THE BALL-CAP CRISIS illustrates the kind of emotional dilemma that kills our pastoral love. Lessons like that stack up pretty fast in ministry. They remind me of the Calvinist who, upon falling down a flight of stairs, shook himself off and declared, “Boy, I’m glad that’s over!”
I realize a certain number of debacles are inevitable and that they are good for me. I’ve tried to learn from my failures, and I think I handle things a little better than I used to. The problem is that though the pain caused by generic human foolishness makes me wiser, it tends to make me ambivalent in my pastoral work.
The word ambivalence means “not being able to decide on an issue.” Specifically, it means not being able to give ourselves in love, all because of inner pain that shies our will away from any course of action. Ambivalence causes excessive fluctuation on issues, and it can cause an obsession with fluctuation to the point that no decision can be made. Ambivalence is by nature paradoxical. On the one hand, it can cause us to do pastoral work with more than a healthy professional distance. On the other hand, it lowers our natural, healthy defenses and can make us unsure of our personal boundaries. It often causes us to retreat into self-centered self-love as a defense against risking mature, adult love. We become vulnerable to unhealthy forms of love and unhealthy forms of self-sacrifice.
Ambivalence masks itself as wisdom, whispering, “Don’t get involved, it only hurts to care. Don’t make a decision, someone will be disappointed and you’ll have to backtrack.…”
This is pseudo-wisdom, leaking into the consciousness from a part of our spirit that refuses to be hurt again; loss, particularly any loss that signals death, is intolerable. Losing my parishioner-friends in the ball-cap crisis ripped my heart out. Not only did it feel like a death, it was a kind of death, and I was forced to deal with it as such.
Parents often deal with the death of a child by distancing themselves from the children that remain. This is done as protection from ever being hurt that badly again. Many parents overcome this brutal self-preservation instinct, but it is not easy. Nor is it easy for pastors to override a similar instinct when they lose dear parishioners to conflict. The frequency with which it occurs can build up a reservoir of pain, making pastoral ministry intolerable.
Far-flung cold space
The pain of loss that causes ambivalence can happen to pastors on the corporate level: We feel rejected by the entire church, often through the action of the council. How many times have we heard, “We want to know how you’re doing … tell us how we can help you,” only to find that when we share our tiredness and even illness, we are rebuffed with what amounts to, “We have it worse than you do … stop complaining”?
Eight years ago I tried being honest with a church council after being assured that they wanted to know how I was feeling. I got blasted and vowed I would never again be honest with a council about my physical or emotional condition. The few times I have broken that vow since have not contradicted the basis for my vow.
The council’s intransigence may have something to do with life in Montana. In these little towns, if you aren’t working three jobs, if you are not constantly on the verge of physical, emotional, and marital collapse, you aren’t working hard enough. Not many of the people here really do work that hard, but they all think they do, and many of them have the broken marriages to prove it. This may sound like bitterness. I suppose it is—I fight that too—but bitterness is easier to deal with than ambivalence. In bitterness I despise the church, and I want to leave. In ambivalence I cannot decide to leave the church and cannot decide to love the church.
Bitterness is bad, but ambivalence is worse. Ambivalence leads to pastoral disaster. Bitterness can drive us out of the ministry—not always a bad thing—but ambivalence paralyzes us, and that is never a good thing. Ambivalence is more likely to destroy a pastor’s relationship with his or her family. That’s because it is easier for a pastor’s spouse to identify with bitterness than with ambivalence. One can unite around bitterness but not around ambivalence.
Bitterness is a burning cause, the center of the sun; ambivalence is cold space, formless and void. People who are bitter together can still love each other, people who are ambivalent together can’t. My guess is that fewer bitter pastors become sexually involved with parishioners than do ambivalent pastors. A bitter pastor is usually mad at the whole blasted church. An ambivalent pastor isn’t mad at anyone— on the outside—but he may be desperate for anyone’s attention that will solve the loveless, indecisive state of his existence. Every church has people who thrive on solving the ambivalence issue for pastors. (Worse, the layperson who seems most sympathetic to your dilemma may be simply worming her way into your favor; she may be storing ammunition for a future battle.)
Of course, the struggle to avoid bitterness and ambivalence is common to all people. “That’s just the way life is,” semi-sympathetic laypeople will quickly point out. We live in a sinful world, and the church is infected with sin, as are its pastors. Church conflict and pastoral bruising are part of the deal. We never had the right to expect pastoral work to be conflict free. We never had the right to expect that conflict could be solved by common sense and love.
