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The Pastor's Call & the Pastor's Contract - By Dr. James Bachmann
This is an article Dr. Bachman wrote based on his presentation that he made to the LCMS theology professors in Dallas, Texas in March. In the article, Jim discusses the relationship between the role of the modern day pastor and the life of the contemporary congregation. Presently in our church, questions are being raised about the nature of the relationship and what it means to be a mission minded church. Often, differing expectations, abilities and goals between pastor and congregation become a source of contention in the church.
In order to clarify some issues and move the discussion forward, Dr. Bachman makes use of a distinction between what he calls "the essential tasks" of the pastor and those tasks that are not essential but "necessary." The distinction that he makes enables the reader to approach the problem from a new perspective. His article has important implications for the life of the pastor and the role of the church in modern culture.
The Pastor’s Call & the Pastor’s Contract
A Two Kingdom Perspective on Contemporary Congregational Life
James Bachman; Concordia University, Irvine
1. Introduction
In today’s chaotic and unstable social milieu pastors are often forced to attend to more than the essential work of Word and Sacrament ministry. Pastors must also give significant attention to necessary, though not essentially pastoral, left hand rule tasks of shaping and managing congregational community.
We are not the only generation to face these challenges in the church. Acts, 1 & 2 Corinthians, and the Pastorals each give us glimpses of struggles in the early church over left hand rule social dynamics. For that matter, Jethro had to give practical advice on leadership to his son-in-law Moses (Exodus 18).
2. Yesterday’s stable cultural context for congregational life
Lutheran theology does not support a comprehensive identification of the Gospel with the surrounding religious culture. Christ reaches us through the Holy Spirit’s use of God’s Word and Sacraments. Bach and/or Haugen and/or Isaac Watts and/or Thrivent billboards at Busch Stadium are optional.
But, in typical ministry contexts, we need some set of cultural supports to provide the context in the midst of which the Gospel can be proclaimed. In Germany and Scandinavia, and in the North American immigrant communities that came from these regions, Gospel proclamation was supported by north European music, education, and other social and cultural practices. These gave great strength and unity to the social institutions that supported the congregations and also the colleges and seminaries of the church. (Scandinavian Lutherans also bequeathed steep-roofed church architecture to the Ethiopian Lutheran Church!)
Fifty and more years ago people were born and raised in our congregations or came into our congregations having already experienced many years of being shaped by the overall immigrant culture. Common social and cultural experiences shaped both the essentials and the variable necessities for congregational life. We tended to use common liturgies, sing common songs, teach and shape children in common ways, share common meals and menus, use common worship times, etc. The Lutheran way of life was sufficiently distinctive that Garrison Keillor could make a reputation with gentle humor aimed at us.
The immigrant experiences of Lutherans in North America taught us to shape and manage congregational communal dynamics as a continuous piece with the social dynamics of the surrounding immigrant culture. Because populations were not especially mobile, grandmothers and grandfathers led multigenerational communities. Their hands directly shaped the next generations and passed on the social and cultural inheritance, working to assure that children and children’s children would continue to support communal life in the congregations.
Everybody knew what the right age was for first communion, what catechism classes were about, when they were to be held, how the final examination was to be conducted, and when the rite of confirmation should take place. Sunday School attendance pins had a definite meaning. Everybody knew on which page the Sunday liturgy would begin. If a family did happen to move from one Lutheran congregation to another in a distant state, they could be reasonably confident they would encounter the same practices they had experienced “back home.”
Ministers and lay leaders in Lutheran congregations each usually had 18-22 years of consistent and uniform pre-seminary and pre-leadership mentoring and experience in their congregations ahead of any formal training for becoming congregational leaders. Whether students went to Bronxville or Milwaukee or Seward or Austin, they would find continuity between what they had grown up with and what they were now encountering.
