Pastor Pete
Pastor Pete! Pastor Pete! It’s Pastor Pete!” The chorus of exclamations came from the mouths of half a dozen children, their faces pressed to the glass of our living-room window. These voices—excited and clamorous—entered my gut with a feeling of poignant loss. I knew that I would never hear myself addressed that way again—“Pastor.”
Jan and I had left our Maryland congregation a year previous to the children’s chorus and had returned for a few days to complete arrangements to sell our house and move our belongings to another city across the continent. There I would be addressed as “Professor.” Together we had been pastor to this congregation for nearly thirty years. We had said our good-byes, many of them heart-wrenching. We didn’t think we could handle any more emotion. Nobody knew we were back. We were trying to get in and out of town as inconspicuously as possible.
But we were discovered by the children. They were out trick-or-treating while we were at work in our living room getting ready for the arrival of the moving van in the morning. We had forgotten it was Halloween and had left our drapes open as we made our preparations. Masked and costumed, their noses pressed against the glass, they were unrecognizable as the children I had baptized, children of parents I had married, children whose grandparents I had buried over a span of three decades. But they recognized me: “Pastor…Pastor Pete.”
I have no idea who started it, but many years before some of the young people in the congregation had begun calling me Pastor Pete. The usage soon filtered down to the children. Nobody had ever called me Pastor before. But as the years went on, I became accustomed to it and found that I rather liked it. Pastor.
Ours was an informal congregation, and, except for the children and youth, most of the people in it were older than I and addressed me by my given name, Eugene. Which was just fine by me. Somewhere along the way while growing up I developed a rather severe case of anticlericalism. I had little liking for professionalism in matters of religion. If I detected even a whiff of pomposity, I walked away. But Pastor, unlike Reverend or Doctor or Minister, especially when used by the youth and children, wasn’t tainted with professionalism, at least to my ear. Pastor sounded more relational than functional, more affectionate than authoritarian.
This book is the story of my formation as a pastor and how the vocation of pastor formed me. I had never planned to be a pastor, never was aware of any inclination to be a pastor, never “knew what I was going to be when I grew up.” And then—at the time it seemed to arrive abruptly—there it was: Pastor.
I can’t imagine now not being a pastor. I was a pastor long before I knew I was a pastor; I just never had a name for it. Once the name arrived, all kinds of things, seemingly random experiences and memories, gradually began to take a form that was congruent with who I was becoming, like finding a glove that fit my hand perfectly—a calling, a fusion of all the pieces of my life, a vocation: Pastor.
But it took a while.
I grew up in a Christian family and embraced the way of Jesus at an early age. Christian was a term that seemed as natural to me as my own name. Pastors were part of the landscape but never a significant part of it. In the small-town Montana world in which I was reared, they always seemed marginal to the actual business of living. The one pastor I respected in my growing-up years arrived too late to overcome the accumulation of indifference that in effect placed pastors on the margins of my life. I didn’t take them seriously.
I took scripture seriously. I took Jesus seriously. I took church seriously. I took prayer seriously. But not pastors. For the most part, pastors seemed tangential to all that. In our congregation we had preachers and reverends, brothers and sisters, deeper-life teachers and evangelists, missionaries and revivalists and faith healers. But no “pastors.” By the time I entered adolescence, putting together fragments of overheard conversations among the adults, I concluded that “pastors” basically came to kill elk with their Winchester 30.06 rifles and catch rainbow trout on dry flies. They came and went regularly from our church. Two years was the usual tenure—three at most. They arrived and left like migrating geese. Some headed north to Canada in the spring where the conditions for adventure were congenial, others south to Mexico in the fall for the winter warmth and solace of sun and sand. Nearly everything of what they talked, preached, and taught had happened someplace else. And it was always glamorous—remarkable miracles and visions. And conversions. As an adolescent, I envied the people who could tell stories of their dramatic conversions from lives of drink and drugs and assorted debaucheries. They were so much more interesting. I grew up in a church culture that made an art form of Damascus Road stories. Whenever I heard the stories—and I heard them frequently—I felt so ordinary, so left out. But that didn’t last long. After a while all the stories started sounding alike and took on a patina of banality.
They were good storytellers and accomplished publicists for the gospel. But they weren’t pastors. Mostly I liked them. But I never respected them. Outside of the morning our family spent with them each Sunday, none—there was one significant exception—seemed particularly interested in God. And I was beginning to get interested in God. But it never occurred to me to become a pastor.
As my world widened, nothing that I observed and experienced in pastors caused me to rethink my adolescent assessment. If anything, it confirmed it: being a pastor is not serious work. Within congregations the work of pastor seemed like a grab bag of religious miscellany. From among outsiders, the general attitude I picked up on was, at best, condescension, at worst, outright disrepute.