We can resign ourselves to the fact that our parishioners struggle with ambivalences too, and therefore we should simply accept it. But this doesn’t work for us. Everyone else we know can conceivably pursue a vocation without love.
Sure, it’s better if teachers, doctors, and artists love the people they work with. But they can perform their work without love and they can even do it well. The bind we face is that we can’t do pastoral ministry without love. It isn’t a series of tasks we do with love— rather, pastoral ministry is love, which we apply with a series of tasks. Preaching, teaching, calling, praying, even church administration are nothing but the consistent application of God’s love to the church. God’s love is the oil that the lampstand burns to produce the light of the world, and we are the bearers of that love.
To overcome the ambivalence that paralyzes our love, we must discover and embrace genuine love that can endure the battles and can motivate us to ministry. My guess is that the kind of love so subject to ambivalence is not a pure form of love in the first place. Maybe we need ball-cap-crisis heat to destroy the weak strains of childish love mixed in with our godly love. It is by no means beyond the ken of human nature to syncretize God’s love poured into us by the Holy Spirit with the bratty love of our “inner child”—whatever that is. The ball-cap crisis wounded my inner child.
In pastoral ministry, we need plenty of childlike faith, and we can’t get enough childlike innocence, but to overcome ambivalence we must make the choice to love like Jesus. To solve the dilemma of ambivalence in pastoral ministry, we need a short course on the need for love in pastoral ministry, because ambivalence lies to us, leading us to believe we can do our work without love.
We also must define clearly the kinds of love pastors need—there’s more than one. Ambivalence makes pastoral love seem impossible by meshing the different loves together into an indefinable, amorphous, massive demand for something like heroism. And when we’re hurting badly, heroism is precisely what we can’t manage. But then again, the drive to be a hero may be what gets us in these fixes. Heroism is not a form of pastoral love. Ambivalence has much less power over us if we know precisely what we need to do and then simply do it.
For example, the first love I discuss is hesed, a Hebrew word defined as “covenant love” or the “ability to bond.” When I get flustered with my church and want to quit in a flurry of what I believe is holy anger (which is often nothing more than hurt feelings), I remind myself of my call to keep covenant with my church, and that means to keep my resume where it belongs—in the drawer. I may not feel love when I’m mad, but I can keep my promises when I’m mad. Keeping covenant doesn’t always feel like love, but it is a primary form of pastoral love.
Downright physical
But do we really need to love our church? Can’t we do it another way?
Not according to Jesus. Jesus expressed the deep longing of the pastoral heart when he told his disciples:
Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. (John 15:4-5)
These are the two facets of the pastoral heart: the spiritual desire to be with Christ and the material desire to do the work of leading others to follow him. For the pastor the two drives cannot be separated. They are united in our heart; we want to be with Christ and we want to lead others to him. They are united in our practice; we spend time with Christ and we spend time with the people we are called to serve. They are united in our effectiveness; the time we spend with Christ nourishes us and directs us to our work with people, and our work with people casts us back into the arms of Christ, for nourishment, direction, and rest.
Yet something remains unsatisfying about this dichotomy. Abiding in Christ and bearing fruit look like the two sides of our average day: prayer and Scripture-reading side by side with people-time.
But we require a more integrated view of this vital relationship. After all, the branch doesn’t spend from eight till noon stuck in the vine sucking sap and from noon to five wandering around the vineyard looking for some grapes to ripen. The vine/branch relationship is fixed. The branch springs from the vine, is nourished by the vine, and at all times is supported by the vine. Fruit-bearing is rhythmic—the branch bears fruit at intervals. Nourishment and fruit-bearing is one act of abiding in Christ.
What does it mean to abide in Christ, anyway? In John 15 Jesus goes on to say:
As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. (John 15:9-14)
“Abide in my love..…” To abide in Christ means to abide in his love. That makes it more clear.
“If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.…” The way to abide in Christ’s love is by obeying his commandments. That makes abiding in Christ more concrete.
“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you..…” His specific commandment is that we love one another. This makes abiding in Christ concrete, practical, even attainable. Abiding in Christ is not vaguely mystical; it is starkly physical. We abide in Christ by loving one another in the fellowship of believers.
Jesus defines what it means to love one another when he says, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Abiding in Christ is physical in the same way that the relationship between the vine and the branch is physical. Furthermore, the relationship of the branch, the vine, and the fruit illuminates what it means to lay down one’s life for one’s friends: There may come a time for us to die to save a friend.
But that can only be done once. It is difficult to imagine how that view of laying down one’s life can be construed as a long-term relationship of nourishment and fruit-bearing.
