Sixteen of us—two priests, one rabbi, and thirteen Protestant pastors (six Presbyterians, a Lutheran, an Episcopalian, two Baptists, three Methodists)—sat on metal folding chairs arranged in a circle in Harford County’s Department of Health Services, the same kind of chairs my congregation sat on in our basement sanctuary on Sundays. We did this every Tuesday for three hours over the course of two years (minus summers). Dr. Hank Hansen, a psychiatrist from Phipps Clinic, the psychiatric unit of Johns Hopkins Hospital, convened us.
Harford County, an area northwest of Baltimore in Maryland, is mapped on the coastal plain between the Chesapeake Bay and the gentle, rolling hills of the Piedmont that in thirty or so miles to the west begin a gradual rise to become the Appalachian Mountains. For two hundred years it had been a quiet place of dairy and horse farms, interspersed with forests of oak and beech, bounded on the north by the Mason-Dixon Line and the Susquehanna River. The millennium preceding the naming and dividing of this land, it had been home to Indian tribes, whose way of life had been interrupted by the arrival of explorers and adventurers from Europe. The Europeans saw that “the land was good” and proceeded to steal it from the Indians and begin the settlements that eventually became the United States of America. A few years before I arrived, real-estate developers had been busy promoting the green hills and suburban privacies of our county as an alternative to the pollution, noise, congestion, and rising crime rate in the city.
The population was growing—the reason that I had been assigned here to develop another congregation—and with the influx of new people, mental-health needs had increased, exponentially as it turned out. It wasn’t just that there were more people. Social conditions were changing. Just a few years earlier, the psychiatrist Rollo May had diagnosed our time as the “Age of Anxiety.” The buffer of green hills and lush forests, small villages and family farms, soon failed as a defense against both the miasma of anxiety and the Egyptian plague of emotional and mental problems. By the time I arrived in October 1962, two military installations, Aberdeen Proving Ground and Edgewood Arsenal, were links to the war in Vietnam. People were coming unhinged at many levels: uprooted, loss of place and neighborhood, military families under special stress, civil rights and racial tensions, three major assassinations (John Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy), the sexual revolution, the drug culture, young people in new schools finding themselves strangers for the first time in their lives. A lot of insecurity, a lot of stress.
The doctors at the Phipps Clinic in the city were facing a dramatic increase in the number of people coming from our county needing help, often, if and when they did come, too late. There was no infrastructure in our county adequate to respond to this unanticipated demand for emotional-and mental-health services. Who could have guessed we might need it? We were in a secure, green place of farms and historic villages with storied roots in our colonial past. People arriving thought they had left social and personal problems in the city, or wherever else they had come from. No one anticipated this. We had few counselors, a sprinkling of psychologists and psychiatrists.
Dr. Hank Hansen took the initiative. He envisaged using pastors as a first line of response to the burgeoning mental-health needs. He chose our county to try it out. The hospital administration authorized the program. The Phipps Psychiatric Clinic would donate Dr. Hansen’s services to us every Tuesday morning. By letter he invited all the clergy in our county to meet with him. Sixteen of us showed up.
Dr. Hansen introduced himself and the program. He told us he thought that pastors were probably the most likely persons in the community to be in touch with people in mental and emotional crisis. And people who didn’t have a pastor would most likely know someone who did.
He told us what he wanted to do: train us to provide a kind of front-line safety zone for intercepting mental-health needs. He would train us to evaluate and respond to the mental-health needs that were proliferating in our increasingly dislocated, uprooted, anxiety-stressed population. We would learn how to identify and deal with routine emotional difficulties, but even more important, how to discern psychotic breaks with reality, serious suicidal threats, and symptoms of potential violence and then arrange with the hospital or police for emergency referrals or interventions.
“Here’s my plan: I’ll meet with you each Tuesday morning for three hours. The first hour and a half I’ll lecture; the second hour and a half we will do group therapy, working through one another the various things we might expect to face. We will do this for two years.
“Would you be interested?”
We were.
So began a two-year immersion in aspects of congregation that I knew next to nothing about: strategies of deception and denial, passive-aggressive neuroses, alcoholism and other addictions, anxiety and depression, family dynamics, sexual confusion. I learned a lot. It was heady stuff. Dr. Hansen was young—thirtyish, with high cheek bones, black hair, a ready smile, and a strong chin. Crisp and decisive. He lectured without notes, conversationally. The group-therapy session was an education in itself as I observed his skill in bringing out into the open the intricacies of emotional and body language, demonstrating the impact of relationships on communication as the sixteen of us dealt with one another.
