Pastors Don't Just Happen (or "How Did This Happen to Me?" a Pastor's story)

Every superhero has an origin story. As a kid those were my favorite comics to collect. As I grew up I kept reading comics but as my reading material expanded into novels, history and even into things like theology and philosophy, I have always been intrigued by “the hero’s journey.” Over the years, I’ve also gotten to know a lot of pastors. A lot. I’ve come to discover that many of their lives have followed “the hero’s journey” and that these men and women, somewhere in the midst of their journey, have had to become pastors the same way that Frodo had to go to bear the ring to Mordor or Joe Banks had to jump into the Volcano.

In his memoir, The Pastor, Eugene Peterson reveals not only did he have a lack of

interest in being a pastor, but it was a lack that seminary – if anything – reinforced:  “And pastor as a vocation for me seemed like being put in charge of one of those old-fashioned elevators, spending all day with people in their ups and downs but with no view.” Peterson wanted to learn, to teach and to write. His relationship with Jan, his future wife, was transformational. “Those years of graduate study could have marked the beginning of a slow withdrawal from a relational life into a world of books.  She rescued me from that.”

Looking back on the story of his early relationship with Jan, Peterson observes, “What I didn’t know was that when we did marry, something had already been going on in me at some deep level, as yet undetected, that would soon disqualify me from the life of learning that I anticipated.” Unbeknownst to him, maybe even against his will, Peterson was becoming a pastor, shaped by his story and by Jan’s story as their stories converged into one narrative: “In not quite three years, she was what she had always hoped to be – a pastor’s wife.”

Formation by story had been happening for a long time before Peterson recognized where that formation would eventually lead him.

I’m incredibly interested in the story of every pastor that I meet.  I want to collect origin stories from pastors the way I used to collect Spider-man, Batman and Green Lantern stories.

Have you ever engaged your sacred imagination to try to picture how your pastor came to be who, what and where she is right now? Have you ever wondered what events have shaped her, some knowing, some unknowingly, to choose the life she is living as a pastor?

No doubt there are some shady origin stories.

At a conference for youth pastors that I attended years ago, a psychologist spoke, the author of a book on “Why Teenagers Act the Way They Do.” But he turned the tables on us and instead of talking about teens and the way they behave and the whys behind them, he explored by we became youth pastors. He talked about the origin story of the youth pastor who had few friends in high school and he became a youth pastor so teens, the popular ones and otherwise, would have to be his friend. Later I came to call this the “Michael Scott.” As he went on to describe other origin stories the auditorium had more and more empty seats. Heroes don’t always care to share their true identities.

But the truth is that there are men and women who have become pastors, in the past and in the present, who were dragged kicking and screaming, or at least reluctantly, to the pulpit. There are men and women who are as surprised as anyone else on earth to find themselves, pastors. There are beautiful, amazing, wise, sacrificial, patient, long-suffering, generous, faithful women and men called “pastor” who wonder every Sunday morning around 8 a.m., “How did this happen to me?”

I want to invest the second half of my life in collecting the origin stories of these heroes. I want to encourage them and be encouraged by them. I want to honor those people who have honored God with a life well-lived pastoring congregations that have been well-loved by listening to and sharing their stories.

Listen, if you’re a pastor, know this – there are no ordinary men and women who engage in this vocation – Paul the apostle was under the impression you have been given as a gift by God to the church. Being a gift, hand-picked and hand-crafted by God is something extra-ordinary.  Some of you feel like that Christmas sweater that got stuck in the back of the closet, some of you feel like you’ve been re-gifted so many times that you don’t know where you’d call home and some of you feel like every church that’s unwrapped you has thought you were a piñata. But you are a gift that God has given and that’s never for nothing. You are changing the world by living your story and sharing who you are and loving the people God has dropped you into the midst of.

If you’re a pastor and wouldn’t mind sharing your origin story with me sometime, I’d love to hear it. I think you’re amazing.

I'm going to be launching a podcast soon where I'll be exploring my admiration for pastors and their stories more in depth.  If you've got a question you've always wanted to ask a pastor, leave it in the comments and I'll pass it along.  Stay tuned.

Identity

One of the primary gifts of the story is that of identity.  Knowing our story confers upon us that sense of identity that is critical to both formation and purpose.

The story-less life produces a vacuum that demands filling and by God or by another source it will be filled. Typically, in the absence of the internal pressure created by a storied life, we will adopt the dominant narrative of the world immediately around us. This is more unconscious than conscious though we will become actively committed to the promotion and preservation of the narrative we assume.

