The Worship Symposium began today at Calvin; this year, I started off by taking a seminar on “Developing Pastoral Excellence,” which turned out to be interesting in an unexpected way. The presenter, the Rev. David Wood, is the director of Transition into Ministry, a program funded by the Lilly Foundation which seeks to aid and support pastors in the transition from the education process into the early years of their first call. As such, he’s been thinking a lot about what it means to be a good pastor and what is necessary for pastors to minister well; in so doing, in looking at all the list that various authors have generated of what makes an excellent pastor, he noticed “the sound of something missing”: he argued that an essential and unconsidered component of pastoral excellence is friendship.In brief, his argument runs like this. To be a good pastor, one must be a person of character and integrity and moral habit; as Aristotle (whom he quoted repeatedly) says, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” To live in this way requires sustained moral effort; and to sustain moral effort, the Rev. Wood contends (following Aristotle), we need friends of character—deep, strong friendships with godly people whom we can trust implicitly.This is true for a number of reasons. For one, central to our work as pastors is our ability to maintain a proper balance of intimacy and distance with the people in our congregations, something we can’t do if we’re starved for intimacy ourselves. For another, this requires a degre of self-knowledge which we can’t manage on our own—we need people who know us well to reflect us back to ourselves, so that we can see them through their eyes. For a third, we need support, reinforcement, encouragement, and sometimes a good swift kick or two from others if we’re to live lives of excellence of character—none of us have the resources in ourselves to do that alone.And fourth, we need friends to protect us from boredom. The Rev. Wood argues that when you see a pastor in moral collapse, you’re probably seeing someone who was bored with their life. It’s easy to grow bored with the things that matter most to us if we have no one with whom to share them; it’s easy to forget why they matter. We need others to help us remember, and to help us stay excited about and invested in them. As long as we stay interested in what we’re called to be doing, we stay energized about doing it, and invested in it. When we get bored, we go looking for trouble—and usually find it.
