The Pastor in a Secular Age (Ministry in a Secular Age Book #2)

Ministry to People Who No Longer Need a God

Andrew Root

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780801098475
• eBook ISBN: 9781493418220
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

A New Vision for Pastoral Ministry Today

In Faith Formation in a Secular Age, the first book in his Ministry in a Secular Age trilogy, Andrew Root offered an alternative take on the issue of youth drifting away from the church and articulated how faith can be formed in our secular age. In The Pastor in a Secular Age, Root explores how this secular age has impacted the identity and practice of the pastor, obscuring his or her core vocation: to call and assist others into the experience of ministry.

Using examples of pastors throughout history--from Augustine and Jonathan Edwards to Martin Luther King Jr. and Nadia Bolz-Weber--Root shows how pastors have both perpetuated and responded to our secular age. Root then turns to Old Testament texts and to the theology of Robert Jenson to explain how pastors can regain the important role of attending to people's experiences of divine action, offering a new vision for pastoral ministry today.

Part 1: Welcome to the Pastoral Malaise

1
A Historical Map of the Pastor in Our Secular Age

“I’m not sure what I’m doing,” he said. I’d never met him before, but I’d talked with hundreds of hims (and hers) after speaking at pastors’ conferences. The air of fragile confidence was familiar, this sense of being lost in the house you grew up in. “I’ve been a pastor for fifteen years, and most days I have no idea what I’m doing,” he continued.1

I could only pause and allow the silence to invite him to say more. “I mean, I know what I’m doing, maybe all too well. I have no trouble filling my days and doing the things that make me a good pastor. I actually think I am a good, even faithful, pastor.”

There was the confidence. When it came to being a pastoral professional, he had it. These had been fifteen years of success. Of course he had stories of failures and mistakes, but like all good professionals, he had learned from them. So in a sense, he had a very good idea of what he was doing and was successful at it.

But then the confidence cracked. “Yet I have this sick feeling, this kind of dull unease in my stomach, that something is wrong. I’m not sure of its origins or why it’s there, but it’s just this discomfort, like I’m missing something.”

“Like something is slipping through your fingers,” I said.2

“Yes,” he returned, “but in a way that gives me a nauseous feeling.”3

Welcome to the Malaise

Canada is known for snow, hockey pucks, and Tim Horton’s coffee. Not surprisingly, the Great White North is less well known for hosting the Massey Lectures on politics, culture, and philosophy. Yet these lectures are famous, not only being aired on the CBC (Canadian Broadcast Channel) but also boasting past presenters like Noam Chomsky and Martin Luther King Jr. In 1991, Charles Taylor, the Montreal philosopher whom we met in the first volume of this series, delivered his lectures, called “The Malaise of Modernity.” Taylor articulated something in these lectures that he would continue to explore years later in his book A Secular Age, in which he investigates the way that our late modern world strikes us with a general feeling of discomfort, a kind of uneasiness. Taylor describes this as a malaise, a kind of nagging illness, the source of which can’t be identified. He explains that this low-grade cultural stomachache may have its origin in at least three things: “(1) the sense of the fragility of meaning, [and the] search for an over-arching significance; (2) a felt flatness of our attempts to solemnize the crucial moments of passage in our lives; and (3) the utter emptiness of the ordinary.”4

It’s no wonder that the pastor I met above felt a dull sense of unease, a vocational nauseousness, like he didn’t know what he was doing. If this cultural malaise has indeed arrived, then it is no surprise that the pastor would feel like patient zero. In A Secular Age, Taylor calls this unease “the malaise of immanence.”5 It is as though living in a world free of transcendence, enchantment, and an organization around divine action has given us a freedom that leaves us with a discomfort we can’t pinpoint, a dull boredom we can’t shake. As I discussed in volume 1, we have arrived in a secular age not because people no longer see it as necessary to go to church (and are willing to mark “none” on a survey) but rather because the very idea that there could be a personal God who orders and acts in the cosmos has become unbelievable (or at least contested). Or we could say that we now live in a world where it is quite easy to forget, deny, or simply not care that there is a transcendent dimension to reality. Taylor’s point is that the price paid for this freedom is an uneasy boredom, an ailment of felt flatness.

If ministry were only about getting people to join the institutional church, then the pastor could hone her professional skills and battle for market share. And many denominations and seminaries have settled for this understanding of the pastor. But what caused the pastor I was talking with to have a stomachache and overall feeling of malaise was the unexpressed realization that the very God he preached had become unnecessary. And in turn this led him to feel somewhere deep enough beyond words that in this shrouded void he was not needed at all.

