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On the Benefits of a Learned
Ministry
By Paul Miller
Do we still value a learned
ministry?
When
I attended Emmanuel College in the late 1970s, students were required to take a
course on the history, polity and traditions (today we might say “ethos”) of
the United Church of Canada. At that time there were still plenty of people
around with memories of 1925 and before who could take about the founding
denominations from first hand experience. Three legendary figures were invited
to speak about the churches that entered into Union, A. B. B. Moore for the
Congregationalists, Arthur Organ for the Methodists and Richard “Dick” Davidson
for the Presbyterians.
Dr.
Davidson recalled the astonishing fact that his grandparents, who had almost no
formal schooling, could debate the finer points of Calvin’s Institutes for hours on end and knew the
Scriptures virtually from memory. With congregations of folk like that, he
said, the Presbyterians considered it important to have an “educated clergy.”
Indeed, he said, a learned ministry was one of the principle contributions of
Presbyterianism to the new denomination.
Dr.
Davidson’s comments made a considerable impression on me at the time and
confirmed by belief that disciplined learning is one of the essentials of effective
ministry.
But
this view has fallen on hard times. It is not a vision of ministry that is
highly regarded. During those same late 70s, a major shift was taking place in
theological education away from a traditional curriculum grounded in systematic
theology, Old and New Testament studies and biblical languages to one more far
more oriented to “practical”, experience-based skills for ministry. An
action-reflection model was challenging the study of classic texts as the
primary pedagogical paradigm. This shift both reflected and contributed to a
change in the expectations of the church for their ministers. Empathy and a
commitment to justice was regarded as more important than “book learning.”
Until
the 1960s, theological students were presumed to have prepared themselves in
advance with an undergraduate degree that included courses in philosophy,
history, ethics and classics. By the time I arrived in 1978, this type of
preparatory curriculum was no longer recommended. “Life experience” and
“diversity of background” were more highly valued than training in the
traditional liberal arts. Greek and Hebrew were no longer required subjects.
The number of courses offered in pastoral counselling, political theology,
spirituality and the practice of ministry proliferated, often crowding out the
older disciplines from the student’s timetable.
This
change was not unique to theology. It reflected in turn a much wider move
towards an interdisciplinary approach to learning in which traditional
boundaries between clearly defined areas of study collapsed and the so-called
humanities began to interact freely and fruitfully with the so-called social
sciences. This fundamental shift had nothing less than a revolutionary impact
on areas like biblical studies which now looked as much to anthropology and
sociology as to textual analysis; or theology which was increasingly influenced
by psychology, economics and political science; and it was inevitable that the
change should be felt in seminaries and theological colleges.
This
has been by no means a bad thing. Far from it. Interdisciplinary collaboration
has produced an explosion of new knowledge and insight into areas relevant to
preparation for ministry. There is no question in my mind, at least, that the
new approaches to knowledge have yielded significant benefits to theological
education.
However,
alongside these developments was also an emerging active suspicion or hostility
towards the so-called “classic tradition” of Christianity. This tradition,
articulated by Athanasius and Augustine, by Aquinas and Abelard, by Luther and
Calvin, by Wesley and Edwards, by Barth and Brunner, which had been the
foundation and framework of the old curriculum, was now seen as at best
irrelevant and at worst destructive of an authentic Christian witness. This
attitude grew up among those who had imbibed odds and ends of the
post-structuralist critique of the oppressive “Western curriculum” and was
often articulated with a great deal of heat and very little light. The feminist
attack on the authority of “dead white men” and the liberation theologians’
call to begin doing theology “from below” contributed to this hostility.
Everything was being politicized and the foundational texts of the western
Christian tradition were being “exposed” as concealed weapons of misogyny,
homophobia and Eurocentric cultural elitism.