3. Today’s chaotic and unstable social milieu
Today, however, North American culture has succeeded in erasing most of the distinctives of Lutheran immigrant social and cultural practices, especially in so far as those distinctives are “German.” Bach and 16th century chorales are no longer a staple of North American Lutheran culture. In many congregations we no longer have a common educational and catechetical practice for children. A common commitment to the LWML or the LLL no longer glues us together. Pastors and other ministers no longer have common background experiences that establish common bonds.
With the disappearance of the surrounding immigrant culture in the last half century Lutheran congregations lost what I call the “hidden hand of ethnic social solidarity” that had helped them attend to necessary, though not essentially pastoral, left hand rule tasks of shaping and managing congregational community. Church leaders today do not have the old “hidden hands” of grandparents and others to take care of “the necessary” in congregational life. The loss of the “hidden hand of ethnic social solidarity” has also changed the life formation that ministers bring to their congregational vocations. We no longer can be confident that a common cultural inheritance is shaping future pastors and leaders.
4. Doomed Responses
A doomed response to the disintegration of old stable contexts would be to try to recreate the old immigrant social and cultural dynamics in which Lutheran Christians lived together in a more total and integrated community. Our old ethnic social solidarity is gone for good. Yet, we have a tendency still to hope that we can manage the organizing of our congregations through the “hidden hand” dynamics associated with closely knit immigrant community life.
The social structures that helped our predecessors are not essential to what it is to be the Body of Christ. The Body of Christ will necessarily be found in the midst of some form of human social structure, but no particular social structure is essential to the Body’s life.
Another doomed response is to teach that right preaching of the Gospel inevitably builds a viable human community that can pay bills and salaries. The New Testament does not teach that rightly preaching Christ inevitably builds strong human communities. Instead, the Apostles often began their preaching in communities that already had a structure—the Jewish synagogue, the Roman household. Sometimes a human community would grow up that could pay the preacher’s expenses. Sometimes St. Paul had to ply his tent-making trade (Acts 18:3, 20:34, 1 Thessalonians 2:9).
In the days when the “hidden hands” of the grandfathers and grandmothers kept a strong community going, we preachers and theologians sometimes were tempted to think that our orthodox preaching made the human community strong. But we should recognize from the human success of heterodox and non Christian communities like the Mormons that human community, as a left hand rule structure, is not built by orthodox Gospel proclamation.
5. The Ways Forward
The radically new life of distinct persons in one essential community, the Body of Christ, lies “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). Our new life in Christ presupposes the baptismal death of the old Adam’s anxious self-seeking. But, in so far as congregational members are still sinners as well as saints, congregational life will be marked by dynamics that partake of the old order (God’s left hand rule) as well as by the essential unity in diversity that is the Body of Christ (God’s right hand rule). Consequently, we cannot simply identify life in the Body of Christ with life in a typical congregation.
We must carefully examine how congregational community combines both the old sinful human dynamics with the emerging new life in Christ. The essential is to preach Christ. The necessary is to organize sinner/saints so that stable contexts emerge in the midst of which we can preach the Gospel and administer the Sacraments.
The ways forward become difficult here for two reasons. 1. Human congregational life needs to have a sufficiently distinct cultural and social shape, so that sinner/saints have a well-defined communal life to which they can make a robust commitment. 2. God has built so much diversity into his creation that people inevitably organize themselves in a wide variety of social and cultural shapes.
Today, we Lutherans in the LC—MS have a chaos of social and cultural expressions vying to be carriers of the Lutheran Gospel proclamation. How can the LC—MS achieve a distinctive Lutheran expression, when LC—MS congregations throughout North America are fragmented on the question of what social and cultural shaping to use to build congregational life?
Music and liturgy are obvious examples of our fragmentation. Note that the question to ask is not simply whether this piece of music and text is orthodox and in harmony with the scriptures. Humanly speaking, music and ritual are strong expressions of culture and are tools for building community. So, we must also ask both locally and globally whether our choices of music and liturgy are building strong communities. And we should further ask whether our choices have any hope of uniting communities across our Synod? Use of Lutheran Service Book should be considered by our congregational leaders not only with a view toward its orthodoxy but also with a view to how it might help our church body strengthen itself locally and globally. Could LSB become a focused and usable reference point in the midst of the chaos of cultural expressions in worship vying to be carriers of the Lutheran Gospel proclamation?
