Author Archives: Rob Harrison

Political psychopathology

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That wasn’t the title of Peter Berkowitz’ recent column on “Bush hatred and Obama euphoria,” but it might have been.  (Although “pneumatopathology,” a pathology of the spirit, would really be more to the point.)  This is not speaking, of course, to opposition to one and support of the other, or even to intense dislike of the policies of one and strong approval for the policies of the other, but to something which goes beyond both.  As Berkowitz writes,

Bush hatred and Obama euphoria—which tend to reveal more about those who feel them than the men at which they are directed—are opposite sides of the same coin. Both represent the triumph of passion over reason. Both are intolerant of dissent. Those wallowing in Bush hatred and those reveling in Obama euphoria frequently regard those who do not share their passion as contemptible and beyond the reach of civilized discussion. Bush hatred and Obama euphoria typically coexist in the same soul. And it is disproportionately members of the intellectual and political class in whose souls they flourish.To be sure, democratic debate has always been a messy affair in which passion threatens to overwhelm reason. So long as citizens remain free and endowed with a diversity of interests and talents, it will remain so. . . .In surveying the impediments to bringing reason to bear in politics, it was not [Alexander] Hamilton’s aim to encourage despair over democracy’s prospects but to refine political expectations. “This circumstance, if duly attended to,” he counseled, “would furnish a lesson of moderation to those, who are ever so much persuaded of their being in the right, in any controversy.”As Hamilton would have supposed, the susceptibility of political judgment to corruption by interest and ambition is as operative in our time as it was in his. What has changed is that those who, by virtue of their education and professional training, would have once been the first to grasp Hamilton’s lesson of moderation are today the leading fomenters of immoderation.Bush hatred and Obama euphoria are particularly toxic because they thrive in and have been promoted by the news media, whose professional responsibility, it has long been thought, is to gather the facts and analyze their significance, and by the academy, whose scholarly training, it is commonly assumed, reflects an aptitude for and dedication to systematic study and impartial inquiry.From the avalanche of vehement and ignorant attacks on Bush v. Gore and the oft-made and oft-refuted allegation that the Bush administration lied about WMD in Iraq, to the remarkable lack of interest in Mr. Obama’s career in Illinois politics and the determined indifference to his wrongness about the surge, wide swaths of the media and the academy have concentrated on stoking passions rather than appealing to reason. . . .By assembling and maintaining faculties that think alike about politics and think alike that the university curriculum must instill correct political opinions, our universities cultivate intellectual conformity and discourage the exercise of reason in public life. . . . They infuse a certain progressive interpretation of our freedom and equality with sacred significance, zealously requiring not only outward obedience to its policy dictates but inner persuasion of the heart and mind. This transforms dissenters into apostates or heretics, and leaders into redeemers.

Kentucky as test case: the rhetoric/reality gap widens

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Of course, the storms that passed to the south of us last week didn’t only affect Kentucky, but that seems to have been the worst-hit state, so it stands in for the whole mess (just as Katrina hit Mississippi, too, but you didn’t hear nearly so much about that because unlike Louisiana, Mississippi had a competent [GOP] state government that managed the disaster effectively); and that mess, it seems to me, is important for understanding what we can expect from the Obama administration in times of crisis—and this is definitely a crisis, with over a million people suffering, and a number of deaths.  For those not used to dealing with ice storms, J. G. Thayer explains:

The problem with ice storms is magnitude. They cover vast areas, and the damage is systemic. They can wreak havoc on electric grids. Utilities can find themselves having to deal with thousands of broken lines and hundreds of broken poles. . . .It’s been about a week since Kentuckians got pounded, and they’re still digging out. Half a million people were still without power as of Saturday night, and almost half that many have no water. Emergency shelters are still open, and the governor has mobilized every single member of the National Guard to assist.

Now, by way of comparison, here’s Barack Obama in May 2007:

In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died—an entire town destroyed.

Actually, the death toll was 12, so then-Sen. Obama overstated the magnitude of the tornado’s damage somewhat, but that’s still a tragedy; he certainly didn’t apologize for using it as an opportunity to bash the Bush administration for sending the Kansas National Guard to Iraq:

Turns out that the National Guard in Kansas only had 40 percent of its equipment and they are having to slow down the recovery process in Kansas.