Even when that narrative is “they should have no story except the story that they choose when they had no story.” (Hauerwas)

In 1984 a book by Thomas Oden was published called, Care of Souls in the Classic Tradition. In this brief but important book, Oden voices his concern about the shift in pastoral care from the Classic tradition, wholesale, to a modern psycho-therapeutic version. Oden laments the lack of familiarity with our story, illustrated by the neglect in the system of formation for pastors for reading and familiarity with the Classic work on pastoral care by Gregory the Great. In place of our story, Oden demonstrates, we adopted the dominant story of the day that focused on the works of Jung, Freud and other psycho-therapies, to provide pastoral care to help people sort out their issues.

Oden wrote, “So pastoral theology has become in many cases little more than a thoughtless mimic of the most current psychological trends.  Often these trends, as psychologist Paul Vitz has astutely shown, have been bad psychology to begin with.” (Oden, p33)

In 2011, Eugene Peterson’s memoir, The Pastor, as published.  Among the many insights about the storied-life or the importance of the narrative, The Pastor, illustrates over and over again our tendency to assume the dominant narrative of our times when we’ve become disconnected from our story.  This is not a problem exclusive to pastors, this is a human problem. But when those who are charged with the care of souls have become disconnected from our story, what hope can souls have to do anything but the same? When pastors have lost the plot, how do those we shepherd not become “twice the child of hell” we ourselves have become?

In The Pastor, Peterson tells the story of a young pastor who had been part of their “Company of Pastors” that were seeking to recover the plot of our narrative that education and church experience has driven out of them or perhaps had simply failed to transmit to them. A young pastor who had been part of the group for seven years was moving on to “multiply his effectiveness.” Peterson tells about the lunch they shared before this young pastor, Phillip, left.

The more he talked that day over our plate of breadsticks and bowls of vichyssoise, I realized that he had, despite the Company of Pastors, absorbed a concept of pastor that had far more to do with American values – competitive, impersonal, functional – than with what I had articulated as the consensus of our Company in Five Smooth Stones. That bothered me. It didn’t bother me that he was changing congregations – there are many valid, urgent, and, yes, biblical reasons to change congregations.  But Phillip’s reasons seemed to be fueled by something more like adrenaline and ego and size. (Peterson, p156)

In Oden’s experience, our story-less experience found us taking on the dominant narrative of pop-psychology as pastoral care. In Peterson’s experience, this same lack of conviction or coherence about the story we are in, led us to adopt the story that good pastoral care is about growing bigger churches.  Peterson writes, “…the momentum of what was being termed church growth was gathering.  All of us in the Company agreed that it was misnamed.  It was more like church cancer – growth that was a deadly illness, the explosion of runaway cells that attack the health and equilibrium of the body.” (Peterson, p158) The work of the Company, to reinforce the nature of the story we find ourselves in, for one another, gave them a perspective on the dominant narrative of church growth, that many will not share.  Knowing what story you are does that.

It often moves you to the fringe. It makes you a threat to the dominant narrative. And the keepers of the dominant narrative will first try to get you back and then failing that, they will mock you and if you persist, will exile or eliminate you.

It happens for to men and women at work who live in a way consistent with their story but contrary to the dominant narrative. When your story is love and the dominant narrative is fear or resentment, love becomes the violence that threatens the system. And you will be stopped. The workplace can be hostile unless you adopt the dominant narrative.

It happens to pastors who invite people to live a story that is different from the dominant narrative that they have adopted when they did not know the story they were in. We have in our minds a story about what a pastor is, does and should be and should do. When our pastors don’t conform to that story, we do not question our story, we question the pastor – their knowledge, their character, their aptitude and their proficiency.

It happens to millennials when they won’t dance to the same tune we love.

A friend who trains people in a particular field related some training day stories to me. One of those stories was about the amount of work my friend has to do to bridge the understanding gap between older members of the workforce with the newer. The younger members worked their shift but when their shift was scheduled to be over, they went home. The older members were living a story that saw this as a lack of commitment, a poor work ethic, an unwillingness to be team players. The younger members story was that they worked to live, they didn’t live to work and they would not give up family time or play time to conform to the story their older counterparts were living. Both had the same job description, both were doing the job they were asked to do but both were living in stories that made them critical of the other. And both felt an internal pressure for the other to adopt their story as the common narrative.

