Where Pastors Can Be Human

And actual pastors

Photo by ALMA on Unsplash

I read a post by a pastor on Not Twitter this week that’s been weighing heavily on my soul. It has since been taken down, so I will not use his name:

Since I became a lead pastor, I can't remember the last time a person invited me out just to be together as human beings in the world. There Is always an ask always an agenda always a need. Probably this is one reason why I tweet so much and it's an important self-realization that this has served as a crutch for me instead of really dealing with the fact that isolation and expectation like that are soul-draining. I think that until I have something published or some meaningful work product to put out here, I will not be around as much, as I will be finding some grass to touch. Hopefully. Cheers.

Another pastor whom I’m friends with, retweeted it, saying:

This dynamic of loneliness in the pastorate is so real and can be excruciating. It’s why the small, slow, and deep work of connecting pastors as people—not just colleagues—has become a passion flowing out of my own experience of loneliness.

This all provoked my empathy, but also so many questions that have been bothering me regarding the vocation of the pastor. What is a pastor? How big is the gap between the pastor and the laity? What is the nature of their authority? What expectations do we put on a pastor? Are they biblical? Are they dehumanizing? Are pastors able to be vulnerable? Can they have friends? If their friends are only other pastors and leaders, how may that stunt their own maturity and harm their congregants? Who is caring for their souls? Are pastors ever able to have what Eugene Peterson calls “unpretentious companionship?”

This all makes me return to Peterson’s work on the vocation of the pastor. The expectations placed on a pastor are often managerial or messianic: facilitating giftedness in service of the church, keeping the institutional side running—growing, “getting things done.” Pastor as program director. Or, there is the honorable work of perceiving hurt, managing crises, and stepping in to help people in trouble. While these are good and necessary parts of the vocation of pastor, Peterson warns that they are not the center of it. And if they become so, God isn’t needed so much. I think this is where the loneliness comes in, because it becomes dehumanizing. And it’s something we all have to think about—the expectations the pastor puts on oneself, the expectations from church leadership, and from the congregants as well. The culture in the church can become toxic to our greatest need.

The main vocation of the pastor, according to Peterson, is something less performative. Less measured in the short-term. It is the pastor as spiritual director. This is “the act of paying attention to God, calling attention to God, being attentive to God in a person or circumstances or situation.” This requires a slowing down, a listening, a looking, contemplation, prayer, doing what looks like nothing. Spiritual direction requires reverence for people’s secrets, embracing the holiness of encounter, and curiosity and imagination to see the Spirit working at this moment. It is a refusal to accept the faces that are being presented—both the virtue and the vices that mask our untold stories—and get a glimpse of the work that God is inviting us into together. It’s all so glorious and subversive, because it is right there in the ordinary. The pastor as spiritual director “is not the formulation of something new but the recovery of something original.” And yet it’s a paradigm shift in our central expectations for a pastor.

Spiritual direction is more than teaching the content of the faith and virtuous living, although these are prerequisite to the maturity the vocation requires. We absolutely need pastors who teach and model the obedience of the faith. But we aren’t projects to be filled with their knowledge or problems to be fixed. And I think that is at the root of this loneliness, and the constant agenda-ing attached to what the pastor’s tweet above articulated. Which leads to another question: do we put all this on one person in the church? Pastors need spiritual direction as well. I know a number of pastors and seminary professors who hire spiritual directors and benefit greatly. I am grateful for them to have that, and I honor this professionally earned and accredited position. I have a friend in this profession and am confident that she is very good at what she does. And passionate.

But I also wonder, on another level—a level that is woven into our ordinary living but our deep-rooted needs—wouldn’t we all benefit from spiritual direction in our friendships? Peterson points out that the Celtic translation for spiritual director is “soul-friend.” Don’t we all need this? And don’t we want to be this for one another? What if our pastors and leaders in the church could develop a culture that brings us up in becoming soul-friends? Spiritual direction would train us to look at one another with wonder instead of as “ministry opportunities.” What if we are trained to look and listen for how the triune God is at work in one another? If we have soul-friends attuned to the Spirit in this way, would that not also help us to, as Peterson describes it, be a little less interested in ourselves and gain interest in God who is in us? If we were to grow in maturity in spiritual direction, we wouldn’t look at our pastors as program directors or messiahs. We could have unpretentious conversations.

I don’t want to be too idealistic, here. I’m talking about a paradigm shift. It isn’t easy work. A pastor could not do this on his or her own. What are the leaders and volunteers willing to do to help keep the church running so that the pastor isn’t in constant managerial and program mode? And where can the pastor find these soul friends? In the congregation? In the leadership? Some kind of parachurch gathering of fellow-pastor spiritual directors to one another? Professionally? Maybe in multiple places in different ways.

Spiritual direction certainly isn’t easy work for the central vocation of the pastor. Peterson is looking to the prophet Jonah to make his case. “It is a work in which we give up control, fail and forgive, watch God work. A Nineveh vocation.”

It doesn’t answer all my questions above. But I feel like it’s a good start.

And there’s another question provoked by the tweet that I didn’t ask—how social media helps and hurts in this lonely, dehumanized context he described. I want to keep thinking about this and would love to hear reader’s thoughts, both from pastors and congregants.

My thoughts here are also percolating within the context of my other writing, particularly Why Can’t Pastors Be Friends with Congregants? and On Being a Door Opener.