Now, here’s this from the Obama White House website:

President Obama will keep the broken promises made by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. He and Vice President Biden will take steps to ensure that the federal government will never again allow such catastrophic failures in emergency planning and response to occur.President Obama swiftly responded to Hurricane Katrina. Citing the Bush Administration’s “unconscionable ineptitude” in responding to Hurricane Katrina, then-Senator Obama introduced legislation requiring disaster planners to take into account the specific needs of low-income hurricane victims.

OK, so the point appears to be clear:  the Bush administration didn’t care about disaster victims and didn’t do enough to respond to their needs.  Can we do better?  Yes We Can!  Which offers a not-so-implicit promise:  We will.In Kentucky, we have the first test of that promise, and so far, Barack Obama is failing.  Miserably.  Under the Bush administration, FEMA was savaged for its poor response to Hurricane Katrina; so, did they respond quickly and effectively to help those suffering from this storm system?  No.  Why?  Because it might be dangerous and difficult.  According to FEMA spokeswoman Mary Hudak, “We have plenty of folks ready to go, but there are some limitations with roads closed and icy conditions.”  I’m sorry, but that’s just pathetic.  For crying out loud, it’s a natural disaster—of course there will be limitations.  You find a way to overcome them, or you aren’t doing your job.  That’s the standard to which FEMA was rightly held in 2005, and it’s the standard to which they need to be held now.Also, the White House website trumpets the fact that in 2005, Sen. Obama visited the area hit by Katrina several times; has he bothered to go to Kentucky?  No, though he did find time to throw a Super Bowl party (with strips of $250 a pound Wagyu steak).  He did get around to declaring a federal disaster area—two days after the storm went through, and only after he’d been asked to do so by Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear.  Compare that to the way the Bush administration and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal handled Hurricane Gustav, essentially pre-positioning the federal response.  For all that the current administration brags that they “have learned the lessons of Katrina,” they clearly haven’t learned them as well as the Bush administration did.  Their rhetoric, as always, is fabulous; their follow-through, however—as is the emerging pattern—doesn’t measure up.And then, of course, there’s the press.  Have they been on top of Barack Obama on this the way they were on top of George W. Bush?  Well, as the Anchoress writes,

Americans are freezing and dying but I guess I’ve missed Anderson Cooper flying to the midwest and crying and Geraldo shouting, “where is the help?” I guess I’ve missed members of the press demonizing President Obama for eating steak and having cocktails with the press while people are freezing and without food.When a million people in flyover country are suffering, and 42 people have died, we don’t hear much about it. If this was New York, Washington, Boston, (or if the president had an R after his name) you’d see non-stop reports, and the press would be roundly criticizing FEMA’s absence, and the White House’s disregard. Right?

Right.  Or as John Hinderaker put it,

Is Barack Obama an insensitive lout who serves $100 per pound steaks to his elite guests and turns up the heat in the White House high enough to grow orchids while a million of his countrymen are without power and dozens are freezing to death? If not, why not?Solely because that is not the story the media want to tell. Many on the web—but no one in the mainstream media—have commented on the fact that Obama has not even pretended to do anything about the massive ice storm that has disabled much of Kentucky and neighboring states. It took days for FEMA to swing into action. Why is that not a scandal? Days went by before Kentucky’s governor called out the National Guard. Why did no one blame Obama for failing to call out the Guard sooner? Probably because he lacks the constitutional power to do so; but the Constitution hasn’t changed since 2005. . . .A basic reality of our time is that our mass media are monolithic, and what they choose to report (or not report) depends on what fits the narrative they are pushing on the public. If our reporters and editors wanted to portray Obama as clueless and out of touch with ordinary Americans, he has given them ample opportunity to do so. But because they are Democrats and he is a Democrat, they have no desire to tell that story. So “let them eat steak” is not a theme you’ll be seeing on the evening news.

J. G. Thayer sums it up well:

If George W. Bush’s handling of Katrina was really such an executive catastrophe, then President Obama’s indifference to the suffering of Kentuckians is unforgivable. But since no one is objecting this time around, what does that say about the motives behind the outrage over Katrina?

