Relocating To Elfland

For sheer headiness, it would seem hard to surpass Paul’s statement concerning the ministry of young Timothy: “Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers” (1 Tim 5:18). These are God’s words, and we shouldn’t immediately jump to qualify them. Ministers save people. Under God, they do.

I would like to draw attention, though, to the first part of Paul’s statement: “Keep close watch on yourself.” If a minister doesn’t do this, he’s not going to save anyone; and I’d like to suggest that a grave danger lurks in the life of a minister precisely because he is trying to save others. There’s something wonderful, of course, about being used by God to pour out His grace, truth, wisdom, and love to His people and the world; but a minister who fails to keep watch over his heart in this matter can fall prey to a poison so subtle that it remains largely imperceptible until its deadly work is already done.

As C. S. Lewis pointed out in The Four Loves, we humans need to be (and to feel) needed. This is not sinful, per se: it’s a good thing to be needed (take parenting, for example), and the pleasure we feel in being needed (holding an infant, for instance, or lifting a load from a neighbor’s back) is perfectly legitimate. God made us to love others, to meet their needs, and we can and should feel His own joy in doing so.

But there’s a dark side, thanks to sin. Pastors are not immune from the deep insecurities, fears, and longings that beset other mortals; and whereas others may drown these things in distracting pleasures, or mask them behind professionalism or machismo or other forms of self-protective detachment, a pastor can hide behind . . . well, ministry. Love. Giving care and compassion and counsel. And this can be quite addictive. One can reach a place of justifying one’s own existence – deriving a sense of personal value and purpose – from the fact that one is saving others. This is a problem on many levels, but maybe we need to think through the psychology of it a little more.

There is a huge difference between a relationship in which the other person acutely needs me and a relationship in which the other person doesn’t. In the first case, I don’t have to face much in the way of insecurity: I am needed. It’s gratifying. It gives me a sense of strength and value. But in a relationship where I’m not acutely needed, I face a fearful question: will the other person choose to relate to me simply because he or she wants to, because he or she sees who I am (not just what I have to offer) and is either genuinely attracted or (which is perhaps even more comforting) glad to love me in spite of myself? This, in a word, is vulnerability.

A minister can shield himself from such vulnerability by crowding his life with relationships in which, in one form or another, he is constantly needed. Which becomes a self-feeding problem, because eventually he has no life apart from the ministry. When he looks in the mirror, he sees nothing that could attract anyone “just because,” and it’s a terrifying prospect to show himself to others apart from a ministry context. What if they see what he sees: that if he stops offering what he has to offer, there isn’t much of a life or a person left? He has become his ministry; if a person doesn’t need ministry, what else is there to be attracted to? So he goes on hiding behind ministry. He has one secure reason to exist, one sure basis for personal value: he’s saving people.

Of course, the way to deal with this is not to stop ministering! It is not to stop caring and giving oneself for the good of others. It is, rather, to keep watch on oneself and, by the grace of God, to open oneself to all the vulnerability and hurt that can come in a different sort of relationship: the sort in which one’s only basis for acceptance is the love of God in the heart of the other. It is to invite and explore relationships in a non-ministry context, where the basis for the relating is not acute need, but sincere desire. It should go without saying that human relationships don’t neatly fit into compartments of “need” and “desire”; but still, I hope what I am trying to get at is clear.

One avenue to this other sort of relating is for a pastor to do things simply because he desires to do so. There’s a time to go play a round of golf “just because”; there’s a time to go hiking in the woods “just because”; there’s a time to play a board game for no other reason than that it’s fun. These are activities in which the pastor is seen as a mere man; and these are contexts in which it is fairly easy for others to engage him as such. Maybe he will turn out to be a loser, and no one will want to come back for more – but that’s a risk we all have to take in this world, and it has so much to do with this thing we call grace. We are utterly vulnerable before the grace of God – we have no control over whether He will extend it to us. It’s no different in our human relationships. The one who will not embrace this truth will dwell in the prison house of his own self-protection. And it is hellishly dark and cold inside.

There’s a much finer line than many of us would like to admit between (a) wanting someone else to be like Jesus and (b) wanting someone else to be like me, since I’m so much like Jesus.

A part of great preaching is to be able to say something once and have it stick, to say it so vividly and well that it is instantly memorable. The preacher who has to say the same thing four times to make the lights go on is wasting three attempts, which suggests the lights are dimly lit in his own mind. Lacking a scalpel, he must flail about with his machete, and his audience is in for a very long sermon.

