Yesterday, I went to visit my father-in-law. He was in the hospital after a knee surgery. A little background here is that he has been a pastor for the last 42 years. That’s long time for a life dedicated to stand by souls who crave for a hand to hold, a face to relate to, and a heart to share one’s brokenness.
Now I know a pastor’s calling is sacred, but what do they really do or experience in that calling? What do they have to rise above when everything around them is falling apart?
In this day and age, where the pastors we have come to know lead megachurches with thousand-strong congregation, and they are also adored and adulated, is the pastor’s job really that difficult?
I think it is fitting here to cite St Augustine, a prominent African Catholic bishop, who attempted to describe the role of a pastor. It is no easy read for the prerequisites of a job. Here is the job scope of a shepherd of broken/wounded hearts.
“Disturbers are to be rebuked, the low-spirited to be encouraged, the infirm to be supported, objectors confuted, the treacherous guarded against, the unskilled taught, the lazy aroused, the contentious restrained, the haughty repressed, litigants pacified, the poor relieved, the oppressed liberated, the good approved, the evil borne with, and all are to be loved.”
That’s a rather high calling right?
Anyway, I read a book “The Pastor” by the late Eugene H. Peterson many years ago, and recalled one incident the good pastor encountered that had stuck in my memory.
The year was 1955. The young seminary student Eugene had a rather unusual encounter with a church janitor. His name was Willi Ossa, a German. He said that Willi was one of those people who profoundly shaped the process of him becoming a pastor. But it was not a positive encounter, trust me.
Willi was severely negative about the church. He had seen it all and wanted to warn the young Eugene about becoming one. His outraged hostility had a grounding on his past experience.
Willi had lived through the war and “personally experienced at close quarters the capitulation of the German church to Hitler and the Nazis. His pastor had become a fervent Nazi.’” Willi knew little about deep theology then. He only knew that “the state church he had grown up in hated Jews and embraced Hitler as a prophet.” Willi was a witness to history of how a church became corrupt, siding with the evil of the time. And Willi “watched as they turned his beloved Germany into a pagan war machine.”
Ironically, Willi became an unwitting advocate against organized religion when he told Eugene that “churches, all churches, reduced pastors to functionaries in a bureaucracy where labels took the place of faces and rules trumped relationships.” Pastor Peterson wrote that Willi liked him and didn’t want him, whom he saw as a friend, destroyed.
So, one thing led to another, and Willi, being also a very serious painter, offered to paint Pastor Petersen. In the book, Pastor Petersen wrote: “Every Friday I would sit with the afternoon sun on me, mostly silent, as (Willi) painted and Mary (Willi’s wife) prepared a simple supper. Then we would walk the six blocks to the church.”
It took a few weeks to complete the portrait. And guess what came out of the church janitor’s artistic strokes. Pastor Peterson described his portrait as such: “He had painted me in a black pulpit robe, seated with a red Bible on my lap, my hands folded over it. The face was gaunt and grim, the eyes flat and without expression.” When Mary first saw it, she exclaimed in German: “Krank! Krank!” It means “Sick! Sick!”
When Pastor Petersen asked Willi why Mary would say that, he replied: “I told her that I was painting you as you would look in twenty years if you insisted on being a pastor when the compassion is gone, when the mercy gets squeezed out...” He then turned to Pastor Petersen and said: “Eugene, the church is an evil place. No matter how good you are and how good your intentions, the church will suck the soul out of you. I’m your friend. Please, don’t be a pastor.”
That young Eugene took the advice and turned it on its head. He became a pastor anyway and founded a church in 1962, “Christ Our King Presbyterian Church” in Maryland, which he had served for 29 years before retiring in 1991.
This brings me back to my father-in-law. He had his own stories to tell about the people he had encountered. But I will always remember what he said to me once, “Mike, my calling is to the people God has entrusted to me.” And I trust, the entrusted lives also included leaders too.
Alas, misshaped lives are not uncommon everywhere we go, and healing wounded hearts is one of the key callings of a pastor in the humble refuge he resides in called the church. But the church is far from perfect. It can become ugly, and in rare times, as Willi puts it, it can be perceived as an ally with evil.
For those unfortunate occasions, the church was supposed to be one that stands apart from the world where the source of her hope is not on things that offer only temporary solutions and pleasures. The tragedy is that the means often become tyrannical, and subject the end to a compromise or deformation that, like Willi said, “suck the soul out of you.”
For decades, my father-in-law and many pastors in his church have stood in the gap to personalise hope, exemplify love and embody joy to their sheep who have been crying out for a living testament to the faith they have been reading about in the Bible.
In the end, it is the people that the shepherd’s heart can never let go. And their lives matter because the true shepherd leaves no one behind. His journey is for a lifetime, and his road, no matter how treacherous, is one that his sheep never travels alone.
Let me end with these questions posed by Pastor Petersen.
“In our present culture the sharp distinction between a job and a vocation is considerably blurred. How do I, as a pastor, prevent myself from thinking of my work as a job that I am expected to do to the satisfaction of my congregation?”
“How do I stay attentive to and listening to the call that got me started in this way of life – not a call to make the church attractive and useful in the American scene, not a call to help people feel good about themselves and have a good life, not a call to use my considerable gifts and fulfill myself, but a call like Abraham’s “to set out for a place…not knowing where he was going,” a call to deny myself and take up my cross and follow Jesus, a call like Jonah’s to “go at once to Nineveh,” a city he detested, a call like Paul’s to “get up and enter the city and you will be told what to do”?”
Indeed, if you read Jeremiah 12:5, this scripture will challenge you: “If you’re worn out in this footrace with men, what makes you think you can race against horses?”
Pastors run that race, both on foot and on horses. His is a long journey in obedience, in the direction of what his Saviour had overcome. It is thus an obedience for a purpose beyond the squabbles of men, the pettiness of their blind ambitions. It is also a race that he never knows where it will take him.
But as long as his eyes are on the crown of life that is imperishable, his hope will always rise above the circumstances, his faith above the uncertainty, and his love, as Augustine puts it, above the temporary earthly affairs of an intemperate soul.
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