Just
how deeply ingrained this intellectual reorientation became was revealed in a
recent survey of women in ministry in the United Church. Respondent after
respondent claimed that the primary criterion for formulating her own theology
was not a theological tradition but “my own experience.” Many expressed disdain
for those who build their theology on the insights of others, especially of
those who lived in a context alien to our own such as the German academy of the
19th century. [1]
Again,
there is nothing wrong with incorporating experience into theology. Indeed,
there is nothing new. One only has to read Acts chapter 2 to realize the
importance that experience has always played in Christian theology. Father Jean
LeClercq’s classic The Love of Learning
and the Desire for God argues that the intellectual renaissance in12th
century monastic culture was an attempt to integrate medieval theology with a
heartfelt desire for communion with God.[2]
Luther saw himself as liberating the Word of God from the ivory towers of
scholasticism and placing it in the hands of the people where it could
illuminate their real experience. Wesley and Edwards advocated a warm “heart
religion” in response to cold Enlightenment rationalism. Kierkegaard launched
an all-out assault on what he regarded as a bankrupt and dessicated
Christendom. In the early 20th century, P. T. Forsyth defined
religion in terms of the personal encounter between the believer and a personal
God. An appeal to and deep sensitivity to personal experience is hardly a
discovery of the late 20th century.
What
seems to mark the current intellectual climate in the church is not its
interdisciplinary approach nor its appeal to experience. There are two main
negative characteristics that seem prevalent to me. One is intellectual
laziness. There is an attitude that those who pursue disciplined knowledge of
the Christian tradition are somehow avoiding the issues of “real life.” The
pursuit of knowledge is regarded as a strategy of avoidance. Ministers
sanctimoniously intone that they are too busy caring for people to sit around
reading all that dry theological stuff.
The
second characteristic is an almost pure instrumentalism. By that I mean that
many clergy seem interested only in learning those things that have a direct
bearing on the doing of their “jobs.” Continuing education for clergy these
days tends to be heavily weighted towards techniques for church management. We
see a proliferation of “12 keys” or “10 laws” approaches to pastoral success.
Pastors are inundated with advertisements for the latest ministry strategy,
cutting edge leadership model or coaching seminar, all laden with corporate
jargon and aggressively marketed. Clergy today are under intense pressure to
define themselves as organizational managers and, as such, they seek the
techniques that will “work,” that will produce quantifiable results. We are
repeatedly told that we work in a highly competitive environment in which churches
need to act decisively to retain their share of the religious market. Assuming that we buy into this instrumental
understanding of ministry, which is very difficult to resist when our
livelihood seems to be at stake, who will have time to ruminate over
Augustine’s Confessions or the poetry
of Herbert or Hopkins? After all, we’ve got churches to run.
I
am not opposed to the church borrowing techniques from business and marketing
to communicate the gospel more effectively. However, there is a great danger
that something vital in the soul of ministry will be lost. This kind of
pastoral functionalism which appears to be attentive to the health and growth
of the church does not serve the church well when it encourages pastors and
leaders to care only about matters of immediate professional concern,
uninformed by a larger vision of the purpose of ministry. Such a vision needs
to be nurtured by learning – by wide, imaginative and sympathetic reading and
listening.
Characteristics of a “Learned Ministry”
I
would like to suggest a few characteristics of a learned ministry. These are
not the result of any “scientific” research but of my experience over
twenty-two years in the pastorate. I want to suggest that the kind of learned
ministry we need today is first of all disciplined, secondly, possessing both
depth and breadth and thirdly, and most importantly, marked by humility.
Discipline
First,
a learned ministry must be disciplined. By that I mean that pastors need to
build time into their routines for reading, thinking, writing and reflecting,
beyond the weekly demands of sermon preparation and church administration. It
never ceases to amaze me how little
some clergy read; how unfamiliar they are with the spiritual and theological
tradition they claim to represent; and how foreign the worlds of literature,
philosophy, history and science are to them. To repeat, this ignorance is
sometimes justified by the condescending claim that responsible pastors are too
busy meeting the needs of real people in a complex world to have their noses
buried a book by some long forgotten German in his ivory tower. Of course, that
is simply the rationalization of the uninformed. Postmodern ideology
notwithstanding, the truth is that we have at our disposal the vast riches of 2500
years of reflection on the meaning of human existence in God’s world. It is the
height of arrogance to think that we can act as competent guides on the journey
of life without at least making an effort to sample some of these riches. I do
not mean that all clergy should try to become “intellectuals.” But if we do not
strive to expand our horizons of thought and imagination, we are not loving God
with our whole mind and we are not giving our people what they deserve.
A
learned ministry will make serious study and reflection a professional
priority. They will not view reading as a leisure activity which steals time
from the work their congregations are paying them to do. They will see it as
integral to their vocations. And they will ask their congregations to support
them in providing time for such study.
