, in church work, in the current literature, I’d gotten all turned around.
The power of this book to reshape my vision of ministry came from the fact that The Life of Alexander Whyte pictures his whole life. It starts with his birth and ends with his death. In it I saw that the true effect of ministry comes from the pastor’s whole life, not from the exercise of an infinite number of individual tasks.
Techno-pastor always gets chopped into littler and littler pieces. The church is divided into programs, which are divided into gatherings, which are planned at meetings, which are divided by agendas, which have many sub-agendas, all of which are constructed of many individual details, all of which Techno-pastor must master.
But Techno-pastor does not master details; details master Techno-pastor. Techno-pastor does not chop the church into bite-sized pieces, the church chops Techno-pastor into bite-sized pieces. What all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could never do, “The Life of Alexander Whyte” did; it put my life back together again. And it still does.
I spend less time at meetings now, more time in parishioners’ homes, in my home, in prayer, in good books, and in trout streams!
In many ways Eugene Peterson is a modern Alexander Whyte. Both Presbyterian, their shared recreational passion would be not golf but mountain climbing. And mountain climbing is an apt metaphor for their reading and writing habits. I met Eugene in 1986. We were sharing favorite books. I mentioned The Life of Alexander Whyte. His face lit up. He had feasted there. His eyes sparkled like St. Nick’s as he gave me this present: “When I first started preaching, I decided that before I could preach to others, I needed to hear a sermon myself. So every Sunday morning, I got up early and read a sermon of Alexander Whyte’s. I’ve done it my whole ministry.”
HIGHLIGHTS OF ALEXANDER WHYTE ON PREACHING
- “Never think of giving up preaching! The angels around the throne envy your great work. You ‘scarcely know how or what to preach.’ Look into your own sinful heart, and back into your sinful life, and around on the world full of sin and misery, and open your New Testament, and make application of Christ to yourself and your people; and … you will preach more freshly and powerfully every day till you are eighty.”
- “[In preaching] do not despise delivery, falling back on matter. The matter is dead without delivery. Delivery! Delivery! Delivery! said Demosthenes to the aspirant. You able fellows are tempted to despise delivery as being ‘popular.’ I implore you to rise above that delusion … “
- “The pulpit is a jealous mistress and will not brook a divided allegiance.”
- “Many a time I feel so cold and dead that I might doubt if I had ever come to Him at all; but I go about my work notwithstanding, looking in His direction, and my heart fills by and by with His love to me.”
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Dave Hansen is pastor of Belgrade Community Church in Belgrade, Montana.
1996 Christianity Today/LEADERSHIP Journal