The only other psychiatrist I had known was a member of the White Plains congregation where I had worked before I knew I was a pastor. Dr. James Wall was the chief psychiatrist in the Westchester County Hospital, just north of New York City. He was a large and imposing man seated, along with his wife, in the front pew of our congregation each Sunday. Our church sanctuary in White Plains was imposing in itself, a stone gothic structure constructed on a battlefield of the Revolution of 1776 and dignified by a cemetery of the colonial dead. Dr. Wall worshipped with his eyes shut. I always assumed he was sleeping. And then one Sunday while I was preaching, he opened one eye and nodded his approval. I took it as the equivalent of an audible, affirming “Amen.” Psychiatrists for me were the high priests of the medical profession. This was the first time one of them had noticed me, even though it had only been with one eye.
Later that summer my senior pastor was away on vacation and I was left in charge. The church had recently employed an Indonesian immigrant to help with the janitorial work, a young man in his early twenties with as yet very little English. He was apprehended molesting a nine-year-old boy in the men’s restroom. Irate, the boy’s parents came to me. I panicked—I was into something way over my head. The only person I could think of to ask for help was Dr. Wall.
Without hesitation he said, “Bring him to me,” and gave me directions to his office at the hospital. We were there in fifteen minutes.
We were shown into his office by a receptionist. I was expecting something on the order of the holy of holies. He was, after all, a high priest. This was very ordinary. What followed was also ordinary.
He asked Dennis what had taken place. Dennis was matter-of-fact. Dr. Wall said, “Dennis, you remember very well. You have a good memory. Do you ever forget things?” Dennis nodded.
“This is something I want you to forget. Use your forgetter on this one.”
And that was it.
That evening Dr. Wall stopped by the home of Dennis’s parents and talked it over with them. I wasn’t there. He let me know that he would check in with the parents monthly for the next year to see how things were going. And that was the end of the matter.
But not for me. For me it was the beginning of a discernment and clarification of relationship between pastor and psychiatrist, what we have in common and what we do that’s different, a clarification and discernment that was about to accelerate in the two years of Tuesdays with Dr. Hansen.
I was a new pastor, only recently secure in my vocation as pastor, and still in the early days of realizing what my workplace, my congregation, consisted of and what was actually involved in going to work every day in this workplace. For a number of years I had assumed that I would be a professor, with students in a classroom. But then the Pastor John of Patmos epiphany in New York City catalyzed my identity as pastor. Pastor was my vocational home ground. Drawn into it by many previously unrecognized threads, I entered a life centered in sanctuary and congregation, contextualized by growing up on the sacred ground of Montana.
The two years of Tuesday mornings further clarified my new working life as pastor. I joined the group of sixteen out of a sense of community service. I, along with my clergy companions, was asked to help the mental-health professionals at this time of social and moral confusion and distress, and it seemed like a good thing to do. In the process I was introduced to the complex field of counseling and psychology.
The pastoral counseling movement in the American church had been in session thirty years or so at this time. Most seminaries were giving at least some training in dealing with the emotional needs of people. But not my seminary. I had only peripheral acquaintance with it and not much interest. I was intoxicated with the miracle and mystery of language—American English to begin with, but Hebrew and Greek not far behind. I was intrigued by the complexities involved in understanding all the operations of the Trinity and the many dimensions in which these operations entered human lives.
But people in particular—it seems odd to even say this now—I had pretty much taken for granted. I liked some of them and didn’t like others. I tried to be polite to those I didn’t like. I had my life to live and they had theirs. Those close to me, my wife and children in particular, I took delight in knowing in more and more detail, and if I came across details I didn’t like, I brushed them aside, pretending that they didn’t exist, or clumsily tried to eliminate them by rebuke or “good advice.”
And now I was gathering a congregation to worship God. When the invitation came to join the Phipps Clinic project to prepare pastors to serve the community in the way Dr. Hansen would guide us, I didn’t anticipate that it would have anything directly to do with understanding my work with the congregation. It was a time of social disruption when many of the landmarks, family and neighborhood security systems, were either eroding or falling apart. I thought I was just being helpful, doing good Samaritan work, on those Tuesday mornings. Maybe something like a payback for the good Samaritan work psychiatrist Dr. Wall had done to help me out as a pastor.
What happened, though, is that it became a major factor in understanding congregation and the nature of my work in it.
