I’ve been struck recently by the close relationship between pastoral care and preaching authority. My previous church responsibilities involved only very limited pastoral functions. This is the first time I’ve been a “one man show,” so to speak. And I’m convinced that it matters. It matters than the pastor who visits you in the hospital also teaches your Bible study, also spends time with your children, also visits your mother at the nursing home, and also attempts to preach the Word each Sunday. I believe it matters greatly.
I think this is what makes small church ministry simpler in a number of ways than role-related ministries in larger churches. If your people only see you preach and lead the occassional meeting or funeral, it’s unlikely they will have little personal investment in hearing what Word the Lord has that Sunday. Let’s face it: it is the rare Christian (relatively speaking) who comes Church with ears to hear. I believe that is why preaching is in such poor shape: we feel forced to bend our sermons (please don’t dumb them down more and refer to them as “messages”) to hardly creative, culture-oriented and chimerically “practical” advice or storytelling with very little chance of revealing anything of the Divine.
I believe that this pastoral authority also lends itself to preaching authority. When your people know that you care about them – that you have sat with them in their homes, in the hospital, married and buried their loved ones – then real homiletic freedom is possible. We are not bound by the need to impress or dazzle because our hearers are already convinced that we are genuinely concerned for them as fellow Christians. We also do not fear to step on toes and push our people if that is what the text demands, because we are confident that our people trust us enough to speak the truth in love.
There is a strain of Protestant Christianity right now that is, I believe, self-conciously and dangerously “radical.” It follows, to some extent from a Barthian perspective (I believe Tom Long calls it the “herald” model of preacher) that would prefer to damn the torpedoes and fire away with the percieved “truth” of the Gospel without any thought to how it is heard or the lives of the flesh-and-blood people sitting in the pews. This has recieved a boost, I believe, from Stanley Hauerwas and others in the ‘radical’ orthodoxy and/or postliberal strain. Conciously taking up a place that is neither theologically conservative nor liberal, such preachers are susceptible to believing their word is the Word.
I have heard horror stories of many such pastors who, in their zeal for being radical, forgot to be pastors. Case in point: the uproar among everyday Americans over the Jeremiah Wright scandal. Maybe he said what needed to be said, but certainly his manner and his context can be legitimately called into question.
On beginning in the ministry, someone told me the oft-repeated phrase “No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” It is trite, to be sure, but there is wisdom in that phrase. It is especially important wisdom for people like myself just out of seminary and eager to prove that we do indeed know something worth hearing. Our authority for preaching in a local church, especially a small congregation, will largely rise and fall with our relationships with the people in the pews. This can be a great terror, or a great tool. The choice is ours.
Uniting Grace 