Jeremy L. Berg

Today, Will Willimon, in his book “Pastor” quotes his own teacher’s words on the pastorate toward the end of his career training clergy. James E. Dittes speaks of “ministry as grief work”:

To be a minister is to know the most searing grief and abandonment, daily and profoundly. To be a minister is to take as partners in solemn covenant those who are sure to renege. To be a minister is to commit, unavoidably, energy and passion, self and soul, to a people, to a vision of who they are born to be, to their readiness to share and live into that vision. To be a minister is to take that all-out, prodigal commitment to a people who cannot possibly sustain it. . . . The minister is called by their need, by their fundamental inability to be who they are born to be, hence by their fundamental inability to share and live into that vision in which the minister invests all. To be a minister, then, as God knows, is to be forsaken regularly and utterly, by those on whose partnership one most relies for identity, meaning, and selfhood.

p. 290

Willimon adds his own powerful reflection on the pastor’s true crown, referencing the Roman Catholic rite of Holy Orders where the soon-to-be priest is made to lay prostrate on the floor of the church, face down and arms out-stretched:

“Jesus’ own earthly ministry ended upon a cross. As Paul reminds us, God’s power in Christ is “made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). From what I have experienced as a pastor, the challenge is not to find some means of sure success, as the world measures these matters, but rather to fail in the right way, for the right reasons.

Gradually to lost heart out of sheer boredom at the triviality of the church is to fail for the wrong reason. To be crushed because we put too much confidence in the approval of people or the praise of the world is failure not worth having. But to have failed in the manner of Jesus, on the cross, to lie prostrate on the floor, arms outstreched in cruciform, to have confronted the world with the good news of Christ only to have the world fling it back in our face — this is the cross that is the pastor’s crown” (290).

No wonder they speak of this life as a vocation — as something God “calls” people to.  No one in their right mind would ever voluntarily sign up for this life of lonely grief work filled with daily grief and abandonment unless God.  It’s a high calling. Please pray for your pastor regularly, friends.