I was in the process of coming to terms with my congregation, just as they were: their less-than-developed emotional life, their lack of intellectual curiosity, their complacent acceptance of a world of consumption and diversion, their seemingly peripheral interest in God. I wasn’t giving up on them. I didn’t intend to leave them where I found them. By now I was prepared to enter a long process of growth in which they would discover for themselves the freshness of the Spirit giving vitality to the way they loved and worked and laughed and played. And I was finding areas of common ground that made us fellow pilgrims, comrades in arms in recognizing unexpected shards of beauty in worship and scripture and one another. I was learning to not impose my expectations of what I hoped for them but rather let them reveal to me, as they were able, who they were. I was becoming a pastor who wasn’t in a hurry.
Meanwhile on these Tuesdays I was being given another way to give definition to congregation. In our Tuesday seminars I was given a vocabulary and imagination to understand the people in my congregation as problems. This was refreshing. Here was a way of giving clarity to this haphazard gathering of people with various, mostly undefined, aspirations to get in on something more than they were experiencing, something that had to do, maybe, with a vaguely imagined God. Defined as problems, my congregation gave me an agenda that I could do something about. Problems have names: anxiety, alcoholism, depression, narcissism, Oedipus complex, transference, countertransference. Once there was a name for the problem, you could do something about it. On Sundays, as I looked over my congregation, they often appeared as a gray assemblage of weakly motivated people hoping for something, as yet undefined, that might fill in the gaps in their jobs and their marriages. On Tuesdays I was being given an entirely different way to define my congregation—as problems. People with problems, men with baggage, women with neuroses. I was fascinated. The intricacy of emotional problems was intriguing. I listened with new ears and heard with heightened attention. If problems were the problem, problems could be fixed. I found that I was good at this. I had an aptitude for dealing with people in need. I liked helping them. I liked helping spouses understand and work on their marriages. I liked helping parents understand and guide their children. I liked helping people understand and forgive their parents. I was soon devouring the writings of Erik Erikson and Carl Jung, Bruno Bettelheim and Viktor Frankl.
Being a pastor put me amid people with needs: marital needs, family needs, identity needs. I was doing good work, work that gave me satisfaction, work that was recognized and praised by others as good work. I didn’t know at the time how close I was to abandoning my haphazardly intended but finally achieved pastoral vocation. It was a time when pastors all over the country were abandoning their vocation to take up counseling. I could have ended up among them.
Those two years of Tuesdays were critically important for me. Besides orienting me in the details of the emotional, mental, and relational difficulties that bedevil people’s lives, an orientation that I very much needed, it did something even more important—it clarified what I was not: I was not primarily dealing with people as problems. I was a pastor calling them to worship God. My parishioners had problems, of course—who doesn’t? And I was always present to listen and understand and pray. But when and if a person in my pastoral care had a problem that made it difficult to function in a satisfactory way or that was life-threatening emotionally in marriage or work, the Tuesday seminar was providing me with the names and whereabouts of people who could help. By this time I had acquired appreciation, understanding, and deep respect for the psychiatrists and psychologists, the psychoanalysts and counselors, who were taking seriously and working skillfully with the problems that were being visited on my generation.
But this was not my work, at least not my primary work, not the work I had been called to do. Gradually this became clear to me in the Tuesday seminar. The people who made up my congregation had plenty of problems and more than enough inadequacies, but congregation is not defined by its collective problems. Congregation is a company of people who are defined by their creation in the image of God, living souls, whether they know it or not. They are not problems to be fixed, but mysteries to be honored and revered. Who else in the community other than the pastor has the assigned task of greeting men and women and welcoming them into a congregation in which they are known not by what is wrong with them, but by who they are, just as they are?
The call I, frightened and panicked, made to Dr. Wall that day I was in over my head with Dennis and his parents has been repeated in similar circumstances hundreds of times. What on my own I certainly would have bungled, he handled with intuitive dispatch made possible out of long years of experience and practice. In the disordered times in which we live, pastors can’t get along without Dr. Wall and Dr. Hansen. But their work is not my work. Knowing they are there to do their work, I am free to do my work. And my work is not to fix people. It is to lead people in the worship of God and to lead them in living a holy life.
Tuesdays, besides helping me be a better good Samaritan in my community (a good thing), also introduced me to ways I could be useful to my congregation that would satisfy them without having to deal seriously with God or with themselves as children of God (a bad thing).