I recently listened to an interview with Kenda Creasy Dean on the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Dean is a professor at Princeton Seminary, served as a researcher with the National Study of Youth and Religion, and has recently written a book (based on her work with the NSYR) titled Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church. Here are her opening few lines from the interview: “I think one of the things that is really tricky, particularly to convey to parents, and to congregations as well, is that if you are trying to form your kids to be Christians, it’s not going to fit them very well for American culture. And actually, it’s probably going to deform them for some of the things that we value as a society. And nobody wants to deform their kids – everybody wants their kids to fit in, and to be able to do well.”

This is a call to discipleship that many Christian parents simply won’t embrace. They want their kids to have everything that’s valuable by the standards of North American culture – comfortable affluence, popularity, sex appeal, social experience, all the toys and perks and bells and whistles – and they hope their kids will somehow also want to be in church and keep their virginity as long as possible. The idea that following Jesus might deform their children from the standpoint of cultural values, that maybe their kids won’t fit right in and succeed in all the paths their peers are treading . . . it’s unthinkable. Jesus wouldn’t require such a thing.

Having grown up in separatist Christianity, I’m sensitive to the problem of Christians making themselves “weird” for weirdness’ sake. There’s no problem, for example, with Christians being comfortably affluent – for some, it’s their calling. For every one of us, not to work hard in order to have for purposes of enjoyment and generosity is simple disobedience. But anyone who thinks a life fully oriented to the glory of God won’t make you look weird by North American standards is asleep to the cost of Christian discipleship. Christian faithfulness doesn’t fit in. Get over it.

People say a preacher must preach to an audience of One. That’s ridiculous. God didn’t ordain preaching because He needs to hear it, but because His people need to hear it. It is true, however, that a preacher must preach for the approval of One. And in this he must be resolute.

“Leaders choose daily, but the real weight on their shoulders lies in the need to decide. And there are no easy decisions. To decide requires a death, a dying to a thousand options, the putting aside of a legion of possibilities in order to choose just one. De-cide. Homo-cide. Sui-cide. Patri-cide. The root word decidere means ‘to cut off.’ All decisions cut us off, separate us, from nearly infinite options as we select just one single path. And every decision we make earns us the favor of some and the disfavor of others.” (Dan B. Allender, Leading with a Limp)

A primary reason why many of us need to be spending more time in the presence of our Lord is not so much that we need to be reminded of His majesty as that we need to be reminded of His joy.

We’ve been talking in Bible school the past two weeks about what it means to be the church in the world but not of it (read: the Christ and culture problem). Here’s a brilliant example of cultural engagement that hasn’t lost any of its Christian teeth.

Today is the fifth anniversary of my ordination to the gospel ministry. It seems appropriate to pause on the occasion for a bit of ruminating.

Pastoral ministry has given me a perspective nothing else could have on life in our 21st century North America (having never lived anywhere else, I can’t comment on things elsewhere). One particular sensation stands out from the past five years, and it illuminates the perspective I’m referring to. The sensation – which I experience acutely and regularly – is that of spinning my wheels, of being crushingly busy all the time while not being at all sure what I’m accomplishing. Now, this is very similar to another sensation which is merely the result of finitude: we never see in this life all God is doing in us and through us, but we remain cheerful, because we know He’s doing something and it’s good to be part of it. What I’m describing is quite different: it’s a fairly clear-sighted sense that the value of my work doesn’t match the voluminous energy I am pouring into it. Before someone takes this as an unconvincing attempt at self-deprecation (or, worse still, an outburst of self-pity), let me explain.

I believe a pastor’s most important work is to study and ponder the goodness, truth, and beauty of God (we could bundle all of this into that wonderful biblical phrase, the glory of God). Why? Because his second-most important work is introducing other people (his sheep, in particular) to the goodness, truth, and beauty of God. And the reason for this is that God created humankind to know, ponder, adore, and image His goodness, truth, and beauty – this (borrowing language from Wendell Berry) is what people are for.

I could not have expected, five years ago, how nearly impossible it would be to fence out time for my most important work. “Oh, brother, another pastor complaining about time management.” No, that’s not where I’m going with this at all. In fact, the very mention of time management is an indicator of what I really want to strike at, something I have come to believe runs so deep in our modern thinking that we no longer perceive how pernicious it is.

