580 - Why a Pastor Should Not Be a "Person"

Why a Pastor Should Not Be a "Person"
By William H. Willimon

In his popular book on caring for clergy who care, The Pastor As Person,¹ Gary Harbaugh says, "Most difficulties pastors face in the parish arise when the pastor forgets that he or she is a person."² Contrary to Harbaugh, I believe the troubles occur when pastors forget that they are pastors.

Many contemporary commentators on Christian ministry tell clergy that only by being "in touch" with the common humanity they share with their parishioners-their femaleness, maleness, empathy, or whatever personal attribute is considered worthy by the commentator-can pastors be up to the demands of ministry. Some of the worst damage that pastors do to their parishioners, they say, is done in the name of theology, or tradition, or church discipline. As a pastor said to me recently, "Theology is fine, but what most people want from me is compassion and care." Or, as Harbaugh claims, a pastor ought never forget that he or she is a person.

This attitude is a strange view of a "person." Where is this "person" who can somehow be detached from commitments, society, history, economics? A pastor is a person who has had hands laid upon his or her head, made public promises before God and the church, willingly yoked his or her life to the demands of the gospel and the people the gospel gathers.

I

Pastors are not called to care, but to care "in Jesus' name." How can this marvelously caring and empathetic pastor, who has subordinated church tradition, theology, and ordination to the needs of his or her own personality be sure that his or her care is not another means of self-deception? (what we once called sin.)

In our attempts to be empathetic, to eschew tradition, Scripture, and the resources of the church, contemporary clergy represent what Jack

William H. Willimon, a frequent contributor to THEOLOGY TODAY, is Dean of the Chapel and Professor of Christian Ministry at Duke University. He has written many books, including a commentary, Acts (1988), and Peculiar Speech: Preaching to the Baptized (1992). Portions of this article are adapted from his chapter in Against the Grain: Professional Ethics (1993), edited by Michael Goldberg.

¹ Gary Harbaugh, The Pastor As Person, (Minneapolis; Augsburg, 1984). The Academy of Parish Clergy voted this book "The most useful book for pastors" in the year that it was published.
² Ibid., p. 9.

581 - Why a Pastor Should Not Be a "Person"

L. Sammons, Jr. has called "Rebellious Ethics."³ We have devised a narrative that we must stand apart from our socially constructed professional roles in personal moral judgment of them. The worst moral danger, according to "Rebellious Ethics," is for lawyers or pastors to be captured by their professional roles. The goal of this ethic is to have no ethic imposed upon us by our role, to be the sort of pastor who can be a pastor without taking oneself too seriously or, as Harbaugh put it, to be more a person than a pastor.

The more we summon up the psychological courage to rebel against our socially imposed roles, the more ethical we will be says "Rebellious Ethics." The cynicism within the conversation of the Ministers' Monday Morning Coffee Hour, in which clergy sit around making cutting comments about their flocks, or regale one another with sacrilegious jokes, represents a rather harmless attempt at ersatz rebellion from clerical roles they find so confining, an attempt to deny clerical power by making fun of being a cleric. Our rebellion shows that we clergy know enough about our roles to know that they put us in risky positions where power is being used and therefore potentially abused, but we know not enough to change our professional practices to improve our profession. Rather than engage in deep reflection on the subtleties of the exercise of power in our roles, we adopt the stance of the romantic rebel, the fiction of the roleless person. Richard Rorty has noted that modernity believes that it is the nature of all roles to undervalue the person as a person.⁴ However, in deciding to fall back on our own resources, to rebel against traditional expectations for pastors, we pastors have not rebelled against our socially assigned role, rather we have fallen backwards into the clutches of the dominant cultural function of clergy in our day-the care, encouragement, and detachment of the individual psyche from any commitment other than dedication to the self.

As Martin Marty notes, American clergy function within a national polity that decreed that "religion had to be put in a legally subordinate situation in civil life, where so many ethical decisions are made.⁵ Through the Constitution, the state makes individuals of us all, telling us that we have thereby been given the maximum amount of freedom through detachment from family, tradition, community, and history. The genius of this liberal constitutional arrangement is that, all the while telling us we are free, the modern state has found how much easier to manage are detached individuals rather than people who have a home, a tribe, a neighborhood, or a past.

Marty says this means that ministers "have the most direct effect on

³ Jack L. Sammons, Jr., "Rebellious Ethics and Albert Speer," unpublished paper, Mercer University, Macon, Georgia, 1992.
⁴ Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
⁵ Martin Marty, "Clergy Ethics in America: Ministers on Their Own," in Clergy Ethics in a Changing Society, edited by James P. Wind, et alia (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991), pp. 23-26.