I can remember the moment that clarified this unique nature of congregation as over against the world of the therapeutic into which I was being introduced on Tuesdays. It was the chairs that did it, those gray, metal, folding chairs arranged in the Department of Health Services so that we were looking into one another’s faces, carrying on conversations, with Dr. Hansen probing our relationships with one another in observations and questions. During the lecture part of our morning we were considering people, other people, as problems, dealing with them as problems, discussing ways to go about fixing the problems. In the therapy section of our morning we were the problems. Our avoidances, our defense tactics, our passivities, our body language—all under scrutiny. We didn’t get by with much. And if we did, it wasn’t for long. Our lives, our language, our relationships with one another, our habits of concealment, our silences that spoke louder than words, slowly, sometimes painfully, surfaced.
And then one morning I noticed the chairs. The chairs in which we were sitting were exactly the color and material and style of the chairs Frank arranged each Sunday in our basement sanctuary for our worship of God. On Sundays they were arranged in two sections set at right angles to each other in our L-shaped basement so that we could look into the faces of at least half of the congregation. All the chairs faced an open space occupied by a cross and pulpit, communion table and baptismal font. Same chairs, similar configuration as on Tuesdays, but a totally different focus. In therapy we were looking at one another, noticing what was obscured or held back, identifying problems that we could solve or fix. In worship we were all fairly accessible to one another but looking not at one another but beyond one another, cultivating a listening, responsive attention to what we could not see—God. The Celtic cross, communion table, baptismal font, and pulpit called us to attention before the God we could not see or figure out. Therapy, fixing problems, fixing people, was about us. Worship, becoming whole, opening our lives to what we could not control or understand, was about God.
I observed this without any sense that one was better or worse than the other. They were both necessary, both appropriate, given the work that was there to be done in each setting.
It was an epiphanic moment, seeing the chairs of Tuesday in contrast to the chairs of Sunday. In the Tuesday chairs I was learning to understand people in terms of their problems; in the Sunday chairs I was learning to understand people in terms of God’s grace working in them. The epiphany was not in the observation itself, but in the realization that I was gradually becoming more interested in my congregation as problems to be fixed than as persons made in the image of God, capable of living, just as they were, to the glory of God.
The Morrison family put the epiphany into a story. For a couple years now, I had been calling people to worship God in our basement sanctuary, visiting the men and women of the congregation in their homes, getting to know their stories, giving up my romantic illusions of putting together a cadre of Christians who would showcase the gospel to the community. I thought that I had come to terms with the nature of a Christian congregation—not as an exceptional gathering of people who were eager to pursue a sacrificial life, following Jesus in the way of the cross, but something more like the way Paul described his Corinthian congregation: “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong…things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are.”
This pretty much described the people I was working with. These were not just random drop-ins from the neighborhood as I had previously thought. These were men and women whom God chose. They were his choice. Not my choice by a long shot, but God’s choice. This is what a “biblical” congregation looked like.
I was becoming comfortable with this and thought I was settling into the unspectacular work of keeping company with these people as together we were learning to believe in Jesus and practice the life of resurrection together.
The week preceding my epiphany with the chairs, Ann Morrison had come to see me, asking for help. I had been her pastor for about a year. She came with what I assumed to be a fairly minor family difficulty. Her son, Roger, had returned for the Christmas vacation from Brown University, where he was studying law. He had a reputation in the community for being very bright, a reputation that was later to prove accurate. But things weren’t going well at home on this vacation. When he took a shower, he was careless with the shower curtains and inevitably left puddles of water on the floor. Every morning his father would erupt at breakfast, furious. Roger would politely apologize, but the next morning it was the same thing, only accelerated. Things were disintegrating. Ann, the mother, was caught in the middle, helpless to do anything. The vacation was turning into a first-class disaster.
Tuesday mornings had given me insights and perceptions for understanding what was going on between Bruce the father, Roger the son, and Ann the mother-in-the-middle. I met with them and was able to defuse the hostilities and provide a few days of truce until Roger returned to Brown. I had been useful. I was pleased with myself.
Until the moment of the chairs.
I suddenly realized that I was gradually becoming more interested in dealing with my congregation—the Morrison family was only one instance—as problems to be fixed than as members of the household of God to be led in the worship and service of God. For one thing it was much easier. The family dynamics and emotional difficulties could be isolated and defined and worked on. Christian growth was all-encompassing and could only be entered into as a mystery. In dealing with my parishioners as problems, I more or less knew what I was doing. In dealing with them as a pastor, I was involved in mysteries, mostly having to do with God, that were far beyond my understanding and control. No person shows up in worship without problems; pastoral care involves knowing how to respond appropriately to them. Nothing wrong with that. But what alarmed me was that I was slipping into the habit of identifying and dealing with my congregation as problems, reducing them to problems that I might be able to do something about or at least refer to someone who could help.
