Of Dreamers and Cynics

My dad^⁠ was a good man who worked hard with his hands and built beautiful houses.¹ He served in various ways in his church and taught third grade Sunday school. He was not by nature a cynic. But all of his roles demanded such close interaction with people that shortly after finding out I was planning to be a pastor, he cautioned, “Don’t do that. You have to deal with people.” (Cynical as that sounds, he fully supported my decision.)

As seminary graduation approached, a church with which I had interviewed said that if they called me they would want me to make a ten year commitment. I ran this by an veteran pastor who, speaking out of his experience with people, said, “Don’t do that. They’re not going to make the same commitment to you.”

Pastors may begin ministry as dreamers, but cynicism lurks. Ministry by nature engages us with people whose judgments and loyalties can shift with the wind. Some churches treat pastors more as drugs from which to get a hit than as shepherds from whom to receive care. And that can turn the hearts of even the best John Lennons among us.

You may think that I’m a dreamer cynic.

Watching pastor friends get used and then discarded like drugs in a needle tugs me in a cynical and hopeless direction and tempts me to tell young ministry students, using my best Gandalf voice, “Fly, you fools.”

It’s not all churches, of course. And it’s not just churches that are the problem. There are pastors who need to be put on a shelf if not in a cell. But when good pastors get cast aside so the churches can search for a newer and more agreeable high, it’s hard to avoid the hard shell of cynicism.

Churches hire^⁠² pastors to visit the sick and to care for the troubled. They hire them to preach the Bible in an engaging and practical way, and they hire them to make sure good programs exist and are well managed. Pastors embrace this, preaching as faithfully as they can and dropping everything when necessary to speed to the hospital or to a home. They faithfully ask God for direction for the church and pour their energies into leading in the direction they feel God has given them.

Churches welcome this until they don’t.

Congregations want pastors to preach the bible, but only so far as that preaching confirms what they already believe. When pastors take a “wrong” position on a cherished subject, as so many learned in 2020, welcome evaporates.

Congregations want pastors to lead, but not in a way that challenges cherished practices or attitudes. When, in the late, 1980s, a white pastor friend of mine in the deep south went to the wedding of the church’s black nursery worker’s daughter, he was warned by the church never to do that again. They were paying him to lead, but not really.

In my first church, after I and the elders had carefully considered the needs of the whole congregation, we gave space to drums and guitar in our worship service. We led as best we could. The result was that a number of people simply stopped coming. These were people whose stories I had heard, and with whom I had prayed in the hospital, and whose grief I had shared. They left without the kindness of a goodbye.

That hurt, but I could survive it. Some churches react to unwanted preaching or leadership by making the lives of their pastors miserable. When the drug no longer gives the user the high he covets, he has no more use for it. Too easily pastors are tossed aside by churches looking for a new and more agreeable hit. This is why many good pastors are no longer in ministry.

It’s right to cry out in protest when pastors are mistreated. It’s right to oppose churches who treat pastors like something disposable. But I no longer dream of changing the reality. Pastors deal with people, and people, at times, will turn. It breaks my heart to watch it happen. The prospect that pastors will be disposed of, as was Jesus and Paul and countless others, is always there.

Is this cynicism?

Perhaps. But I want, as much as is possible in all of this, to remember the beauty. There is always beauty.

If my dad had followed his own advice and had chosen some line of work that kept him free from people, he would never have been so hurt. But as well there are a great many beautiful and enduring houses in southwest Ohio that never would have been built. That would be sad. If pastors always knew what lay in front of them, they would surely choose a different career path. But if you, pastor, had done that, the beauty that you were privileged to nurture in the lives of others, in pointing them to Jesus, would not now exist. And that, too, would be sad.

Too many pastors have been used and discarded, but still their beauty lives on. Their faithfulness has left a Jesus-shaped imprint on more persons than they can imagine, and no one can tear that down.

So maybe I’m not a cynic, but still a dreamer after all.

I trust I’m not the only one.

1. You can listen to this post here or here.

2. Yes, I know, churches ‘call’ pastors. But in all practicality the line between ‘hire’ and ‘call’ is a distinction without a difference.