Memo to Kentucky from the MSM:  we don’t actually care about your suffering, we care about its political value.  Since it has no political value, never mind.The fact of the matter is, this won’t be President Obama’s Katrina moment (whether or not it should be), because the MSM won’t let it be, and it’s just not big enough or horrifying enough for those not directly affected by it.  But if he and his administration aren’t shaken up by their poor response to this storm and its aftermath, and if they don’t learn the necessary lessons from it, they will have one.  Something will come along from which their media lapdogs can’t save them, and whether they believe it possible now or not, the Obama administration will be broken just as the Bush administration was.  Right now, they’re sowing the wind; if they don’t make some major changes, the time will come when they reap the whirlwind.

Is the Crystal Cathedral about to shatter?

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Maybe, if the AP story has it right:

The church is in financial turmoil: It plans to sell more than $65 million worth of its Orange County property to pay off debt. Revenue dropped by nearly $5 million last year, according to a recent letter from the elder Schuller to elite donors. In the letter, he implored the Eagle’s Club members—who supply 30 percent of the church’s revenue—for donations and hinted that the show might go off the air without their support.

Robert H. Schuller, who is of course the church’s founder, handed over the senior position at the Crystal Cathedral to his son Robert A. Schuller a few years ago; after a while, though, it appears he decided he didn’t like what his son was doing, because last fall he removed his son from the television broadcast.  After that, the younger Schuller’s resignation as senior pastor (which was announced last November 29) was inevitable, merely a matter of time.  The resulting upheaval, of course, has badly damaged the organization.  I was particularly struck by this comment:

Melody Mook, a 58-year-old medical transcriptionist from El Paso, Texas, said she stopped her $25 monthly donation and is looking elsewhere for her spiritual needs. She said she dislikes the guest pastors.  “I feel hurt and confused, and I’m not sure that I want to sit and watch when I know there’s problems beneath the surface,” she said. “You feel like you’re in somebody else’s church every Sunday.”

I read that and I have to wonder, didn’t she realize it’s been “somebody else’s church” the whole time?  She lives in El Paso, for crying out loud—she’s not a part of that congregation, and never has been.I have mixed feelings about this situation.  On the one hand, this could have and should have been avoided; after all, it’s not as if no one saw it coming.  The transfer of power from elder to younger Schuller has been planned since 1997 or so, and for that whole time, people familiar with the situation have been saying it wasn’t going to work.  I remember being a part of a conversation in the summer of 1998 among folks from various parts of the Reformed Church in America in which people expressed two main concerns:  one, that Robert A. Schuller didn’t have the gifts for the position to which his father wanted him to succeed; and two, that Robert H. Schuller would never really be willing to let anyone else run the show independently, not even his son.  As a consequence, I doubt many close observers of the situation are surprised at how the transfer of authority has played out.  I realize there was no way that the RCA’s Classis of California was going to tell the elder Schuller “no,” but they should have.On the other hand, maybe it would be for the best if the Crystal Cathedral did shut down.  It’s generated a lot of money and a lot of publicity over the years, but to what real benefit to the kingdom of God?  Maybe it would be better to shut the doors, let the property revert to the Classis of California, and let the classis and the Synod of the Far West figure out how best to use it.  I know there’s been some discussion in the past about starting a new denominational seminary in the West; the campus could be used for that purpose, and you could probably cover a lot of the expenses of starting and running a new school by renting out the great glass sanctuary itself to some other church for Sunday services.  Or maybe it would be better just to sell the whole thing and use the money to fund church plants all over southern California.  I don’t know, but there would be lots of options.The bottom line here, I think, is that this is what happens when you build a church on a personality and a media strategy rather than on the gospel of Jesus Christ.  If the driving force in a church is anything other than the gospel, and if the congregation’s chief loyalty is to anyone but Jesus, that church is built on the sand, and it cannot and will not endure.Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.—Matthew 7:24-27 (ESV)

An observer’s guide to the “new politics”

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Since we’re now into February and the new administration is underway, it seems a reasonable time to stop and evaluate what Barack Obama’s “new politics” look like so far.

In short, posture a lot about things like “the greatest ethical standard ever administered to an executive branch,” “bringing change to Washington,” and “the moral high ground” to cover over the fact that the reality is just D.C. business as usual.  Funny, but the “new politics” looks just like the old politics.Update:  Including the fact that the American people will only put up with so much.  Tuesday afternoon, Tom Daschle withdrew his nomination.