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private and personal life. They have a measure of unimpeded influence on those who choose to affiliate with the religious body they serve." Yet he notes that clergy "also find themselves 'boxed in,' segregated as it were, in the private sphere. 'Religion is a private affair' is an effective way of cutting off the influence of clergy ... to introduce a religious backdrop or argument appears to be an intrusion into the civil fabric."⁶ I believe that the pastor compensates for this lack of public significance by becoming the eager chaplain to the dominant ethic-you stay out of my life and I'll stay out of yours. The "genius" of the contemporary pastor is that he or she attempts to achieve public power by being so nice; appearing to be caring, empathetic, and kind, all the while conveying this culture's officially sanctioned ethic: There is no point to life other than that which you personally devise. You stay out of my life and I'll stay out of yours.

II

So, in contemporary clergy's willingness to keep things private and personal, detached from ecclesial demands, in exchange for our alleged religious freedom, we have not rebelled against cultural expectations. We have acquiesced into the most ethically debilitating of those expectations. It is not that we have been too good at being pastors and not good enough at being people; rather, we have not been good enough at being pastors. True morality, the ability to judge our own self-deception, the gift of seeing things in perspective, comes from practices outside those sanctioned by the system. It comes from being forced, Sunday after Sunday, to lead and to pray the prayer of confession followed by the words of absolution. It comes from being ordered, Sunday after Sunday, to "do this in remembrance of me." Our ecclesial claim is that through obedience to these practices, Jesus gives us the resources we need to be faithful disciples. And we will never know whether or not Jesus was speaking truthfully if our pastors refuse to hold us accountable to Jesus' demands. Our aim as pastors should be to produce the sort of people whose lives will either make Jesus appear to be incredibly crazy or amazingly able to produce the sort of people he demands.

During a lunch I had with the chair of our chemistry department, he noted that ministers could profit by the ethics of chemists. "The ethics of chemists?" I asked. "Sure. It is impossible to be a good chemist and a liar at the same time. The chemist's honesty about experimental results, openness with other chemists, and commitment to standard methodology would enhance the practice of ministry."

Which suggests that Jack Sammons is correct. We don't need to be better rebels from the virtues and practices of our craft; we need to be more deeply linked to them. Separated from the skills and commitments of our craft, we are left morally exposed, victims of conventional wisdom. For pastors, the worst form of self-deception may be the

⁶ Ibid., p. 2 9.

583 - Why a Pastor Should Not Be a "Person"

deceptive idea that we are without power, just one of the boys (or girls), not taking ourselves too seriously, a person.

Consider the ethics of preaching. The morality required by the craft of sermon preparation, the self-criticism, obedience to the text, confidence in the congregation, and weekly hard work are disciplines that are more moral than technical or personal. In fact, that may be a good test for whether or not ordinands are morally ready to be entrusted with a congregation. Have they mastered the craft well enough to write fifty-two Sundays of sermons without lying too often?

Sportscaster Red Barber recalled that the chief ethical crisis of his career occurred when manager of the Yankees, Branch Rickey, called to prepare him for the fact that in the next few days, baseball's color line would be broken and black players would join the team. Barber's small town Mississippi roots caused him great consternation. "What should I do?" he asked himself. Should he resign rather than be part of this? "Then a voice said to me. 'You are an announcer. You will announce!' Scales fell off my eyes. I knew what I was to do. The next week I announced to the world the arrival of Jackie Robinson. There was no problem."

As Nicholas Wolterstorff has noted, "role assignment in modern society is grounded on will to an extent never before known in history. And this, of course, invites us to think of our personal identity as something behind all our social roles rather than as in past determined by our roles."⁷

The notion that we are most fully ourselves, most fully ethical, when we have freed ourselves from the demands of Scripture, tradition, and church merely demonstrates the power of the socially-sanctioned story that holds us captive. As George Lindbeck has shown, we are all liberals. That is, the individual is the basic unit of reality, the sole center of our meaning. We are all children of modernity, that story which holds that each of us has a right, a duty, to be free of all stories save the ones we have individually chosen. We all live under the modern presupposition that none of us should be held to commitments we have not freely chosen. Our morality has thus made freedom of choice an absolute necessity, for we believe that we have no destiny other than that which we personally choose.

If I explain my actions on the basis of tradition, community standards, my parents' beliefs, Scripture, I have obviously not decided for myself, have not been true to myself, have not rebelled against the external imposition of a role, so I have not been moral, I am less than a person.