A superior understanding is that the vine lays down its life by providing the branch with its life reserves, and the branch lays down its life by providing the fruit with its life reserves gained from the vine. This describes the pastor’s life. It is one in which we lay down our lives for our friends over a long period of time. This is our spiritual and material life with Christ.
In this union we bear fruit in a direct and positive way: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). Yet by the way we do ministry much of the time, you’d think Jesus had said, “By this everyone will know you are my disciples, if you run great programs.” Sadly, instead of knowing us by our love, the world knows us by our programs. The world doesn’t care about our programs. They are as good at running programs as we are.
More than anything, our parishioners want us to love them. More than anything, they want to love one another. More than anything, the world longs for a church of Christians that loves one another. We need not worry about offending the world with our dogma, our morality, or our worship. However, if we offend the world by our fighting and lovelessness, we can expect nothing better than, “Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned” (John 15:6).
Some painful experiences in pastoral ministry make us want to be religious hacks who hawk religion. We may become experts at manipulating human behavior instead of simply behaving like humans. Ambivalence girdles our nourishment from the vine. We dry out. We become tinder.
Rather, ours is a ministry of love. There is no other way for us to do our work. We can be religious professionals without love. We can teach religion without love. We can be religious hacks without love. But there is no pastoral ministry without love.
Beachhead of love
However, we cannot under any circumstances simply choose love. The burden of love is ultimately unbearable. A person can choose to splay himself spread eagle on a hand grenade in a foxhole once. No one can choose to do that every day. The pastor cannot choose love every day, the pastor can only choose to yield his or her life to Christ every day. In Christ the burden of love is not unbearable, for he tells us:
Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Matt. 11:28-30)
This is why he tells us first to abide in him and then to love one another. The choice we make is to abide in Christ. Or perhaps better, it is Christ’s choice that we abide in him. We know that we can love only after he has loved us first. Likewise, we can choose . him only after he has chosen us. As Jesus goes on to say in John 15, “You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last … ” (v. 16).
Jesus is being polite. Not only must he choose us, he must conquer us.
When Christ wants to love a congregation, he establishes his beachhead in the heart of the pastor. However, the heart of the ambivalent pastor is guarded, militarized territory. Land mines everywhere. Barbed, electrified wire abounds. Searchlights blast the beach. Jesus of Nazareth, our crucified and risen Lord, walks into the danger and absorbs the angry, brutal defense of our ambivalent heart. He uses no weapons of warfare, but he has ways of breaking our hearts wide open.
Often Jesus comes to me in the lives of people who love me and whom I love. To use an extreme but unfortunate example, how many times has my dear family stepped forward to love me, crying to break through my weakness and depression, only to become entangled and shocked in the barbed wire around my heart. I didn’t sec it up for them. I thought I was setting it up for that lousy church! I forgot to take it all down before I walked in the door!
Does this break my heart? If it does not, I am a monster.
Thanks be to God, my heart is still capable of being broken. When I take ministry home with me, snapping at my wife and children, healing involves more than simply deciding to love my family more. That is not particularly difficult for me. I’ve got lots of experience apologizing, and they are well-experienced at forgiveness. Besides, I want desperately to love my family, and I enjoy doing it immensely.
My church? I wouldn’t go so far as to say I want desperately to love my church. Sometimes I don’t care at all, and it doesn’t bother me not to care. Full healing for me, and for my family, requires me not simply to love them better; I must love my church better. I can accomplish that onerous cask only by yielding to Christ’s advances against my stubbornly ambivalent heart. He must be Lord. Jesus is the most stubborn warrior in the world, and he is the least compromising; he will cease and desist only upon unconditional surrender.
And he knows when I’m faking it with precious god-talk.
Jesus has been at war with me and I with him for eighteen years. But at least when we are at war, I am not ambivalent! That is his way of keeping me in union with him, for when we are at war, we are still in love and still in union. When I stop caring, I am in trouble. He tells me, “I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth” (Rev. 3:15-16). Apparently, Jesus would rather I throw a rock at him than turn my back on him, as the astoundingly large number of psalms of lament seems to indicate.
In the next four chapters, I will discuss the different kinds of love Christ has given us to love our churches: what these loves are, why our churches need each type of love, and what happens when we fail to express them. Specifically, I will discuss why we must bond with our church, why we must show compassion to our church, why we must like our church (yes! why we must like it!), and how that all adds up to the agape sacrifice we make to Christ for his church.
Copyright © 1998 David Hansen
