Those who turn to Tom Currie’s new book hoping for a bowl of chicken soup for the pastor’s soul or ten steps to a booming church will be disappointed — thank God! But those who read it seeking a thoughtful, faithful response to the maladies that afflict ministry today, and who seek to remember why ministry still matters, will find their efforts rewarded on nearly every page.
Many voices in our culture critique the consumerism that consumes us, “the commodification of everything” (as The Hedgehog Review has put it), which seeks to make even God a thing to be bought and sold. There are chroniclers galore of the soul-stultifying depression of churches that have enthralled themselves to the tyranny of usefulness and have found that their prayers to the gods of this age have been answered and the church has become for many a matter of mere utility. But few voices have responded to these and other contemporary challenges with such profound pastoral insight as Currie.
This book benefits from the author’s insatiable appetite for interesting conversation partners, as well as his own vocation as pastor and theologian. Reflecting, for example, on Alexander Schemann’s Journals, Currie challenges the reader to recover the joy (the “deep confidence”) of the gospel that transcends and contradicts the mere “pursuit of happiness” of our amusement-addicted culture. He asks us to consider the question: “What if precisely at the point where Christ declares his work to be finished [on the cross], it is finished also with our grim efforts to justify ourselves?” Currie discerns the central irony of the contemporary Protestant church, which often seems to have forgotten that its integrity lies not in its own righteousness, but in the recognition of our need for God’s grace. He recalls the seventeenth-century poet and priest George Herbert’s exploration of joy in the poem, “The Bunch of Grapes,” inviting us to allow the Scriptures to read us, and to draw us into what Karl Barth described as “the strange new world within the Bible.” Far from a commodity that the church can dispense for its own ends, “it is through the cross that joy comes and makes itself known precisely in resisting our efforts to commodify it, remaining ever a gift.”
In a chapter wonderfully titled, “Dostoyevsky as an Apostle of Joy,” Currie takes on the cult of productivity and management that can threaten the identity of the church, reducing the minister to the chief executive officer of a religious society, our era’s moral equivalent to the medieval peddler of indulgences. In harmony with Eugene Peterson, whom Currie appreciatively credits, he writes: “Dostoyevsky provided the gift of a vision, a sanctified imagination that could sympathetically depict the messiness of human existence with all of its passions and painful contradictions while revealing in its very midst the even deeper mystery of a grace incarnate in the lives of these fictional characters.”
Anyone who has read Currie’s earlier books, especially Ambushed by Grace: The Virtues of a Useless Faith (1993), will recognize the continuity of his thought and appreciate the care with which he continues to explore the necessity of an eccentric (or ex-centric) faith, a faith that literally takes us out of the center of our ultimate concern, and therefore risks salvation at the hands of God alone. Currie perceives the seductive power, the idolatry and futility of every human effort to construct our own salvations, to purchase our own redemptions, even when these efforts are ecclesiastically sanctioned. From poet W. H. Auden’s “Christmas Oratorio,” he wrings hope for a church made desperate by its own self-justification: “Nothing can save us that is possible/ We who must die demand a miracle.”
This book is at its best when the author reflects directly on lively and original thinkers like Dostoyevsky and Flannery O’Connor, which is to say that Currie is an attentive and imaginative reader and listener. If preaching is the art of listening out loud to the Word of God, then Tom Currie demonstrates his aptitude as a preacher throughout this book. Perhaps this is why the book reminds me of what Presbyterian pastors once did better than any other variety of ministers. They provided a thoughtful and literate response to Christian faith. Good Presbyterian ministers were well-grounded in a discernable set of Reformation traditions, yet were also eager to explore the worlds of literature and philosophy, history, politics, and ethics, the arts and sciences, the full range of human intellectual endeavors. They were, at their best, unafraid to examine big ideas, but were also suspicious of over-reaching grand theories; willing to engage the world with compassion despite the costs, and wise enough to know how to negotiate “the art of the possible.” They were convinced that God is (sometimes against all odds and often in spite of the evidence) at work in the lives of the men, women, and children who worship together, care for, sometimes annoy, and even harm, one another in real congregations. These ministers reflected on the meaning of the gospel carefully and with a sense of humor grounded in an embarrassing lack of embarrassment at the irony and modesty of their calling. To read this book — and this is a book to be read slowly and at leisure — is to remember what was historically best about Presbyterian ministry, and to hope that the best is not beyond our reach even today.
There is a tendency in The Joy of Ministry to be dismissive of certain pastoral functions the author describes as therapeutic and administrative. This weakness in the book cannot be overlooked, despite the book’s strengths. While one can resonate with Currie’s concern that ministry should not be reduced to purely therapeutic or administrative functions, and while one can appreciate the fact that (given the strong currents of cultural accommodation related to these models of ministry) it is crucial that we point out their faults, one may find oneself debating with the author: “Isn’t a pastor not only a preacher but also an overseer?” “Isn’t a pastor not only a teacher but also a physician of the mind?” Both of which questions are posed by the earliest theologians of pastoral ministry, Gregory of Nazianzus and Chrysostom.
It seems to this reviewer that pastors have a duty to discern God’s presence in the mundane, and to articulate the theological significance of the routine. The pastor is peculiarly placed to note how the gospel calls certain administrative practices into question, not because they are merely administrative, but because they are contra-gospel. The pastor has the distinctive task of discerning the spiritual stakes of something as ordinary as the workings of a personnel or a finance committee.
Having noted this concern, however, it is vital to keep in focus the valuable corrective this book provides. Like Joseph Sittler’s Gravity & Grace or Eugene Peterson’s Working the Angles, both of which are now nearly twenty years old, The Joy of Ministry reminds us of what is essential to Christian ministry, that without which the church’s ministry would lose its way: “To be disturbed and charmed and content in the presence of Jesus Christ,” Currie writes, “is to confess that ministry is sustained by his love and is not a religious project we can manage or control. Ministry is not a comfortable vocation,” he tells us. But ministry is joyful.
Michael Jinkins is dean and professor of pastoral theology at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. He is the author of several books including Letters to New Pastors (Eerdmans); The Character of Leadership (Jossey-Bass); and The Church Faces Death (Oxford University Press).