I expend an utterly astonishing amount of time as a pastor doing two things. First, I administrate. That is, I organize and oversee vast amounts of labor foisted on us by our modern labor saving devices: dozens of phone calls (which can at best be postponed by letting a queue pile up on my answering machine); flurries of emails surrounding every event in the life of the church (not to mention hundreds more that pop into my inbox because someone thinks I may have a boredom problem); hours of time on the information superhighway making sure I don’t sound like an idiot if (God forbid!) I miss something someone else believes newsworthy; and a half that has not yet been told. From the time I roll out of bed until I fall back into bed – at home, in the study, and on the road – I am constantly managing a massive jet stream of data and communications.

Second, I solve problems. I give input (lots of it) on crises (lots of them). Some crises pertain to the beehive as a whole; many others arise in the personal lives of individuals. All are “urgent”; some are genuinely important. But on any given day, I have (to throw out a number) twenty such crises that may, in one way or another, erupt and demand my attention. And I don’t mind this at all, except that when I’ve finished addressing the latest crisis, I often wonder if truly sustainable progress has been made. Crisis aversion is not, after all, the same thing as construction.

Which leads me, finally, to what I have discovered about life in 21st century North America: We are a society (as Chesterton never tired of saying in his context) that values utility above all else. There are things to be done, there are problems to be solved, we want to get these things done (we especially want the problems solved), and we never ask why any of it should be done. We don’t stop to ponder the greater purposes for human existence, and so we have no real reason to ask why sending the next email or making the next phone call is more important than, say, taking an afternoon off to think about why God made apricots, or to read the work of Girard Manley Hopkins, or to play checkers with grandmother. If all that matters is getting things done, it is not long before the supreme virtue in society is efficiency, speed of execution, and acquisition of the technical skills that make one competitive in the marketplace of productivity. It is not long, in fact, before humans are commodified: before their value is determined by how quickly and how well they can do whatever it is society is doing. Entire educational institutions exist to give their students the technical skills to do things – never mind whether students have the foggiest notion what it means to do nothing and think; never mind if truth has ever captivated them, if they love beauty or can even recognize it, if they are passionate about goodness or even regard good and evil as differentiable – certainly never mind whether they have ever worshipped, or ever will.

Of course, the fact that utility and efficiency are ultimately soulless does have its complications. We can’t escape our created humanness, and eventually we feel the emptiness of a life filled with merely doing things. We can’t sustain meaningful relationships, notwithstanding all our skill at keeping in touch; we feel like we’re drifting even when we’re on task; we’re bored even though we’re completely over-stimulated. Enter the therapy industry, with its offer of efficient solutions to make us feel as if we have a soul. If our circuitry is misfiring, we need to be reprogrammed – be it through medication, catharsis counseling, positive thinking, yoga, or what have you.

Personally, I think the therapy industry, like our educational industry, and the time management industry, and a whole lot of what passes as “pastoral ministry,” is largely a product of the system it proposes to improve. We need to radically reconsider our most basic cultural understanding of what people are for, of what it means to be created human in God’s image.

Let me take this directly to the church and offer but one “for instance.” Do you want to have a more meaningful, more connected, more joyful family life? You don’t need a therapist for your marriage and your kids; you need to spend more time as a family doing what God made people for. You need to read the great books together (especially The Great Book, until its grand story of the world captures your imagination, and begins to shape your sense of what you’re doing in the world). You need to eat together, and linger over it. You need to play games together. You need to sing and pray together. You need to grow flowers and raise gerbils and catch fish and practice archery and recite poems and look at the Milky Way through a telescope on cold winter nights. You need to turn off the phone and the computer and the television until you have a clear idea, individually and as a family, of what the purpose of humankind might be, and what this has to do with goodness, truth, beauty, and glory. And only once all of this is clear in your heads should you flatter yourselves that you’re qualified to use the tools the modern world has given us.

The trouble with truth, goodness, beauty, and glory is that they aren’t things we do and they aren’t in the same universe as questions about utility (much less efficiency). What is the “use” of glory? It isn’t useful. It’s glorious. Its value lies in itself, which to apprehend is the life of the soul.

If I have a burning desire for the next five years of my ministry, it is that I may waste more time pondering, savoring, recounting, and enacting the goodness, truth, and beauty of the Lord. I have wasted time doing so here, and it has seemed a fitting way to celebrate the anniversary at hand.

At the heart of manly leadership is the dogged pursuit of horizons one will not reach, of goals one will not attain, without the skills and resources one needs, without self-pity, and without understanding or sympathy from others. If a man demands more than this, he should find a different calling.