The narrow mind of the literary world

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As my lovely wife posted recently, the British novelist Julian Gough wrote an excellent blog post a while back on the self-deluded ghetto that is modern literary fiction.  His post was occasioned by a review in the Guardian—a review of a lit-fic book by a British author, by a British lit-fic author—that was very impressed with the book in question for the originality of its central theme.  The only problem?  Well, here’s what Gough has to say:

This is the first line of the review: “The Opposite House is not the first novel to suggest that migration is a condition, not an event; but it may be the first to contend that the condition afflicts no one so profoundly as the gods.”Now, I couldn’t quite believe that was her opening claim. But it was.  She really thought that her stablemate at Bloomsbury was probably “the first to contend” that migration “afflicts no one so profoundly as the gods”. And editors and sub-editors had let this stand.Which means that nobody involved in the whole process was aware that Neil Gaiman had spent nearly six hundred pages, in his novel American Gods (which is not “literary”, nor published by Bloomsbury), writing about nothing but how migration profoundly afflicts the gods.

I’m not surprised by this—nor, I suspect, is Gough, since in the first paragraph of the piece, he’s already diagnosed the main problem with the modern literary ghetto:  it’s

a ghetto that doesn’t know it’s a ghetto: a ghetto that thinks it is the world.

I have no problem with people enjoying literary fiction; I think a lot of it’s badly overpraised, but some of it’s worthwhile.  What I do have a problem with, as I’ve noted before, is precisely this attitude Gough puts his finger on, that lit-fic isn’t a genre, but rather is simply what’s worth the attention of the serious reader.  This is, not to put too fine a point on it, pure tripe from beginning to end, as B. R. Myers demonstrated at some length a while ago in The Atlantic (much to the anger and discomfiture, it should be noted, of the the mandarins of the lit-fic world; but though they did a fine job of dismissing his points and pulling rank on him, I don’t recall anyone actually disproving his arguments).  Between them, Myers and Gough do a fine job of blowing away the pretentions of modern literary fiction and its acolytes, and showing that their affectation of superiority to the rest of the publishing world has no grounding in reality; in so doing, they demonstrate that the self-proclaimed openness and wideness of vision of the lit-fic world is in fact astonishingly myopic and narrow-minded.

Would the real issue please stand up?

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Lots more to blog about from the Worship Symposium, and I’ll get back to that in a more serious way tomorrow; but I wanted to note separately a comment Craig Barnes made by the by in his workshop on Saturday to this effect:  “The reason Presbyterians are so hung up on talking about sex is that it enables them to avoid talking about the fact that the [PCUSA] is dying. . . .  Presbyterians would rather talk about sex than death.”It’s an interesting point, and I have a sinking feeling he’s more or less right.  I’m not one who thinks we can just pretend our intradenominational disputes over sexual ethics aren’t there, or aren’t significant, because they are—but I have tended to think that if we could somehow just agree to put everything on hold for a while and put our energies instead into revitalizing older churches and planting new ones, as my other denomination (the Reformed Church in America) is doing, that the Presbyterian Church (USA) would be a lot better off, and in a much healthier position to have (and survive) the debate.  If the Rev. Dr. Barnes is right, though, I’m not so sure; if he’s right, we’d just find something else to sabotage ourselves.  Which suggests that some other approach is in order.  I just wish I had an idea what.

Blindness and Sight

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(Isaiah 42:10-25; John 9:39-41)

As many of you know, Isaiah is one of those books of the Bible that liberal biblical scholarship believes should be cut into pieces. The mainstream view among liberal academics divides it into three parts. The first is chapters 1-39, which is generally attributed to the historical eighth-century BC prophet Isaiah and his disciples; the section we’re looking at, chapters 40-55, is credited to a person or persons unknown in exile in Babylon during the sixth century BC, shortly before the Persian conquest under Cyrus; chapters 56-66 are usually supposed to have been written by yet another person or group of people some time after the people of Israel returned to their homeland.

