2 minute read
I revere excellent pastors. Unfortunately, they’re few and far between. Not only that, they’re getting harder to find as American Christian culture‘s implicit expectations are shifting to more of a “Church CEO” model. These days pastors are chiefly responsible for overseeing programs, increasing attendance, maximizing participation, managing the board, and serving as the community’s spokesperson, which is all baptized with the community’s preferred dialect of Christianese. It’s shockingly difficult to find a pastor who specializes in, ya know, pastoral care.
When someone’s whole life is falling apart, it shouldn’t be so damn hard to get more than an hour of pastoral care once every other week. It’s more than the limited allotment of time, though. Pastors today are academically trained and institutionally formed to listen with a default concern for logistics. They’ve been conditioned to gravitate to the practicalities of interpersonal dynamics, institutional policies, financial considerations, etc. It’s all about Doing, not Being. This is why I’m rapidly moving away from trust for pastors and toward trust for spiritual directors.
Spiritual directors are trained to be spiritually and psychologically centered in God’s presence. They listen with empathy, curiosity, and openness. They’re receptive to where the Wind of God might be creatively blowing. That’s why I trust them. After decades of practice, I have developed rhetorical strategies for getting pastors to bypass their ingrained mental habits, but it still usually takes half our time together to get them to lower their shields and get into the deep Holy Spirit stuff whereas spiritual directors tend to inhabit that space as their natural domain.
Before anyone dismisses this as anti-clericalism, bear in mind I’m a priest in the Anglican tradition. I’ve been involved in ministry for two decades in diverse contexts, taken seminary courses like “The Life & Work of the Pastor,” and studied books like Richard Baxter‘s 1656 classic, The Reformed Pastor, and Eugene Peterson‘s outstanding 2012 memoir, The Pastor. I have no vendetta against pastors. What frustrates me is the largely unnoticed seismic shift of expectations that has occurred during my lifetime. This newfangled Church CEO model? It’s an abomination.
The original beatniks distrusted religious people in general, but had a particular unease toward clergy. Ya know what? I feel the same way. Whereas institutionally-focused pastors have inflicted untold abuse and trauma upon my life, people-focused spiritual directors have consistently been God’s means of grace. Whereas pastors have often freaked out when I’ve done my Enneagram 5w4 thing by asking hard questions, spiritual directors love engaging those questions with a fellow pilgrim. The upside of the Church CEO nonsense? I suppose it’s creating an fresh opening.