The irony is that we have merely exchanged narrative masters. We jettison the older, traditional story that it is my duty as an ordained leader of the church to bear the church's tradition before the congregation for a more socially acceptable one-my duty is to my

⁷ Nicholas Wolterstorff "The Schools We Desire," in Schooling Christians, edited by Stanley Hauerwas and John H. Westerhoff (Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 1992), pp. 8-9.

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individual feelings and standards in order to free my parishioners to be dutiful to their individual feelings and standards.

It is so difficult for modern liberal societies to acknowledge the subtle forms of coercion that hold them together because they derive their legitimation from the presumption that there is no moral authority more significant than the individual conscience. Believing this to be true, we are able to dismiss Scripture, Jesus, church tradition, the liturgy of the church, in favor of the freedom to do what we think personally to be right. We thereby have not eliminated the ambiguities of pastoral power. We have merely exchanged one kind of authoritarianism for another. The power of tradition is jettisoned for the demands of the psyche.

All we can do is to service the status quo, be chaplains to the present order, urge people to think deeply, feel sincerely, and make up their own minds. Clergy are thus fated to be nice. We hope that nobody will get hurt doing that. Of course, few may get saved either. Nobody will get to be a saint.

III

Charles Taylor notes that most of the classical moralists-Aristotle, Plato, the Stoics-taught that the moral life was inherently hierarchical. Good morality required a class of elites who had the time and the ability to engage in the higher activities of contemplation and ethical discernment.⁸ Modernity leveled everything, believing that the good life is inherently available to everyone regardless of status, training, or ability. There were many reasons for this leveling-democracy, secularism, the rise of science. Taylor says that the Protestant Reformation is also an important source of modern confusion about requirements for the moral life.

According to Taylor, the Reformation rejected the notion of ecclesial mediation of divine grace, the historic Catholic presumption that some within the Body of Christ could be more dedicated to the faith, and thus more capable of winning merit and salvation, and others could be less so. Now everyone was a saint. Salvation is an exclusive, utterly unmerited gift of a gracious God. God is no more present through specially dedicated people than God is present through everyone. Thus the Reformation made its own distinctive contribution to the individualism of the modern world. Now that salvation was no longer mediated by the church, its clergy, or its saints, the personal commitment of the individual believer became the basic unit of the faith. Participation in the church's worship, the mediating power of the sacraments as means of grace, was jettisoned in favor of the disposition of the individual believer. Whereas Catholicism taught that, "I am a passenger on the ecclesial ship on its journey to God ... Protestantism [implied] there can be no passengers ... there is no ship

⁸ Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self- The Making of Modem Identify (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

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in the catholic sense, no common movement carrying humans to salvation. Each believer rowed his or her own boat."⁹

After the Reformation, vocation, which had earlier usually meant a call to the priesthood or the monastic life, became any employment that claimed to be useful to the common good of humanity. Vocation is having a job. For the Puritans, revelation became a twofold matter of "rebelling against a traditional authority which was merely feeding on its own errors and a returning to the neglected sources: the Scriptures on the one hand, experimental reality on the other. Both appealed to what they saw as living experience against dead received doctrines-the experience of personal conversion and commitment, and that of direct observation of nature's workings."¹⁰

The main arbiter of our pastoral deliberations is now experimental reality. Even the Scriptures, which were important for the Puritans, are jettisoned because they are judged by the only source of revelation now to be trusted-our personal experience of what seems right.

One of the most interesting aspects of Taylor's analysis is his claim that the Reformation's effort to deny special mediation of God's grace through peculiar institutions or special people ultimately destroyed the church's christological center. Now, even Jesus has been rendered ordinary. Jesus is no more revelatory than my personal experience. Everything is ordinary. Having disposed of the extraordinary possibility of miracle, creation, divine intervention in history, there is now no longer the possibility of extraordinary moral demand because extraordinary moral demand exists only in an ecology of extraordinary possibility for change, conversion. Everything is flattened to "what seems right to me." Sentimentality is the best such ethics can deliver.

Those who are ordained are empowered by the church to witness to the faith of the church, to remind us of what it means for us to be Christian in life's circumstances, and to remind the church of what it means to be God's answer to what ails the world. To be a Christian is to be someone who is baptized into those practices and virtues based upon the claim that in Jesus Christ, God is busy saving the world, not on our terms, but on God's terms. God's principal way of saving the world appears to be persons, but not just any old person will do. Saints are needed. Therefore the church calls persons to be pastors to help the rest of us be more than the persons we would be if we had been left to our own devices.

⁹ Ibid., p. 217.
¹⁰ Ibid., p. 230.