Now, for various reasons, some of which I talked about in the opening sermon of this series, I think this view is a bunch of malarkey which has been cooked up by people who don’t believe in prophecy, and thus have to come up with some alternative explanation for, in particular, the prediction of the coming of Cyrus. If you start with the assumption that Isaiah could not have had knowledge of the future, then obviously he couldn’t have known about Cyrus, and therefore someone else has to be responsible for that part. This is, I think, a bad idea for a lot of reasons, but perhaps the most important one—and certainly the most serious for our efforts to understand what the prophet is on about—is that this view of the book introduces assumptions which badly skew our reading of the text.

The most significant of those bad assumptions, I believe, comes into play for the first time here. You see, in order to read Isaiah 40-55 as disconnected from the rest of the book, you have to see it as separate from the book’s storyline, if you will. Instead, these chapters become just one long word of encouragement to the exiles—granted there are some complaints from God mixed in, but those are just side notes; the overall theme is that God is going to deliver his people and everything is going back to the way it should be. But if you clear those assumptions out of the way and read the text carefully, you see something rather different; what you see, as I argued a few weeks ago, is God’s plan for the world shifting into a new phase. You see the servant Isaiah’s been talking about for the first 39 chapters—the people of Israel—fading from view, and a new Servant—Jesus Christ—rising to prominence to carry on the mission they have rejected.

That shift begins with the introduction of the Servant, whom God will raise up to carry out the mission that should have been performed by his people; here in this passage, we start to see that play out. The prophet calls the nations to sing a new song to the Lord for the new thing he has declared, and then we get this image of the Lord as the divine warrior going forth to battle—though who the enemies are in this context, we aren’t told; the focus is on the Lord, who has been silent, but now is going to raise his voice and shout like a warrior in battle, or a woman in labor. No longer will he hold himself back; instead, he’s going to do extraordinary things, both in judgment and in blessing.

In particular, look at verse 16: “I will lead the blind by a way they do not know, and I will guide them along unfamiliar paths; I will turn their darkness into light, and the rough places into level ground. These are the things I will do, and I will not leave them undone.” Now, what does this mean? Look back a minute to verses 6-7, which we read last week: “I will keep you and will make you to be a covenant for the people and a light for the Gentiles, to open eyes that are blind, to free captives from prison and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness.” That’s the promise and the instruction which God gives to his Servant. So we have the ministry of the Servant to bring Israel and the nations back to the proper worship of God, represented as giving sight to the blind and freeing those who are prisoners; and that language of blindness is picked up here, as God states that he himself will lead the blind and make a way for them. 

And then look at verse 17: “But those who trust in idols, who say to images, ‘You are our gods,’ will be turned back in utter shame.” That might seem like a complete left turn to you—maybe you’re starting to think that Isaiah has idolatry on the brain—but actually, it’s the connection that tells us what Isaiah’s on about. You see, there’s a biblical trope here, a standard biblical way of speaking that’s in play in this text—it’s the association of blindness (and also deafness) with idolatry. It isn’t literal physical blindness that’s primarily in view—that’s just a metaphor and a symptom; rather, what Isaiah has in mind is the spiritual blindness that comes along with worshiping idols. You see, God can see and hear—indeed, he sees and hears everything, because he’s the creator of all that is—but idols can’t; they’re just lumps of wood and stone, and so they’re as deaf and blind as the materials from which they’re made and the tools with which they’re shaped. Thus, those who worship the living God can see and hear, because they worship the one who gave them eyes and ears, but those who worship idols soon become as deaf and blind as the false gods before whom they bow.

This is the tragedy of verses 18-25. God had formed himself a nation, his people Israel, to be his servant to lead the nations out of their blindness—but instead, they wandered away from him to worship idols themselves; instead of delivering the peoples of the world from their bondage to idolatry, they ended up in need of deliverance right along with them. That’s why God has to raise up another Servant, because his people have done their best to render themselves no different than the world around them. Indeed, they may well be worse off—thus God asks, “Who is blind but my servant, and deaf like the messenger I send?”—because unlike the nations, they ought to know better. They ought to know better, and have deliberately chosen not to. They have seen many things, but have paid no attention, and though their ears are open, they hear nothing.