Depth
This
leads to our second point. Learned clergy will have both depth and breadth to
their learning.
To
go deep means many things. I want to suggest that a crucial aspect of depth is
intimacy with tradition. Tradition is what has been handed down to us from the
past, in the vast majority of cases in the form of written texts. Pastors
should take the time to read ancient texts, to weigh their words carefully and
ponder the life situation and existential concerns of their authors. Ancient
words can reveal to us how we have come to be where we are in our pilgrimage.
There
is a modern chauvinism which has survived into postmodernity which regards the
past as being largely irrelevant to the present and the challenges of the
present so unprecedented that earlier generations could not possibly have
anything of value to say to us. It is the attitude which sees contemporary
sexual liberation, for example, as the apex of human self-actualization. G. K.
Chesterton called it the “arrogant oligarchy of those who happen to be walking
around.”
Much
more life-giving is the realization that theology is, in the words of P. T.
Forsyth, “thinking in centuries.” We need to enter into conversation with the
voices of the past, not out of antiquarian interest, but to remind ourselves
that we are not the first people to have grappled with these problems and that
ours is the not the only perspective from which to see them. The work of Thomas
Oden over the past twenty-five years has been invaluable in helping to recover
these “classic traditions” and showing how contemporary the words of long ago
often ring.
We
can never completely escape our own 21st century world view. An
essential aspect of humanity is that we are situated in time and that we view
everything from a particular perspective. However, we have been given the gift
of imagination and empathy which, properly exercised, allows us to set aside
the distorting prejudices of contemporary culture and read ancient texts on
their own terms, respectful of their own integrity. Again, this can be a
challenge because we are inundated with powerful cultural shibboleths like
“Everything written before the 1960s is the propaganda of patriarchy.” But we
can by an act of will step outside those prejudices to share, at least in part,
the vision of the past. To read the reflections of Gregory of Nazianzus on the
Trinity, or Richard Baxter on pastoral care, or John Wesley on the Holy Spirit
situates our own parochial concerns in a much larger context. It is not always
necessary to plough through entire texts, either. Modern scholarship has
produced excellent anthologies and collections of the best from the past, as
well as insightful studies of major figures.
All
university libraries will extend borrowing privileges to non-students for a
small annual fee. Many classic texts can be found on the internet, for example
on the Christian Classics Ethereal Library website (www.ccel.org).
There are major on-line libraries such as www.questia.com which make available vast
resources we could not have dreamed of only a few years ago. Technology will be
a great boon to a learned ministry.
Breadth
As
well as depth, learned pastors need to cultivate breadth quite simply because
you never know where you might learn something of true value. I discovered two
of the principles for ministry that I have found most useful from business
writers Peter Drucker and John MacDonald. In his book Managing the Non-Profit Organization, Drucker argues that the
purpose of non-profit organizations, among which he includes churches, is to
“produce transformed individuals.”[3]
In effect, Drucker is saying that the “product” these organizations turn out is
changed people. When I read this it completely altered my understanding of the
church’s purpose and ministry. We tend to think that what the church “produces”
is programs which will attract people and meet their needs. This generates a
philosophy of ministry, however, that is inward focused. What we should be
concentrating on “producing” is people whose outlook, character and commitments
are transformed by the Gospel, so that they will act as leaven in society at
large. MacDonald, in his book Calling a
Halt to Mindless Change[4]
takes aim at the prevalent claim that the world has completely changed and that
businesses must totally revolutionize their way of operating. This claim is
simply false, MacDonald argues. Certainly there are significant differences
between the 1990s, for example, and the 1950s. But the fundamental principles
of successful businesses – sound business practice and attentive customer
service – have not changed. The rush towards such revolutionary changes as
radical restructuring and downsizing in the wake of the last major recession,
according to MacDonald, was not dictated by major social change alone but by
several decades of careless and short-sighted business decisions. The
implications of MacDonald’s analysis were immediately obvious to me. Churches
that run headlong into a complete dismantling of their institutional and
community life on the basis that “the world has changed” will inevitably throw
out the baby with the bath-water. While our methods of organization and communication
need to evolve, Christian communities are built on the same foundations as
always – nourishing worship, authentic spirituality, effective pastoral care
and evangelistic zeal. I cannot even remember how or why I came to read these
two books. I’m sure they were recommended to me by friends in the church who
work in the world of business. My point is, however, that if I had said, “I
don’t have time to read that kind of stuff,” I would never have stumbled across
these two invaluable insights.
