Booknotes on The Contemplative Pastor

Eugene H. Peterson, 1989, The Contemplative Pastor: Returning to the art of spiritual direction, Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

This book should be read concurrently with his memoirs, The Pastor (2011). Peterson’s thesis that pastoral work is spiritual direction is like a breath of fresh air in the numerous books on spiritual direction which focus on techniques and processes. Here, Petersen defines pastoral work as spiritual direction which is also known as soul care. Throughout the centuries of Christian history, he argues that

[T]he [pastoral] work was the same: discovering the meaning of Scripture, developing a life of prayer, guiding growth into maturity. This is the pastoral work that is historically termed the cure of souls. The primary sense of cura in Latin is "care," with undertones of "cure." The soul is the essence of the human personality. The cure of souls, then, is the Scripture-directed, prayer-shaped care that is devoted to persons singly or in groups, in settings sacred and profane. It is a determination work at the center, to concentrate on the essential. (p.57)

I find this refreshing. Spiritual direction (soul care) is helping people to pray, to understand the bible and grow spiritually. A simple and precise definition. Peterson underscores the way we are running the church as compared to spiritual direction (soul care)

In running the church, I seize the initiative- I take charge. I take responsibility for motivate and recruitment, for showing the way, for getting things started. If I don't, things drift. I am aware of the tendency to apathy, the human susceptibility to indolence, and I use my leadership position to counter it.

By contrast, the cure of souls is a cultivated awareness that God has already seized the initiative. The traditional doctrine defining this truth is provenience: God everywhere and always seizing the initiative. He gets things going. He had and continues to have the first word. Prevenience is the conviction that God has been working diligently, redemptively, and strategically before I appeared on the scene, before I was aware there was something here for me to do.

The cure of souls is not indifferent to the realities of human lethargy, naive about congregational recalcitrance, or inattentive to neurotic cussedness. But there is a disciplined, determined conviction that everything (and I mean, precisely, everything) we do is a response to God's first work, his initiating act. We learn to be attentive to the divine action already in process so that the previously unheard word of God is heard, the previously unattended act of God is noticed (p.60-61).

He rewords it so that the contrast is obvious:

Running-the-church questions are: What do we do? How can we get things going again?

Cure-of-souls questions are: What has God been doing here? What traces of grace can I discern in this life? What history of love can I read in this group? What has God set in motion that I can get in on? (p.61)

This gives a new perspective on spiritual direction (soul care) and on the contrast between competitive and contemplative pastoral care. God has already taken the initiative and is active in the world. Our job as spiritual directors are to discern what God is doing in our lives and that of our directees and get on bound. It is a job of grace discernment and appropriation.

.

Why Pastors need Pastoral Care

Some sobering statistics from Pastoral Care,Inc.

Statistics

• 90% of the pastors report working between 55 to 75 hours per week.
• 80% believe pastoral ministry has negatively affected their families. Many pastor's children do not attend church now because of what the church has done to their parents.
• 95% of pastors do not regularly pray with their spouses.
• 33% state that being in the ministry is an outright hazard to their family.
• 75% report significant stress-related crisis at least once in their ministry.
• 90% feel they are inadequately trained to cope with the ministry demands.
• 80% of pastors and 84% of their spouses feel unqualified and discouraged as
  role of pastors.
• 90% of pastors said the ministry was completely different than what they
  thought it would be like before they entered the ministry.
• 50% feel unable to meet the demands of the job.
• 70% of pastors constantly fight depression.
• 70% say they have a lower self-image now than when they first started.
• 70% do not have someone they consider a close friend.
• 40% report serious conflict with a parishioner at least once a month.
• 33% confess having involved in inappropriate sexual behavior with someone in the church.
• 50% of pastors feel so discouraged that they would leave the ministry if
  they could, but have no other way of making a living.
• 70% of pastors feel grossly underpaid.
• 50% of the ministers starting out will not last 5 years.
• 1 out of every 10 ministers will actually retire as a minister in some form.
• 94% of clergy families feel the pressures of the pastor's ministry.
• 80% of spouses feel the pastor is overworked.
• 80% spouses feel left out and underappreciated by church members.
• 80% of pastors' spouses wish their spouse would choose a different
  profession.
• 66% of church members expect a minister and family to live at a higher moral standard than themselves.
• Moral values of a Christian is no different than those who consider themselves as non-Christians.
• The average American will tell 23 lies a day.
• The profession of “Pastor” is near the bottom of a survey of the most-respected professions, just above “car salesman”.
• 4,000 new churches begin each year and 7,000 churches close.
• Over 1,700 pastors left the ministry every month last year.
• Over 1,300 pastors were terminated by the local church each month , many without cause.
• Over 3,500 people a day left the church last year.
• Many denominations report an “empty pulpit crisis”. They cannot find ministers willing to fill positions.