In the U.S. right now we’re experiencing an incredible clash of narratives. I am both fascinated and appalled by what I see. It’s the classic experience of the bigger brother grabbing the little brother’s arm (sorry, Brad, I did you wrong) and using it to smack his little brother in the face while he keeps repeating, “stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself…” You will accept my dominant narrative even while you know that it is not the story we are in.

This is the ongoing challenge for us all. What story are we in? What makes us believe that is our story? What Company are we a part of that supports or challenges (or does both) the story we think we are in? How have you determined the narrative by which you are living your life, making your choices, evaluating reality?  Will you accept the dominant narrative or will you speak and live prophetically, declaring a different story through which others will find hope? Can you clearly articulate for others the story in which you find yourself?

Refugees, God and Our Story

Jesus was a refugee. That's Bible.

That may be why this whole refugee crisis strikes such a deep chord with me.  God has a soft spot for refugees and I think He's grown one in me too.

I'm grateful that I am not alone.  As the days have unfolded, many Christian groups and leaders have spoken up about the plight of refugees, pleading with President Trump to change his executive order that banned them, for at least 120 days, from completing the process they started 18 months to 2 years ago. I'm thankful that the national directors of the Vineyard, Phil & Jan Strout, have issued a statement in favor of refugees.  I'm grateful that the NAE has issued a statement and for World Vision, World Relief and others that have spoken up. 

My heart breaks for them and I hope there is more that we can do, as followers of Jesus, for those displaced by war and famine.  I have very low expectations on nations or governments but I have high expectations on those who follow Jesus, believe in the Resurrection and have experienced God's perfect love that we've been told (and told others) drives out fear.

I know I have some Christian friends who think this is all much ado about nothing. Some who think we're not giving the new President a chance. But honestly, if the new President banned the birth of baby boys or just wrote an executive order to raise our taxes by 10%, I don't think we'd feel inclined to give him a chance. Maybe you would. I just don't think followers of Jesus are called to spectate while the world is on fire. And you can be sure of this, for some of these refugees, the world has already burned down.

People turned back had already been vetted for 18 months or more, already sold their homes, businesses, and came with only what they could fit on the plane. And we've sent them back to places of conflict with less than they had before. Some people we turned back or refused a flight to were on their way for life-saving medical procedures, one of whom has already died (currently, this report appears to be false and the woman in question died just before the ban - join with me in praying that the 4 month old needing heart surgery will survive and get treatment, let's be pro-life). These are people I'm called to love, even if the United States government is not.  I can't ignore this.

Let me share a simple principle: when governments make laws or rules or orders that contradict what Jesus has already told us, government loses every time. Every. Time. That's what following Jesus means. That's why there have been so many martyrs over the last 2000 years. Christians weren't put to death for being good citizens, they've been put to death for disrupting the Order.

Recently, on a Fox morning show, the exchange in this video occurred:

I promise you, Jesus and Mary & Joseph were, in fact, refugees in Egypt despite what the fair and balanced folks at Fox News might think. God has a soft spot for refugees and it would be wise for us to act accordingly.

As followers of Jesus, our interests can never be "America first." We are bound to "Jesus first" thinking and as Vineyard pastor, Rich Nathan recently remarked, "We NEVER read "Jesus, moved by fear..." or "Jesus moved by a desire for security.." It's ALWAYS "Jesus moved by compassion."

If you'd like a quick run down on the order itself and what it actually means, give this a watch:

These are days for followers of Jesus to speak up, open our homes and hearts, let perfect love cast out our fears and live and die like Jesus so that we may all live again like Jesus.

Figuring It All Out

One of the great myths of the United States is the myth of the self-made man (or, thanks to feminism, woman).  It is a story we tell ourselves and we tell each other and we tell our children, to inspire confidence and attempts at doing new things, particularly in business or politics. It is a defining story for our culture and when you suggest that there is no such thing as a self-made anyone, you provoke the tender places that elicit violent reactions or icy cold reception.

As a pastor, I see this same sort of mythologizing among Christians who come to their “own conclusions” about faith and feel great confidence in the rightness of their preferences or of the conclusions they have drawn. These conclusions and preferences have no orientation, no “north star” other than the gravity of their own thoughts and feelings. This is a human condition, so it’s no surprise to see it in the attitudes and actions of believers. In large part, I think this is the unintended consequence of cutting people off from the Story we’re all in, the work of modernity that coopted faith for its own ends.