Here’s
another way of illustrating the same point that knowledge comes from unexpected
sources. The great American historian J. H. Hexter has distinguished between
the actual subject matter of the study of history and the perspective which the
individual historian brings to his or her work.[5]
The first aspect Hexter calls the “first record” and it consists of the
artifacts, evidence and “traces” which the past has left behind. It is the
material that the historian works with to try to understand the past. The other
aspect Hexter calls the “second record.” This is the sum total of all the
skills knowledge and experience which the guides the historian’s approach to
the historical task. No historian ever simply “lets the facts speak for
themselves.” History always involves a complex process of selecting, ordering
and interpreting certain facts deemed
relevant by the historian so that they create a coherent pattern of
understanding. This process is determined, at least in part, by the prior
knowledge and experience the historian brings to his or her work.
Hexter
draws a metaphor from the social and economic organization of a medieval town
to describe the relationship between the first and second records. In the
Middle Ages each town was bordered by a cultivated area called the “sown.”
Hexter draws an analogy between the sown and the organized body of fact,
knowledge and methodology that are the historian’s primary and immediate
concern. But beyond the “sown” was the “waste” – not a desert or a wasteland,
but uncultivated tracts on which livestock were free to roam and graze. This is
like the second record, Hexter says, which consists of what the historian has
picked up along the way by “grazing.” It might be reading done in other fields,
or seemingly unrelated bits of information, or the historian’s own personal
experience. Often this uncultivated “second record” furnishes the unexpected
insight that propels the historian to pursue a fresh line of inquiry. It gives
the study of history a serendipitous and imaginative creativity that would
never arise if historians confined themselves narrowly to “the facts.”
Hexter
illustrates his analogy by an example from his own work. He came across a
passage from Thomas More’s Utopia
that was difficult to interpret by conventional methods. Hexter describes how
his reading of that passage was guided by chance insights he had picked up from
reading works on sociology and economics (in one case simply to pass the time
while waiting for a friend in the library) and by the similarities between his
(Hexter’s) own life situation and that of More when he wrote Utopia. It was the dynamic interplay of
the first and second records, the “sown” and the “waste”, that influenced
Hexter to treat the evidence in a certain way and guided him to fresh insights
about a man who lived in the 15th century. This is not pure
subjectivity, reading into the evidence what the historian wants to find, or
distorting the facts by one’s personal prejudices. Hexter, by all accounts a
brilliant historian, found what he believed to be something true about Thomas
More. But the impetus for his search was inspired, in part, by an imaginative
use of his own second record.
What
does all this have to do with a learned ministry? Simply this. Learned pastors
are not only men and women with a wide knowledge of the Bible, Christian
doctrine, pastoral psychology or effective homiletical techniques. They are
people who are sufficiently attuned to their own second records that they can
derive fruitful insights from unexpected sources.
I
learned as much about the craft of sermon preparation and presentation from a
year spent intensively playing the piano as I did from seminary homiletics
classes or how-to preaching texts. I have gained as much insight about
relationships between men and women and dynamics of marriage from the world of
literature as from books specifically concerned with psychology or counselling.
Time spent reading Middlemarch by
George Eliot, Anna Karenina by
Tolstoy, Rebecca by Daphne du
Maurier, The Accidental Tourist by
Anne Tyler or Updike’s Too Far To Go
have deepened my awareness of the promise and pathology of marriage in ways
that I have been able to apply directly to my ministry.
The
learned pastor cannot be a specialist, he or she must be a generalist. Learned clergy
must learn to graze widely and wisely in many different fields because one
never knows where one might find that felicitous phrase, that rich insight or
that fragment of life that will connect the many dots of pastoral experience
into a gracious and meaningful pattern.