#1 reason pastors leave the ministry — Church people are not willing to go the same direction and goal of the pastor. Pastor's believe God wants them to go in one direction but the people are not willing to follow or change.

Statistics provided by The Fuller Institute, George Barna, and Pastoral Care Inc.

read more

.

Dallas Willard on Assessing Spiritual Growth

DISCIPLESHIP
How Do We Assess Spiritual Growth?
It is possible, but often not very encouraging.
An interview with Dallas Willard

How can churches know if they are being effective at making disciples?

Many churches are measuring the wrong things. We measure things like attendance and giving, but we should be looking at more fundamental things like anger, contempt, honesty, and the degree to which people are under the thumb of their lusts. Those things can be counted, but not as easily as offerings.

| Finish this article |

.

On scandal and scandals

The latest from Thinking Faith...


On scandal and scandals
Recent headlines about clerical sexual abuse in the Catholic Church have focused largely on the way in which the Church has handled claims of abuse and on the postulated link between abuse and mandatory celibacy for Catholic priests. Psychologist Brendan Callaghan SJ looks closely at these aspects of a tragic situation, asking how the Church has arrived at a place of such suffering, betrayal and anger.

Read >>

.

My Farthest Pastoral Visit

Memories of New Zealand #4: Old Friends, New Country

Late last month, I made my farthest pastoral visit- 8,371 km (5,202 miles)! That is the distance between Singapore and Auckland, New Zealand. That did not include the distance I have to travel from Johor Bahru, Malaysia to get to Changi Airport in Singapore.

Meeting my old church-mate and his family is worth all the traveling. It is great to meet up with this wonderful family who has migrated exactly one year ago. Back in Malaysia, the husband and I served in the same church together in leadership roles. We were also in the same accountability group. During our stay, we are introduced to two other members from our home church who have migrated seven and twelve years ago respectively. All are hungry for news from the home church.

Whatever their reasons for migrating (and they are all valid reasons), it has not been an easy transition. It means leaving family, friends and jobs behind. It also means times of uncertainty and insecurity. In mid-life, they have to be retrained for new careers. I am happy that they are able to overcome all obstacles, and to observe that their family unit is now much stronger.



Makan is still an enjoyable activity and the table fellowship great. I am glad that they are settling down well and have found a wonderful church to worship with. It was good to renew old friendship and to catch up with each others' lives. Much have changed but much remains unchanged. They may be Kiwi now but they are still Malaysian inside out, and offers great Malaysian hospitality.

May the Lord continue to bless them.
.

Tribute to Pastor and Mrs Nicholas Yeo

Tribute to Rev. Nicholas Yeo who retired as senior pastor of Holy Light Church (English) Johor Bahru, Malaysia on October 1, 2009. This video presentation, prepared by Michael Shim & Wong Chon Wah, was first shown at the Appreciation Dinner for Rev. & Mrs Yeo at New York Hotel, Johor Bahru on October 4, 2009.