Incrementally, without noticing what I was doing, I had been shifting from being a pastor dealing with God in people’s lives to treating them as persons dealing with problems in their lives. I was not being their pastor. I could have helped and still been their pastor. But by reducing them to problems to be fixed, I omitted the biggest thing of all in their lives, God and their souls, and the biggest thing in my life, my vocation as pastor. I began to assess what was going on. Unaware of what I was doing, I had been making a subtle shift in attitude toward the people to whom I was pastor—and I had been doing it for several months. I was trading in the complexities of spiritual growth in congregation for the reduced dimensions of addressing a problem that could be named and understood. I had been doing this quite a lot.
The Tuesday-Sunday comparison brought clarity to exactly what was unique in my workplace: my congregation. Would I trade my pastoral birthright for the mess of pottage that provided the immediate satisfaction of affirmation and discernable results? Or would I be willing to live in the ambiguities of congregation in which growth was mostly slow and mostly, at least for long stretches of time, invisible? Would I embrace the emotional gratification of solving a problem that could be diagnosed and dealt with head-on rather than give myself as a companion in searching out the sacred mysteries of salvation and holiness?
I had assumed that Tuesdays were a way to be of help to the community. And they were. The unintended consequence was that they helped me understand the vocational priority for me, a pastor, of Sunday—the uniqueness of congregation. I liked the Tuesday world in which I was being immersed, but maybe too much. I liked helping people. I liked the feeling of being important to them. But it was on Tuesdays that I realized in myself a latent messianic complex, which, given free reign, would have obscured the very nature of congregation by redefining it as a gathering of men and women whom I was in charge of helping with their problems. As it turned out, the Tuesday meetings developed muscle and sinew that clarified and strengthened the “hints and guesses” that had for twenty-five years been forming in bits and pieces the vocation of pastor that had so recently—it had been a long pregnancy!—come into renewed focus. The recovery of congregation, as congregation—defined by Sundays, not Tuesdays—turned out to be a big part of it.
The messianic virus, which can so easily decimate the pastoral vocation once it finds a host (me!), is hard to get rid of. As with the common cold, there doesn’t seem to be any sure-cure or preventive medicines. The best you can do is try to stay healthy on a decent diet and plenty of exercise in worship with the people of God.
But by now I was well warned. I knew I had turned a corner when a year or so later I visited Marilyn in the hospital. Marilyn was in her midtwenties, married, and newly employed as a lawyer with an established firm in our county. And new in our congregation. I was still getting acquainted with her. She said that she was in the hospital for tests—she hadn’t been feeling well, and the doctors were having difficulty diagnosing anything. In the visit from her physician earlier that morning, he had suggested that maybe something other than just the physical might be going on, maybe something emotional or mental. I was in the habit by this time of asking someone who gave me that opening, “Would you like to talk to me about it?” But I was now in the process of detoxing from my messianic mode. I said nothing. Later I felt guilty for not jumping in to help. Another month went by, and I visited again, this time in her home. She told me she had agreed that her physician might be right about her trouble being emotional. She had made an appointment with a psychiatrist. Feeling cautiously safe, I ventured “Is there anything you want me to do?” Marilyn hesitated. And then, shyly, “Yes. I’ve been thinking a lot about it. Would you teach me to pray?”
I had been pastor of my new congregation-in-formation for three years. It was the first time anyone had asked me to teach them to pray. Marilyn’s shy request gave a fresh focus to the work and the workplace, a focus that I had come to believe was at the very center of my pastoral vocation.
Up until then I had concluded that prayer was not something for which there was much of a market. Wanting to serve my congregation on their terms, I kept my prayers to myself and did what I was asked. Marilyn’s “Would you teach me to pray?” was a breakthrough. I reflected on the irony: the work that I was most equipped for, that I most wanted to do, what most pastors for most of our twenty centuries of working in congregations expected to do and did, was not expected of me. Until Marilyn asked.
An inner resolve began forming within me: I was not going to wait to be asked anymore. In the secularizing times in which I am living, God is not taken seriously. God is peripheral. God is nice (or maybe not so nice) but not at the center. When people want help with their parents or children or emotions, they do not ordinarily see themselves as wanting help with God. But if I am going to stay true to my vocation as a pastor, I can’t let the “market” determine what I do. I will find ways to pray with and for people and teach them to pray, usually quietly and often subversively when they don’t know I am doing it. But I’m not going to wait to be asked. I am a pastor.