He was standing in the line of an old vocational tradition, of course, but he nevertheless felt like he was on new ground. Pastors like Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Becket, and Jonathan Edwards never dealt with the fragility of meaning, the flatness of our moments of passage, and the emptiness of the ordinary. It would be as hard for them to understand the feeling of malaise as it would a smartphone. They ministered in a world where haunting meaning spilled out of every corner in omens and revelations. And not only were baptisms, weddings, and festivals embedded in the thick cosmic drama of worship and absolution (so much so that Becket had to remind King Henry that he too must obey), but the passage from life to death was short and sudden. This was anything but flat, and the ordinary was filled to overflowing. For Augustine and Becket, anything ordinary existed in a chain of being that played its part in sacred reality. For Edwards, ordinariness, particularly of raising children, held such cosmic weight that his primary pastoral task (particularly from the pulpit) was to push his congregants to live upright ordinary lives in order to raise children well enough to keep them from hell. For Edwards’s Calvinist Puritanism, ordinary life was the stage where heaven and hell collided.

Not so much for this pastor. He was living in a different time, quite literally. We’ll discuss this time transformation more below. But to illustrate, for Augustine, Becket, and, in his own way, Edwards, time wasn’t frozen in a linear progression as we now assume. Certain moments cast meaning over all of ordinary life by shifting time. The people to whom Augustine, Becket, and Edwards ministered had a shared imagination (a “social imaginary” as Taylor calls it)6 that led them to assume that Good Friday in the year 435, 1138, or 1752 was closer to the original day of the crucifixion than a mid-summer evening in 433, 1130, or 1750. Or to say it more directly, they would say that a “holy day”—say, Good Friday 2018—is closer to the crucifixion than an “ordinary day”—say, July 10, 2015.7

The meaning of the crucifixion is so heavy that it bends time, giving us passage into living and participating in the crucifixion’s cosmic significance, and transforming our empty ordinary days into a haunting, sacred experience. It was the pastor’s job to stand on the boundary of these times, helping people make sense of the flood of meaning as the pastor moved people back and forth between ordinary and sacred time. The ordinary was preparation for the coming extraordinary passage into sacred time. There was no need to find meaning, because all of reality was pocked with time-traveling wormholes, and it was the pastor’s job, particularly in Becket’s time, to drive people in and out of these time-bending events.

But this time jumping was wearying. Just as an astronaut prepares for zero gravity, it was assumed that no one could jump time without training. The level of constant preparation in the ordinary time for the passages into the extraordinary time was a burden. And it seemed to just keep ramping up—the number of prayers, the need to touch relics, the fasting, and so much more. Nevertheless, it was the pastor’s job to, in love, keep prodding and pushing the people to prepare, because one time jump or another was around the corner; celebration of the Eucharist, Good Friday, Pentecost, or some other wormhole was soon to be on the horizon. And if we weren’t ready, the meaningfulness was so heavy that it would rip our souls into pieces. And we were all in this together, so if you decided not to pray, or even secretly dabbled in witchcraft, we all could be obliterated when we hit the zero gravity of sacred time—Good Friday was as frightening as it was celebratory.

The pastor had to live under this constant burden while avoiding the temptations to which many succumbed. The pastor had to balance the utter power of driving the vessel (called the church) that not only organized, almost in full, people’s lives but also moved people in and out of these wormholes of salvation.

The world of the pastor I was talking with at the conference couldn’t be more different. But this radical difference didn’t come through a coup d’état. It was not a direct and immediate overthrow that led the open wormholes one day to suddenly be paved over the next. Rather, getting us to this secular age, in which time is frozen in linear progression and ordinary life is freed from the pressure of cosmic significance, has taken many years and many more small changes that have slowly but surely shrunk the once gaping wormholes.

More on the Malaise

It is not that meaning, rites of passages, and the significance of the ordinary have been annihilated; it is just that they have been hollowed out, repurposed for ends other than experiencing the divine. This is why it feels like a malaise. Slowly but surely in the West the transcendent dimension to life became optional in no small part because people (particularly a growing elite) became sick of pastoral prodding. They wanted their ordinary lives to be less haunted, less directly connected to divine consequence.

But this wanting to be free from the sacred monopoly that the pastor or priest possessed had its origin not in doubt but in belief, not in apathy but in the passion to follow God. Seeking to be even more faithful to God, soon people wrestled the keys to the vehicle of salvation from the hands of corrupt priests, who were reformed to no longer drive buses of salvation but teach individuals to drive for themselves. The Protestant Reformation made each person responsible for his or her own being before a Holy God. All were taught to read the Bible for themselves, given the keys to drive their own faith. And where they would maneuver was no longer into the haunting wormholes where time was bent but around the common neighborhood of their ordinary lives.8

With pietistic desire to give everyone direct access to the vehicle of salvation, the bold line between the sacred and secular became much thinner. This was not because everything was now secular (as we today assume it to be) but because everything was sacred. Even diaper changing and cow milking, as Luther would say, were transformed into tasks done before God. Previously, the ordinary duties were done outside the sacred and, at best, could be seen only as preparation for the coming horizon of the wormhole. But after the Reformation, these common tasks were not just preparatory but the actual location of divine encounter. The Reform...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title Page
• Previous Title in this Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: Welcome to the Pastoral Malaise
• Bridge: Winter Lectures in Paris
• Part 2: The God Who Is a Ministering Pastor
• Index
• Back Cover