Stanley Hauerwas writes about this as, “the attempt to produce a people who believe that they should have no story except the story that they choose when they had no story.”

In the pond I swim in, we often refer to this as “the next move of God.”  We could just as easily call it the next wife, the next job, the next re-invention of myself: me 2.0. We talk about “what God is doing today” as if he’s started a new story – because that fits the narrative we’re already living in. Frankly, we prefer a faith practice that reinforces the things that we already believe, the feelings we’re already feeling, the conclusions to which we’ve already come. And by wrapping these all up in very spiritual language we externalize our issues and make noble our actions as we seek to follow Jesus the way we want to.

This path locks us into the inevitable entropy of disintegrated anticipation and the need to keep jumping to a new story as the last one fizzles, fails or falls apart.

Since I’ve been a Christian, not as long as you might think, we have Marched for Jesus, Willow Creeked, Wimbered, Alpha-ed, K.C. Propheted, Inner Healed, Watchmened for the Nations. We’ve been Purpose Driven, Spiritually Mapped, Soaked, the Father’s blessed us, we Cell churched, Shepherded, Globally Awakened, had the restoration of apostles and prophets, done Identificational Repentance and we’ve taken our cities for God.  We have been revived in Brownsville, renewed in Toronto, done 24/7 prayer, 24/7 worship, Youth Churched, fasted for spiritual breakthrough, made intercessors a separate group from everyone else in the church, taken Steps to Freedom, watched Transformation Videos, joined the Global Day of Prayer and discovered the moving pinnacle of worship in Integrity, Hosanna, Maranatha, Vineyard, Hillsong, Delirious, Passion, Jesus Culture, Elevation, and the soup du jour.

Some of the above has been amazing.  Some has been rubbish.

A friend of mine, a younger friend, moved to a large city and found himself in the midst of a number of people his age, believers, intent on following Jesus.  Of course, they couldn’t find a local church that exactly did it for them.  So they started meeting together in an apartment. As their numbers grew, they rented an apartment together, collectively, just to hold their meetings in.  They sat on the floor on pillows, sang acoustic songs, listened to insights they would share with one another, and from one guy in particular who people seemed to look to as an unelected leader or spokesperson for those who gathered.

At first, they didn’t take up an offering, they just helped out the poor in their neighborhood and among them. Once they had to rent an apartment to accommodate their growth as a group, they started to take up an offering, just to help with community expenses, and my young friend was made the “keeper of the bank account” because he was, and still is, gifted by God to handle and create resources.  In a short amount of time, my young friend was involved in two conversations.  The first was awkward.  The “unelected leader” of the group had found himself devoting more and more time to teaching and conversations and need meeting within their informal group.  He came to my young friend and wondered if there were any moneys in the community account that could be used to reimburse him for time missed at his regular job and cover some expenses incurred from doing his volunteer work with their group.  The second conversation was with their whole community, not awkward at all, but an epiphany of sorts.

They called a “community meeting” after their regular meeting for worship and insights. Some of the young adults wanted to discuss an issue.  Several of the young couples had started to have children.  In fact, there were a number of babies in their meeting and several women who were present were also pregnant.  They wondered together whether or not there was something they could do so that the young moms could stay in the room for worship but the babies were all nearby in some adjacent room or something, with someone designated to look after them, maybe on a rota of some kind so not just one mom or individual had to be in the next room with the babies all the time?

It was at this moment my young friend (who had grown up a PK) told me, that he realized they had become a church like the churches they had all come from.

As followers of Jesus, we’re in a Story.  It’s valuable to know the Story we are in because it will save us from thinking we’re “boldly going where no man has gone before.” It will orient us to the things that have always mattered and will always mattered.  The Story will help us sort out our wants that we’ve always projected onto God from the main and the plain of what God is doing.  Knowing our Story helps us sort out the phonies and their miracle claims because we know the Story and what miracles really look like. Immersion in the Story we’re in will carry us through the seasons when it seems like nothing is happening because we know we’ve been there before and these deserts always precede something better. Knowing our Story gives us heart for the long haul rather than spastic sprints from one “move of God” to another.

So, may we know the Story and not be taken in by the stories we’ve made up for ourselves when we thought we had no story.  And may we be saved from “self-made” thinking and find the freedom of being made by God, embedded in the brilliant Story that he has given us.