Images from a Church Camp

a wonderful quiet time on the beach reading psalms in the early morning

a powerful experience of the sunrise

learning from one another

sharing

a small young church with a big heart

.

Mediating Prophetic Preaching

This is a powerful article about prophetic preaching. I like what John Koessler has pointed out and I see the same faults in my own preaching.



The Mediating Prophet
Learning to be an advocate in the pulpit.
by John Koessler

Whenever we step into the pulpit, we are the advocate of the people who listen to us. We are a mediator of the text for them. Our role is to help them understand God's Word.

Unfortunately, we can sometimes adopt an adversarial relationship with our hearers in our preaching. It's not intentional, and it may come from a desire to preach prophetically, but some of us are more comfortable pronouncing woes than the gospel.

| Finish this article |

.

The After Midnight Calls

One of the bane of a medical doctor's life is the after midnight calls. Apparently pastors have the same problem as Gordan MacDonald shares.

PASTOR'S ROLE
The 3:00 a.m. Phone Call
What makes a pastor a pastor?
by Gordon MacDonald

Remember that political ad in which the White House phone rings at 3 a.m. and someone has to answer? I know the experience. Sort of.

My phone call came late one afternoon. The caller, a church attendee I knew only casually, said he was at the hospital where his wife, Josie, was dying of cancer and might not last the night. Could I come right away?

| Finish this article |

Top Kingdom Ideas

from Learnings@Leadership Network,

Warren Bird, Ph.D., is Research Director at Leadership Network, and co-author of 21 books on various aspects of church health and innovation writes

Participants at this week's Leadership Network-sponsored Ideation Experience began their 48 hours together by developing a "top 10" list of top kingdom ideas over the last decade. The original poll to help determine the list of nominees can be found here.

The winning ideas were . . .

• Externally focused churches as key idea for evangelical churches
• Shifting opinions on social issues in the 18-35 year old demographic that are shaping the emphases of the church
• Multi-site churches
• The rise of networks as the key focus for church planting and resourcing in other ways
• Open source content freely given away for church resources via computer
• The rise of church websites/pastor blogs/podcasts and videocasts as church communication tools
• Social networking tools (facebook/twitter/myspace/custom tools) being utilized by churches and parachurch groups
• Bringing management and leadership focus into church in a fresh way
• Greater awareness by U.S. megachurches and others to international missions and humanitarian efforts around the world
• From “marketplace to ministry” as strong source of staff members of churches. Emphasis on “homegrown”
• Deeper penetration and shifts in small group models (life groups, cells, etc.) into a broad variety of churches

read more

How to tame our sins

Somehow we seen to teach less and less about sin and more and more about self-fulfillment in churches nowadays. So it is heartening to read an article about sin from John Ortberg, pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church.


The Sin Tamer

Do we ever get to stop fighting against the evil within?

John Ortberg | posted 6/29/2009

How much sin should we expect in the church? We have gauges for other elements of church life. We generally monitor attendance. We know how many people are in small groups. Somebody counts the offerings. And often we don't just measure what we're interested in—we set goals.

Anybody hear of a church that set a goal for a 5-percent sin reduction next year?

I don't mean to be glib about this. Sin is, somehow, at the root of all human misery. Sin is what keeps us from God and from life. It is in the face of every battered woman, the cry of every neglected child, the despair of every addict, the death of every victim of every war.

Pastors have historically understood their primary battle to be not the battle to build a big church, but the battle against the power of sin. "We wrestle not against flesh and blood … ." Christians have measured the seriousness of the battle by the suffering and bleeding of Calvary.

And sin doesn't seem to be going away, either outside or inside the church. So how should we be thinking about sin, in our congregations and in ourselves?

read more

The Depressed Christian

Depression and the Christian Life

Sermon Statement
It is a myth that Christians do not suffer from depression. The community of faith must be prepared to help those suffering from depression.

read more

David Wilkerson's Prophecy

Christianity Today, March (Web-only), 2009

What You Need to Know about David Wilkerson's 'Urgent Message'

How people are responding to his warning of riots, fires, and economic collapse in NYC.

