“Most ministers were ’set apart for the gospel,’ as Paul says of himself … The preacher’s vocation was once a kind of circle that began and ended in the word. Whatever it was that made you a minister was aimed at its eventual public expression. The minister’s whole existence was concentrated to a point of declaration. Today, however, the circle has been broken.
“Our culture devalues proclamation while elevating other associated forms of ministry such as counseling or community work….
“But the proclamation of the word cannot be professionalized. It has no functional equivalents in secular culture. It cannot be camouflaged among socially useful or acceptable activities. Its passions are utterly nontransferable. The kerygmatic pitch, as Abraham Heschel said of the prophet’s voice, is usually about an octave too high for the rest of society. If you are filling out a job application, see how far it gets you to put under related skills: ‘I can preach.’
“When ministers allow the word of God to be marginalized, they continue to speak, of course, and make generally helpful comments on a variety of issues, but they do so from no center of authority and with no heart of passion. We do our best to meet people’s needs, but without the divine word we can never know enough or be enough, because consumer need is infinite. We are simply there as members of a helping profession. We annex to our ministry the latest thinking in the social sciences and preface our proclamations with phrases like ‘modern psychology tells us,’ forgetting that the word ‘modern’ in such contexts usually indicates that what follows will be approximately one-hundred years out of date. What we lack in specialized knowledge we can only offset in time by making ourselves compulsively available to anyone in need.
“I am convinced that no seminarian or candidate sets out to minister with such reduced expectations, and not everyone succumbs to this scenario, but ultimately the marginalization of the word of God fractions it into a hundred lesser duties.”
Richard Lischer, The End of Words: The Language of Reconciliation in a Culture of Violence (Grand Rapids / Cambridge, U.K., 2005), pp. 22-24.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Richard 01.31.10 at 6:32 pm
Gulp!
Pam 01.31.10 at 8:05 pm
St Paul was a ground-breaker. Speaking as a parishioner, my needs are hopefully ‘met’ by many people - my minister is greatly valued for sharing his brokenness with us, sometimes inspirational sometimes not. Is that proclamation?
Kim 01.31.10 at 10:10 pm
Pam, on “brokenness”, Lischer notes that Martin Luther King described the calling to preach as a “vocation of agony”, and observes: “In the matter of the preacher’s discontent, art has imitated life. In all American literature you would be hard-pressed to find one happy, well-adjusted preacher” (p. 20).
Dave Faulkner 01.31.10 at 10:28 pm
Echoes of Acts 6 where the apostles say they must not neglect the ministry of the word and prayer? Sometimes it isn’t just an internal pressure within a minister that leads to a departure from the centrality of the word, sometimes it’s the poor expectations of congregations.
Tim Chesterton 01.31.10 at 11:57 pm
Good one Kim - thank you.
Pam 02.01.10 at 1:45 am
Yes, Kim, I guess if you want to be “happy and well-adjusted” don’t become a preacher. Still, we do manage to make Geoff (minister) smile sometimes. And vice versa. Thanks for the post.
Kim 02.01.10 at 7:46 am
Oh, YES, Pam, what could be more comic than the vocation of the preacher? If I were to make a film The Preacher, my leading man would be Buster Keaton. The preacher’s climb into the pulpit Sunday by Sunday is Sisyphean (in churches, that is, that still use or even have pulpits - their disuse/absence is a another, architectural sign of the evisceration of preaching in the contemporary church) - and one must imagine Sisyphus smiling (Camus said “happy”).