The Church 8: Practicing the Presence of Pastoring
A missing component in many
churches today is, well, pastoring! Pastoring
is all about the practice of being present in people’s lives. The word ‘pastor’, after all, is related in
Greek to the word ‘shepherd’, and if there is one thing shepherds are known
for it is being present with their sheep. To
illustrate the point, I will give three examples of pastoral ministry that
address the importance of presence—presence with the people.
One story of pastoring that stands
out in my mind is of a pastor I have known for many years. The story is illustrative of his whole
approach to pastoral ministry. Once he
visited a woman from the church at her home.
Her husband never attended the church and, as I recall, was something of
a ‘deadbeat’. When the pastor visited on
one occasion, the man simply stayed in the bedroom watching television. The pastor knocked on the bedroom door and
entered the room. He said, ‘What are you
watching?’ and, without being invited, he lay down on the bed beside the man
and watched television with him. Here is
an example of the importance of presence as an aspect of pastoral
ministry. One might even say ‘incarnational
presence’. To be sure, the Son of God’s
becoming a man is a far richer story of incarnation than the story of a pastor
flopping down beside a deadbeat husband in a low-income home to spend an hour
watching television with him. But that
is the point: if this is what God the Son has done for us, should we not also
understand pastoral ministry in the same way? Pastoring is an imitation of Jesus. We read in 1 Peter,
1 Peter
5:3-4 3 Do
not lord it over those in your charge, but be examples to the flock. 4 And when the chief shepherd
appears, you will win the crown of glory that never fades away.
Another story is of a large,
programme-oriented church my family was a part of for a few years. The pastor delivered excellent, pastorally
sensitive messages in his sermons. They
were Biblically sound, and the size of the church was no doubt a result of his
integrity as a person and his excellent teaching. The church was not that large when he became
its pastor, but the church grew year after year. It grew to the point of having to broadcast
the sermon on a screen to a separate building.
Multiple pastors had to be hired to oversee missions, education, youth,
and other ministry programmes in the church.
These programmes attracted more people to the church—there was something
for everyone. And yet, in fact, week
after week in the large, Sunday morning service you seldom met anyone you had
ever seen before. Worship was a regular
diet of personally engaging the ministry from the platform without regarding
persons around you (despite the moment in the service to ‘greet those around
you’). The actual service was well
cropped to one hour, and this made it possible to fit in three services on a
Sunday morning. Worship was processed. After the sermon—always excellent, mind you—the
first part of a song from earlier in the service was sung and then the
congregation dismissed (no benediction).
Had the service led to some desire for further worship or ministry, this
would have been problematic.
This ‘three songs and a sermon’
Evangelicalism has grown to be fairly standard for many, and that it simply
cannot sustain orthodoxy and orthopraxy in an increasingly post-Christian
culture in the West should be obvious. There
is simply neither enough teaching nor real community present in such churches to
meet the challenges of either life or the culture at large. Religion is, by definition, whatever one
turns to in the heights and depths of human experience. How much more so is Christianity a faith,
love, and hope in Jesus Christ to guide and sustain the traveller on such a journey? Yet shallow Evangelicalism has no chance whatsoever of helping believers to face anything
significant in life's struggles.
Nor did it in the case of one member of
this church who suddenly faced major surgery.
Unable to walk, except a little in the home, he missed the one hour,
weekly services that were a meagre part of his spiritual life in this church. His wife spoke to the ministers about his
situation. There was no telephone call,
card, or pastoral visit. There was no
prayer. No person from the church came
by to see the person over the months of his absence from the church, even
though he had been a member for several years.
Contrast this with our own experience
in a church in England. By all accounts,
the large church just described was the successful church over against this
little English church of about fifty people.
It had been around for about two hundred years in a small market town. The church was sometimes a little larger,
sometimes a little smaller—like any family over the years. Of course, everyone knew everyone else—and that
made the church what it was. The church
actually practiced koinonia—fellowship
in each other’s lives—on a weekly basis.
People from the church met in each other’s homes fairly often, helped
each other whenever there was a challenging situation, and the pastor visited
in the home almost every week. People
prayed for each other, and if someone went missing on a Sunday morning,
everyone knew. The children played
together—they did not just attend a Sunday School class, which was, of course,
an important part of their life in the church.
Which of these churches—the large,
programme-run church or the small, family-based church—practiced the presence
of pastoral ministry? One simply cannot
pastor from the pulpit. Nor should one
try, I might submit—the church needs teaching from the pulpit. Large churches, whose pastors quite possibly
at one point in their lives actually did pastor people, typically reduce their
pastoral role to trying to pastor from the pulpit. They simply fool themselves. One of the requirements Paul set for
overseers in the church was that they manage their own households well (1 Tim.
3.3-4). Many might focus in these verses
on the role of authority, but that would be to miss an essential part of what
Paul had in mind. It is precisely
because the ‘church’ is not an ‘assembly’ but is a ‘family gathering’ that Paul
can say this. That is, the authority of
the overseer is not the authority of someone overseeing the programmes of a
large group but of a group that is intimately engaged in each other’s lives like
a family. The overseer in such a church
is like the head of the household in a large family. Such a person lives in the home with the rest
of the family, is engaged in their lives, and is respected for his care and
concern for each one. What Paul says
about the overseer is grounded in his understanding of the church as a family
present in each other’s lives.
Quite likely, many reading this will have wonderful examples of how their church practices the presence of pastoral care. This post is for those who have not realized that this is an essential part of church and ministry. It is especially directed to those ministers in churches who have given up pastoring while still being seen as the pastor of the church. The pastor who does not show up at the homes of his parishioners on a regular basis is simply not pastoring. The pastor who is not present regularly in prayer with his people is not really a pastor. The (supposedly) ‘successful’ pastor who has now to oversee the programmes of the large church and prepare a fine sermon each Sunday is no longer a pastor. If someone needs a description of what it means to be a pastor, think of my friend pushing his way into a man’s bedroom, flopping on the bed beside him, and watching some ridiculous television show with him just to be there with him, to practice the presence of pastoral ministry the way Jesus did with us.
This is not to claim that pastoral ministry is only about being present, of course. Nor is it to suppose that any kind of presence with someone is pastoral presence. Yet what needs to be emphasized today—at least in my experience of various churches—is that many of us need to recover the practice of presence as one of the essential aspects of what it means to be a pastor.
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