The very large problem we face as a church body is that we can’t simply set out to discover the best cultural forms for Lutheran life in North America today. We actually have to choose among a variety of creative options that all have potential for building distinctive congregations. If we care about the church beyond the local congregation, this means that our choices must also take into account more than what our own local group happens to like.
The challenge of choosing among a variety of good and creative options risks being contentious, and we experience plenty of contention and division on these matters in the LC—MS today. And some pastors and congregations respond by piously saying that they are above the contention—above it because they no longer have the patience to care about the larger church. They will simply do what’s best in their own eyes.
Both locally and globally, equally valuable social and cultural options are competing to be part of what it is to be Lutheran today. If we want any semblance of visible unity among our congregations, we will not be able to accommodate all of the legitimate choices. Otherwise we’ll just be identified with a confusing potpourri of limitless options that will leave the LC—MS with little that is distinctive. Some are puzzled that despite our distinctive theology we remain a “sleeping giant” in North America. The hard truth is that distinctive theology has to be clothed in distinctive cultural and social forms before most people manage even to notice it.
Many congregations are conscientiously struggling with the problem of choosing and creating viable strategies for building their communal life. Not surprisingly, we see a plethora of strategies competing within congregations and between congregations. Districts suffer as people experience fewer and fewer occasions of social solidarity across congregational borders. And the national church body comes to be seen as remote and mostly irrelevant.
So, today we must labor together to study, debate, and create the appropriate human social and cultural structures that will make our congregations and our Synod humanly strong. Strong human structure will provide the necessary contexts in the midst of which the Gospel can be preached and people can be drawn into the Body.
6. The Pastor’s Call and the Pastor’s Contract
Articles V and XIV of the Augsburg Confession point us to what is central and essential in a Pastor’s Call. Article V: “To obtain such faith God instituted the office of preaching, giving the gospel and the sacraments. Through these, as through means, he gives the Holy Spirit who produces faith, where and when he wills, in those who hear the gospel. It teaches that we have a gracious God, not through our merit but through Christ’s merit, when we so believe” (Kolb/Wengert, 40).
Pastors are usually drawn to their vocations for the sake of these essential tasks and not because they want to do the “necessary” tasks I have been discussing in the earlier sections of this essay. But, our current social and cultural setting is so chaotic and unstable that the human side of congregational life won’t flourish without careful attention to these necessary tasks. And, this same setting often leaves lay people ill prepared and ill equipped to help build congregational and District and Synodical community.
The result is that congregations are more and more leaning on pastors to provide the left hand rule leadership needed to keep the human community going. Congregations are, in effect, not only calling a pastor but also hoping to contract with a leader who can help build the congregation’s life.
One sign of increased pressure on pastors is the relatively new practice of interviewing candidates prior to a Call. I think we need to recognize that congregations today often interview pastoral candidates not because they are presuming to interfere with God’s choice of a true pastor, but because they sense that they need to examine and discern a candidate’s gifts for human left hand rule leadership.
Lutheran theology recognizes that pastors will simultaneously have vocations additional to and other than their pastor calling. Recently, in Faith Active in Works, the Commission on Theology and Church Relations put the point this way:
“While those called by the church to serve in the pastoral office concern themselves with the church’s central task of preaching the Gospel and administering the holy sacraments, they also often have additional callings. A pastor is often also a husband and father. Senior pastors in large congregations have complex administrative duties to attend to in addition to their pastoral tasks. Some pastors are ‘worker priests’ earning a living in a secular calling while also serving as pastors. [Sometimes,] initiatives in Christian care may be administered by the person who is also a pastor. In such cases the administration of a program of Christian care will not be seen to be a distinctive function of the pastoral office but rather an additional task in the church’s life that this person happens also to oversee” (1999, 28).
