Editor’s Note: This article was first presented at the Montreat Conference “The Hope of the Church: Celebrating Common Ground” July 5-8, 2006.
By the grace of God, the next generation of pastors will serve the church as passionate/compassionate believers of the Christian gospel. Surely this is one of the warmest and most profound pastoral blessings of an education offered by all of our Presbyterian seminaries. Surely this is the passionate and teaching legacy of our seminaries: at our best, Presbyterians are thinking people with warm hearts.
Why? Because our people in the pews long for pastors who passionately/compassionately believe what they preach and teach. Indeed, from a parishioner’s viewpoint, one of the most priceless affirmations a preacher can receive is: “I can tell you really believe what you preach.” That is, our congregations deeply yearn to call good pastors who will articulate with passion the belief that Jesus Christ is incomparably the most significant event in the history of the human race; that Jesus is God’s own heart of flesh who crawled into the cradle of Bethlehem and who climbed onto the cross of Golgotha; that Jesus, in the words of Joseph Sittler, “comes to us in the world where we are, where we have been, and where we are going. …”; that Jesus is the risen Lord and Savior of all times and all places; that to know God now in Jesus Christ is to know God forever.
By the grace of God, the pastors of the next generation will serve the church as lovers of persons; those who will pray with, grieve with, and minister to the beloved flock, especially in times of crisis and trouble, especially through life’s major passages; those who will sit beside you compassionately on your mourning bench; those who will listen as Christ would listen; those who long to get inside your frame of reference, inside the other person’s skin.
By the grace of God, the pastor of the next generation will serve the church as a person with a good sense of humor, who possesses good leadership skills, who is comfortable in dealing with the reality of ambiguity, who can step outside of herself and poke fun at herself. This pastor will be equipped to deal with complexity and tension within the body of believers. As Samuel Calian and Henlee Barnett have taught us, our churches need leaders who have “the creative ability to see several solutions to a problem, the ability to work in more than one direction.” That is, many complex situations have “more than one angle of vision toward a solution.”
By the grace of God, the pastor of the next generation will serve the church as a biblical/theological sense-maker — as a life-long learner who assumes personal responsibility for integrating classical theological knowledge and disciplines with the skills and practices of congregational ministry. This pastor intricately loves and reveres the art of reading, studying, and passing on the stories of Israel and the teachings of Jesus. With heart, mind, and soul, he believes that the Bible is God’s own self-authenticating word, which finds us and reads us with enormous power. She believes that the Bible is a divine/human window, which reveals God’s search for us and our search for God.
By the grace of God, the pastor of the next generation will serve the church as a spiritual person, a person of character and integrity, one who is strong enough to merit our confidence, one who is good enough to merit our loyalty, one who is a moral mentor, one who is a person of his/her word, one who does not aspire to be a “super Christian,” but one who does aspire to live a kind of life that is congruent with the gospel. By the grace of God, the pastor of the next generation will serve the church as one who possesses a burning regard for justice and mercy, a prophetic imagination which reaches out beyond her own faith community and into the hurting and tearing fabric of the social order; as one who longs to relate Sunday to Monday; as one who believes that Jesus identifies mercifully with every victim of injustice, and that we are called to despise injustice as Jesus despises injustice; as one who will long for the church to live and love as a koinonia of interracial reconciliation; as one who will challenge the church to conduct a “post-Katrina dialogue” with America; as one who will enable our people to feed, more and more, from the indigenous theologies of the world; as one who will prophetically challenge the church, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer convicted us, to read and study history “from below” — that is, from the vantage point of the outcast, the undervalued, the other, the “least of these.”
By the grace of God, the pastors of the next generation will be passionately involved in the relationship between faith and money. They will enthusiastically preach and teach sacrificial financial stewardship as an utterly transformational experience. With the ethicist Sondra Ely Wheeler, they will proclaim that there are two areas in life in which we discover how much we trust God: in how we give and in how we die. Wheeler says that practicing the first (giving) helps us to get ready for the second (dying).
By the grace of God, the pastor of the next generation will interface with the church, in the world, as a servant leader who is willing and adept in sharing the lead. In the words of Ed White, this pastor will know that leadership, as a spiritual gift, is essentially collaborative; that leadership is a “catalytic function” and not “a command and control” function.
DEAN K. THOMPSON is president of Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