Later as a young adult, still attending church most Sundays, I found my way into a more congenial, at least to me, church culture. It wasn’t as emotionally interesting as the one I had grown up in. I missed the melodrama. There was considerably less spontaneity and a much deeper sense of responsibility. Instead of emotional pleas for special offerings, supported by desperate stories of suffering and need, these churches had carefully prepared budgets to which people pledged their annual support. Spontaneity was elbowed to the sidelines by responsibility. The men and women in these pulpits were called doctor, head of staff, and minister. There was considerably less vagrancy. But still nothing that I would later identify as pastor.
I came across a poem by Denise Levertov in which she uses the phrase “every step an arrival.” She was giving an account of her development as a poet. I recognized in her phrase a metaphor for my own formation as a pastor: every step along the way—becoming the pastor I didn’t know I was becoming and the person I now am, an essential component that was silently and slowly being integrated into a coherent life and vocation—an arrival.
There is also this to be said. North American culture does not offer congenial conditions in which to live vocationally as a pastor. Men and women who are pastors in America today find that they have entered into a way of life that is in ruins. The vocation of pastor has been replaced by the strategies of religious entrepreneurs with business plans. Any kind of continuity with pastors in times past is virtually nonexistent. We are a generation that feels as if it is having to start out from scratch to figure out a way to represent and nurture this richly nuanced and all-involving life of Christ in a country that “knew not Joseph.”
I love being an American. I love this place in which I have been placed—it’s language, its history, its energy. But I don’t love “the American way,” its culture and values. I don’t love the rampant consumerism that treats God as a product to be marketed. I don’t love the dehumanizing ways that turn men, women, and children into impersonal roles and causes and statistics. I don’t love the competitive spirit that treats others as rivals and even as enemies. The cultural conditions in which I am immersed require, at least for me, a kind of fierce vigilance to guard my vocation from these cultural pollutants so dangerously toxic to persons who want to follow Jesus in the way that he is Jesus. I wanted my life, both my personal and working life, to be shaped by God and the scriptures and prayer.
In the process of realizing my vocational identity as pastor, I couldn’t help observing that there was a great deal of confusion and dissatisfaction all around me with pastoral identity. Many pastors, disappointed or disillusioned with their congregations, defect after a few years and find more congenial work. And many congregations, disappointed or disillusioned with their pastors, dismiss them and look for pastors more to their liking. In the fifty years that I have lived the vocation of pastor, these defections and dismissals have reached epidemic proportions in every branch and form of church.
I wonder if at the root of the defection is a cultural assumption that all leaders are people who “get things done,” and “make things happen.” That is certainly true of the primary leadership models that seep into our awareness from the culture—politicians, businessmen, advertisers, publicists, celebrities, and athletes. But while being a pastor certainly has some of these components, the pervasive element in our two-thousand-year pastoral tradition is not someone who “gets things done” but rather the person placed in the community to pay attention and call attention to “what is going on right now” between men and women, with one another and with God—this kingdom of God that is primarily local, relentlessly personal, and prayerful “without ceasing.”
I want to give witness to this way of understanding pastor, a way that can’t be measured or counted, and often isn’t even noticed. I didn’t notice for a long time. I would like to provide dignity to this essentially modest and often obscure way of life in the kingdom of God.
Along the way, I want to insist that there is no blueprint on file for becoming a pastor. In becoming one, I have found that it is a most context-specific way of life: the pastor’s emotional life, family life, experience in the faith, and aptitudes worked out in an actual congregation in the neighborhood in which she or he lives—these people just as they are, in this place. No copying. No trying to be successful. The ways in which the vocation of pastor is conceived, develops, and comes to birth is unique to each pastor.
The only modifier I can think of that might be useful in honoring the ambiguity and mystery involved in the working life of the pastor is “maybe.” Anne Tyler a few years ago wrote a novel with the title Saint Maybe. How about Pastor Maybe? That would serve both as a disclaimer to expertise (that if we could just copy the right model, we would have it down) and a ready reminder of the unavoidable ambiguity involved in this vocation. Pastor Maybe: given the loss of cultural and ecclesiastical consensus on how to live this life, none of us is sure of what we are doing much of the time, only maybe.
Witness, I think, is the right word. A witness is never the center but only the person who points to or names what is going on at the center—in this case, the action and revelation of God in all the operations of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I have neither authority nor inclination to tell anyone else how to do this. Those of us who enter into this way of life, this vocation, this calling, face formidable difficulties both inside and outside congregations—idolatrous expectations from insiders, a consignment to irrelevancy by outsiders. So: in light of the widespread misapprehensions thrown into this melting-pot postmodern culture that is North America, there may be a place for honest reporting from the field. A society as thoroughly secularized as ours hardly knows what to do with a life that develops out of a call from God and is lived out within the conditions of God’s revelation. But a witness might be useful.
William Faulkner was once asked how he went about writing a book. His answer: “It’s like building a chicken coop in a high wind. You grab any board or shingle flying by or loose on the ground and nail it down fast.” Like becoming a pastor.