A
word at this point concerning so-called “popular culture.” Even as we become
learned, we must remember that we are called to work in a particular place
among particular people. It is essential to avoid any hint of social snobbery, as
if the pastor is superior because he or she reads Dostoyevsky rather than
watching Days of Our Lives. Our
“learnedness” has to make room for contemporary and popular modes of
expression, including film, television, music, fiction and news media. The people
in our pews likely know much more about Seinfeld
than about St. Augustine and a truly learned pastor will at least have a
passing acquaintance with the richness and variety of popular cultural forms,
particularly if he or she wants to converse with the younger generation.[6]
I
have suggested that the learned pastor should graze widely. However, this does
not mean haphazardly. We have heard a great deal in the last few years about
“the purpose-driven church.” Learning needs to be purpose-driven as well. There
needs to be a broader vision which gives meaning to the “this and that” quality
of daily life and pastoral practice. Breadth of knowledge is merely dabbling
unless it contributes to a greater whole.
That
greater whole, of course, is the Gospel – what we have come to know of Jesus
Christ. Christ is our ultimate “hermeneutical principle” by which we judge the
significance and importance of everything we know. As Christians, we are to
“take every thought captive in obedience to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5.)
Learned clergy are always pondering the foundational principles and
affirmations that permit them to synthesize what they learn into a pattern of
meaning that furthers the Gospel.
At
this point, we revert to a different sense of the term “depth.” Learned clergy
cultivate depth not only in their familiarity with tradition but also in their
personal spirituality. Learned clergy must be men and women of prayer. It is
finally Jesus Christ, made known by the Holy Spirit who measures the worth and
significance of our learning.
Humility
A
final characteristic of a learned ministry, in many ways the most important of
all, is humility. "Remember who you are,” the spirit of Musafa says to
young Simba in The Lion King. No
pastor should fail to heed this advice. For Christians, especially for pastors,
remembering who we are is always a counsel of humility. It means to remember whose we are. It means to remember why we do what we do and for whom we are doing it.
I
once heard of a minister who considered the success of a sermon to be directly
proportional to the difficulty the congregation had in understanding it. A
great sermon, in his estimation, was one that left the people scratching their
heads in bewilderment because it demonstrated how much smarter and more
educated he was than they were. Of course, this man was not a learned pastor at
all but an ignoramus because he completely misunderstood the nature of his
vocation. His learning lacked the essential ingredient of humility.
Humility
takes different forms. As this anecdote illustrates, learned clergy are not men
and women who stand above their congregations intellectually, like those
mathematicians whose reasoning is so complex that only a handful of other human
beings on the planet understand what they’re talking about. Learned clergy are
those who have sampled as widely as they are able, given the limits of time and
ability, from the riches of human learning, and apply what they have learned to
the spiritual welfare of the people given into their care, for the sake of
Jesus Christ and his Kingdom.
Like
most pastors, occasionally I get notes and letters from parishioners. Recently
a letter arrived at the church from an older couple who have been long-time
members of my congregation. They apologized for not being able to attend more
regularly but failing health made it impossible. However, they said, they
appreciated receiving copies of my sermons from our church website. “When we
heard that our church had called a minister with a Ph. D. in Religious Studies,”
they wrote, “we were worried that you might be way over our heads. But that
hasn’t been true at all. You are able to explain the Bible in a way that really
makes sense to our daily lives and deepens our faith.” I consider this to one
of the highest complements I have received in twenty-two years of pastoral
ministry. I was deeply touched.
Learned
clergy are humble and obedient servants who devote themselves to loving God
with their minds, the better to lead God’s people.
[1] Diane
McLellan Walker, “Diversity, Diversity, All Is Diversity: A Study of the Impact
of Feminist Theology on Women in Ministry in the United Church of Canada.”
Unpublished Doctor of Ministry Thesis, McMaster Divinity College, 1999.
[2] Jean
Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the
Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture (New York: Fordam University
Press, 1982 ).
[3] Peter
Drucker Managing the Non-Profit
Organization: Practices and Principles (New York: Harper Collins, 1990.)
[4] John
MacDonald, Calling a Halt to Mindless
Change (New York: AMACOM, 1998)
[5] J. H.
Hexter, The History Primer (New York,
London: Basic Books Inc.) pp.80-109.
[6] Two books
that I have found helpful in understanding the connection between Christianity
and popular culture are God in Popular
Culture by Andrew Greeley (Chicago:
Thomas More, 1989) and Virtual Faith: The
Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X by Tom Beaudoin (San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 1998.) |