This is why Jesus says in John 9, “I have come into this world for judgment, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.” Why judgment? Look at Isaiah 42:17: “Those who trust in idols will be turned back in utter shame.” Those are people who have been offered the gift of verse 16 and refused it—they hold fast to their idols, preferring gods of their own invention, that they can control. And who are those people? They’re the ones who think they already see just fine, thank you—as the Pharisees did—and thus refuse to believe that they need Jesus; in so doing, their darkness, their true blindness, is revealed and confirmed. It’s not that Jesus wants this to happen, that he desires to judge them; but he knew that in his coming, they would judge themselves, and that that judgment on them was thus an inevitable part of his coming. Just as he came, as Isaiah had promised, to bring sight to the blind, so would he also come to reveal the blindness of those who loudly proclaimed their ability to see.

Now, the interesting thing about this is that the Pharisees weren’t blind in the same way as the people Isaiah was talking about—or at least, they would have said they weren’t. They knew this passage from Isaiah as well as Jesus did, and they understood the prophet’s complaint about the people of his time; they knew the dangers of idolatry, of worshiping the gods of the nations, and they were devoutly opposed to that. Their whole effort, their whole reason for existence, was focused on worshiping God faithfully and keeping his law as well as they possibly could; they no doubt saw themselves as the exact opposite of blind and deaf Israel, because they saw their mission as one of preparing the way for the coming of the Servant of God. So why does Jesus make the same charge against them that Isaiah made against the people of his own day?

There are two reasons. First off, they had made an idol of their own religion. Their focus had slipped—as it’s all too prone to do—from worshiping God and giving him glory to worshiping their own purity and glorifying themselves. That’s why, as Jesus charges elsewhere, they’ve begun to use the law of God for their own purposes, figuring out ways to use legal technicalities to avoid meeting some of the law’s more inconvenient expectations, like giving to those in need. This is also why, second, they had committed their own version of blind Israel’s other biggest sin: just as Israel had looked down on the nations as enemies, rather than seeing them as their mission field, so the Pharisees looked down on non-Pharisees as inferiors, people to avoid rather than people to bless. One of the things they objected to about Jesus, remember, was that he hung out with lowlifes and sinners, whom they themselves despised and hated. In this, too, their essential blindness was revealed, because it showed that their true focus wasn’t on God; they couldn’t see that the “people of the land” whom they loathed, the nations whom they regarded as enemies, were the people God loved and wanted to redeem, just as much as he loved and wanted to redeem them. They were, ultimately, all about themselves, and that’s not what God is on about, or wants us to be on about.

The reason, I think, is that the Pharisees had lost sight of the fact that their relationship with God was all about grace, not about their own effort—and make no mistake, they should have known that; we often miss it, too, but the Old Testament really is just as much about the grace of God as the New Testament. That’s why Jesus is the fulfillment of the law, not its replacement. They had lost sight of the fact that even for all the work they put in, they didn’t deserve God’s favor any more than the tax collectors, prostitutes, and foreigners they held in such contempt, and so they failed to understand that their proper response to God and his grace was not to keep it to themselves but to share it. They failed to understand that God calls his people to mission—to the mission of the Servant, to be agents of grace for the world. May we not make the same mistake.

The work of the people is the work of the Holy Spirit

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Simon Chan, “A Theological Understanding of the Liturgy as the Work of the Spirit”


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The most interesting part of my second day at the Worship Symposium at Calvin was Simon Chan’s workshop on the liturgy as the work of the Holy Spirit.  Dr. Chan is a Pentecostal who teaches at Trinity Theological College, an ecumenical Christian seminary in Singapore; from the title and the interview he gave Christianity Today last year, I knew him to be rather more liturgically-minded than most Pentecostals, but I didn’t expect him to ground his argument in the work of Eastern Orthodox theologians like John Zizioulas and Nikos Nissiotis—which is exactly what he did.  It was a fascinating argument and discussion about the way in which the Holy Spirit works on and in the church, and effectively takes on the shape of the church—the church, we might say, becomes the body of Christ by embodying the Holy Spirit.I’ll be a while processing what Dr. Chan had to say, I suspect; but I greatly appreciate his emphasis on the fact that the Spirit of God is always present with and at work in the church, and that it’s the Spirit’s ongoing work that constitutes the church.  That really drives home the point that we are entirely dependent on grace.

The importance of friendship in ministry

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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.