A Pastoral Riddle

That we might smile more

I hope you will forgive this personal intrusion before we get to today’s content.

First, the last post was an embarrassment of typos. I have corrected them online, but, of course, that does not update what arrived in your inboxes. I’m very sorry for that, and my inner perfectionist has been berating me ever since. I can spot the typos and errors in someone else’s work at a glance. I can rarely spot mine. My thanks to those who pointed them out to me.

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Thanks for reading and supporting Greatheart’s Table.

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Here’s a riddle for you:

“When is a door not a door?”

Since my sense of humor petrified around age 12, I still find the answer, “When it’s ajar,” funny.

But this suggests another riddle, one not easily solved and one that not even I can find funny.

“When is a pastor not a pastor?”

Many of us implicitly answer that question “never.” I get that. Pastors are always on call, always accessible. We are expected to model a moral consistency between our public and private lives. Pastors are set apart, ordained by the church, marked in a way that other professions are not. The name “pastor” is given us through the laying on of hands.

The result is that many of us live with no boundary between who we are as a person and who we are as a pastor. And while this is understandable, I’m not sure it is sustainable. We need to be able to walk into our bedroom, change from whatever clothes mark us as “pastor,” and emerge in shorts and a t-shirt. We need to be able to shed the role and to be just a person. I need to see myself not as a pastor, but as a guy who is a pastor. The difference can be profound.

If my role as “pastor” is of the essence of who I am as a person, then in order to be okay with who I am as a person I must be a strong and competent pastor. Whatever failings I have in that role, whatever weaknesses I bring to it, I’ll bear as failings in me as a person. Any criticisms aimed at my pastoral performance become personal attacks on who I am.

Our weaknesses and failings and received criticism will always matter to us, of course. But if I can build some space between who I am as a beloved child of God and what I do as a pastor, then I can be okay with myself as a person even though my pastoral skills are marginal and my sermons occasionally misfire and that last congregational meeting was a disaster and my kids are not at all what others assume they should be.

Further, to conflate our person and our profession

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confuses our Christian life with our professional security. Our character, our desire to be Christ-like, should find its exclusive motivation in the fact that we, as persons, are beloved children of God. To grieve sin and pray for godliness, to live for God’s glory and reflect his comfort and kindness in a personal and genuine way, is the heart’s cry of the Christian, regardless of professional status.

But when our personhood and our profession become blurred, seeking godliness can become just one more means of keeping one’s job. And then, when pastoral pressures become so great that one seeks a way of escape, and those days do come, if we have no boundaries in our identity, then to stop acting like a pastor means to stop acting like a Christian. An affair or a bender may be how one rebels against the demands of being a pastor.

This is a riddle, then.

“When is a pastor not a pastor?”

Can the pastoral role and the person filling it be distinguished? If we don’t distinguish between them, then what happens when we lose the ability, or the place, to pastor? To take away our pastoring strips us of our personhood. If on the other hand we can mark out a border between role and person, then when the role disappears, the person remains. Of course in such a case the loss is deeply grieved. But the person who may no longer be a pastor retains significance as a beloved child of God.

“When is a pastor not a pastor?”

The best answer, I think, is, “frequently.”

Early in my ministry I spent a season playing trumpet in a swing band.

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Had you asked me why I was doing this, I would have told you that I saw it as an evangelistic opportunity, a way to build relationships outside the church. I couldn’t shed my pastoral identity long enough to just do something for the fun of it and be okay with that. When we conflate our person with our profession we lose the freedom to be who we really are. It becomes impossible to be a pastor by day and a trumpet player by night. In the end our congregations get a false, and very fragile, pastor.

So, I am not a pastor. I am a guy who is a pastor. I struggle with this distinction, but the battle to preserve it is a battle worth fighting.

“When is a pastor not a pastor?”

When one is okay with not being a pastor.

While that is a terrible punchline, it has the power to make us, ironically, better pastors.

I can smile at that.

1. “He keeps using that word. I’m not sure it means what he thinks it means.” Yes I do. I know that John Piper says we are “not” professionals. I purposely push back against such overly black and white statements.

2. Though it was marvelously fun, it was short lived. Truth demands that I tell you that I was a terrible fourth trumpet. I was very kindly not invited back for the following season.