Article XXVIII of the Augsburg Confession briefly notes this phenomenon: “Whatever other power and jurisdiction bishops have in various matters, such as marriage or tithes, they have them by virtue of human right” (Kolb/Wengert, 94).
7. What’s a Pastor to Do?
Ministerial education does not yet fully prepare church leaders for today’s “necessary” tasks. We are only beginning to grasp how challenging are the non-pastoral tasks confronting today’s pastor. We necessarily rely on native gifts (but not everyone has them) and trial and error (plenty of error) and continuing education (mostly hit and miss). What we dare not any longer do is promote the old romantic notion that, if we are simply faithful pastors (in the essential sense of the Call), the human community will prosper and grow.
A first step to moving forward is simply to acknowledge that today the necessary tasks of building a human community must be intentionally addressed in our congregations. Having acknowledged the need, we can explore strategies for meeting it.
One strategy might be explicitly to relieve pastors of leadership in regard to the necessary tasks. We might intentionally train and empower lay leaders to take over the community building tasks. These tasks are today so difficult that we would need both to train leaders and probably to compensate them for the work that congregations require. We might call this a “Nehemiah” strategy—raising up “Nehemiah’s” to complement our pastoral “Ezra’s.”
Another strategy can be traced all the way back to St. Paul. We could intentionally prepare men to be “worker priests.” If a vocation outside the congregation provides the pastor and his family the material support they need, then the pressure to build a strong human community in the congregation becomes less urgent. Many “second career” men are now coming into our ministries. We might find that a number of them could continue to practice their first careers while serving also as called pastors.
But, in many congregational settings today the main strategy centers around the called pastor. Pastors and other congregational ministers are being expected and required to undertake left hand rule community building tasks along side the essential work of word and sacrament ministry. Because of these expectations and requirements, we must intentionally provide ways for them to acquire the skills needed for these left hand rule tasks. The proliferation of organizations concerned with teaching church leadership skills and “church growth” techniques is a sign of our groping toward intentional preparation of pastors and ministers for left hand rule tasks.
I think we can be helped theologically and practically if we recognize that “church growth” has much more to do with the necessary tasks of congregational community building than with the essential ministry of word and sacrament. In this light we might begin better to understand why law oriented techniques of community building have a role to play in congregational life, even though these techniques are not what the Gospel is about.
Similar reflections shed some light on our perennial difficulties with “evangelism.” Much of what we call “evangelism” should actually be called “outreach.” In order to build a human community, we often need to entice unconverted, old Adam sinners into the congregation. The bait we use will not initially be the Gospel, because the old Adam has no interest in being drowned at the font. Evangelism involves the delicate task of employing a bait and switch approach to lure the old Adam with law enticements, so that we eventually get him close enough to the font to be drowned.
Because today’s pastor is, in many congregational settings, a contracted community builder, he must become adept at first use of the law. He must discover the law oriented techniques needed for community building. He has to ask how far his ministry can accommodate and appropriate goods in the general culture. He must study how far his congregation needs to cater to and market for needs articulated by that culture. He will also be under pressure to use his ministry to help repair and rebuild left hand rule orders like family and education, because these orders are in such disrepair in contemporary society. As Scott Murray, one of our pastors in Houston, once observed over lunch, “I didn’t realize how much of my time in ministry would be spent helping my people become human on the way to the Holy Spirit bringing them to be Christ’s own.”
But this means that today’s Lutheran pastor confronts an almost unbearable tension. He is being pushed into all these law oriented tasks, but because he is also most significantly a called minister of the Gospel, he must remain the congregation’s central focal point for a proclamation that kills the old Adam and brings us to new life hidden with Christ in God.
Luther teaches us that, when we pray “Thy Kingdom come,” we are confessing that God’s Kingdom comes indeed without our praying for it. But God has blessed pastors and congregational leaders to be significant players in how his Kingdom comes in our specific worlds. Through our prayers and our dialogs and our arguments, God will help us build effective contexts for addressing his life-giving word to our worlds.
Written By: host
Date Posted: 4/13/2007
Number of Views: 1267
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