Ted Olsen | posted 3/16/2009 12:08PM

What did David Wilkerson say that got so many people talking?

On March 7, evangelist David Wilkerson posted an "urgent message" to his blog, ministry website, and mailing list. It began:

I am compelled by the Holy Spirit to send out an urgent message to all on our mailing list, and to friends and to bishops we have met all over the world.

AN EARTH-SHATTERING CALAMITY IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN. IT IS GOING TO BE SO FRIGHTENING, WE ARE ALL GOING TO TREMBLE — EVEN THE GODLIEST AMONG US.

For ten years I have been warning about a thousand fires coming to New York City. It will engulf the whole megaplex, including areas of New Jersey and Connecticut. Major cities all across America will experience riots and blazing fires — such as we saw in Watts, Los Angeles, years ago.

There will be riots and fires in cities worldwide. There will be looting — including Times Square, New York City. What we are experiencing now is not a recession, not even a depression. We are under God's wrath.

read more

Pastors are Angry with their Congregations

Here is an interesting report from Christianity Today's Mark Galli covering The National Pastor Convention in San Diego.

Yet despite the gorgeous locale and weather, there is, as usual, palpable angst here. The place is full of pastors who are either exhausted, burnt out, frustrated, or missional. They all amount to the same thing: a simmering anger about the church.

wow. Putting exhausted, burnt out, frustrated and missional in the same sentence. Does that mean what I think it mean?

For most pastors that anger is directed at stupid lay people, stubborn church boards, or indifferent church bureaucrats. But "the church," and especially "the Western church" or "the American church," is the object of a myriad of derisive and sarcastic comments.

The anger is understandable. Pastors are an idealistic lot, having entered the ministry because they had the mistaken idea that they could make a difference in the world. And the church is standing in their way. I know. I was once a pastor. It's the way this works. I had great ideas for ministering to the community and the world. And all sorts of church people, from laity to church bureaucrats, got in the way. What I could have done in a church without people!

read more

.

Missing Pastors in Rural USA

Rural Churches Grapple with a Pastor Exodus

By David Van Biema / Crookston Thursday, Jan. 29, 2009

In Minnesota, Daniel Wolpert pastors a conventional, aging congregation but also runs a contemplation center on a plot of former farmland.

David Bowman for TIME

rural pastors are disappearing even faster than the general population, leaving graying congregations helpless in their time of greatest need. Trace Haythorn, president of the nonprofit Fund for Theological Education (FTE), says fewer than half the rural churches in the U.S. have a full-time seminary-trained pastor; in parts of the Midwest, the figure drops to 1 in 5. "It's a religious crisis, for sure," says Daniel Wolpert, pastor of First Presbyterian in Crookston, Minn., and a partner with the FTE, which supports young ministers and religious teachers. "And to the extent that these churches are anchoring institutions, it's a crisis of community." The sign for one lovely wood-framed church in nearby Buxton, N.D., says it all: GRUE LUTHERAN CHURCH. FOUNDED SINCE 1879. PASTOR--and then a blank where a name should be.

read more

Comments from Christianity Today blog, Out of Ur, The Hansen Report

Related

Video

Vanishing Pastors on the Prairie

Eugene Peterson Tell it Slant

Eugene Peterson Discusses His Book "Tell It Slant"On the importance of paying attention to language. An interview from PreachingToday.com

PreachingToday.com: What does Tell It Slant say to preachers about their lives outside of the pulpit—about their soul and their relationships—and how that complements their preaching?

Eugene Peterson: The book tells preachers they've got to learn the language of their congregation. They've got to be as comfortable talking to people in the parking lot or in a diner with a cup of coffee as they are from the pulpit. This is a big overgeneralization, but pastors tend to want to talk about what they want to talk about. We're not good listeners. If somebody asks us a question about theology, we can do that. If they ask us a question about Scripture, we can do that. But many of us are always trying to get a foothold so we can make a witness, make a point, make a conversion. Jesus didn't do that, and I don't think we should. We are trying to enter into the life of a congregation, listen to them, pay attention to them. Pastors by and large aren't good at being silent.

The book looks at the nature of language as it comes through in Jesus' stories and prayers. It pays attention to something that's basic and large in Jesus' life but isn't given much credence in ours. We pastors are not conversational people. We know too much, and we're too impatient to get that knowledge to others.


How does Tell it Slant speak to preachers about their lives in the pulpit, when they actually are doing the talking?

It encourages us to use imaginative language. There's an overload of explanatory speech, doctrinal speech, apologetic speech in the pulpit. Much of our Christian language is dominated by proclamation and explanation, information and definition. When we read the Scriptures, it's astonishing how little of that kind of talk there is. The writers are poets, they're singers, they're pray-ers. They use metaphor extravagantly. They use stories, these parabolic or off-the-target stories. I always had a few people in my congregation who wanted me to tell them in the sermons what they should do, and I would sometimes say to them, "Well, I just did. Didn't you get it? I want you to participate in the story, in the metaphor." But they want explanations, they want directions. Jesus did very little of that.

Should preaching resemble everyday conversation more?

I think so, yes, although I don't want to dismiss the importance of the kerygma and the didache. Those have prominent places in our tradition, but I do think things should be much more conversational. Part of this has to do with the culture in which we live, this so-called postmodern culture. Conversation is for people who are disaffected from formal, institutional religion. They are also disaffected from kerygmatic and didactic speech—but not from conversation. They love talking, and they love having somebody listen to them. And so there's a cultural appropriateness to this now.

read more

What should pastors write in their church websites?

Scot McKnight of the Jesus Creed posted an interesting comment on his blog concerning what pastors are writing on their church website.

What annoyed me about these sites was the utter absence of a sense of the sacred
in pastoring, of the overwhelming sense of God's call upon a life that reaches
so deep that everything becomes holy, of the profound respect and privilege of
the call to lead God's people, and of the total lack of order. The sense we hear
today of being real and authentic doesn't mean we devalue the pastoral calling
of its sanctity. I couldn't and wouldn't call any of these folks "Reverend." If
I were a visitor, I'd go somewhere else.

read more

Does a pastor only share about pastoring in their church website?
.

Why Pastors should Participate in Facebook

Pastors should participate in Facebook and other social network spaces because:

* it forces them to become more computer and Internet savvy. Many pastors are generations behind in their understanding and use of communication technology
* it introduces them to a new way of social interacting- the digital way.
* it makes them human. Depending on their openness and integrity, pastors who presents themselves as themselves will have to reveal a more personal and human side of themselves.
* allows them to understand and know what the younger generations in his/her congregation is doing in these social network spaces
* develop new aspects of their ministries. Most pastors do not realise that their ministry is limited to the verbal and printed words. They need to be missional with digital words
* provide the presence of Christ in these social network spaces
* make 'friends' with people from all over the world
* they need to create Christian faith communities in these social network spaces
* they should have fun


Read more here

What will you do? (3)

A young couple in your church has been married for five years but is childless. They have decided to seek treatment for their infertility by “in vitro fertilization” (IVF). They came to your office, agitated and in tears because one of the church leaders have told them that IVF is “unnatural” and the child conceived by this method is the “spawn of the devil!”

How will you educate your congregation?

What will you do? (2)

Mr. Lim, your 60 year old church elder has a stroke and is totally dependent on a ventilator in the ICU of a private hospital. The doctors have told Mrs. Lim that her husband is already brain dead and asked her to make a decision to allow them to switch off the ventilator, and for the doctors to harvest his organs for donation. Three of her six children are against her making such a decision, alleging that she wants to kill their father. A group of your church members have implied that she is guilty of not having enough faith for God to heal her husband.

What will you do in such a situation?