What is a Pastor?

I am attending this year’s “Rostered Ministers Gathering” held by my denomination (you can still register until Friday if you want to do this too). I spend too much time bellyaching about the ELCA, and it seemed appropriate to get out there and give the event the chance to either gainsay my grumbling or provide fresh material for it. I am, in fact, looking forward to it.

Unless you are part of the ELCA, and in fact fairly highly involved in it, you will probably not have encountered the term “Rostered Ministers” or know what it means. Bear with me while I try to work it out. In a theological and ecclesiological sense, “ministry” for Lutherans among others belongs to all the baptized. Everyone ministers in their particular vocations, serving as “little Christs” (Luther’s phrase) in the world. But certain ministries have, from the earliest age of the church, been set apart for particular service to and within the church herself. These are the elders/priests (typically “pastors” in English-language Lutheran usage, though the term denotes the same thing), deacons, and bishops (or superintendents, supervisors, overseers, etc.). While the definitions and boundaries of these roles have never been strictly fixed anywhere in the Christian world, they have been around in some form for a long time and have typically been ritually marked by ordination, consecration, commissioning or something like that. Lutherans had their own ways of doing this, and arguments over just what it all meant and what such ritual demarcation conferred and allowed have happened among Lutherans and between us and others from the beginning. And as I understand it, when the ELCA was formed in the late 1980s, a big TBD was left where our theology of orders and ministry would normally go.

But in recent years, our official communications have avoided references to “pastors,” “clergy,” and “ordination,” in favor of the term “rostered minister.” This is meant at a first glance to include deacons, an order of ministry that has been somewhat revived among us, and deacons are “consecrated” rather than “ordained” [UPDATE: from comments, I am informed that the terminology has been updated and deacons are “ordained,” though it seems to me that the “rostered” language preserves the older distinction by means of trying to erase it]. But, you may be asking if you have endured this far, what does “rostered” mean? A “rostered” leader is someone whose credentials, so to say, are preserved on an official list in our denomination. It is an administrative designation rather than a theological, sacramental, or ecclesiological one. In the absence of a theology of ministry, we have developed a professional registry.

Within this professionalization, one might still see the outlines of the tasks that have defined ordained ministry in the past, most particularly “preaching” or “proclaiming” the Word of God and “administering” or “celebrating” the Sacraments.

But a shortage of ordained clergy and an abundance of under-resourced congregations has meant that, in many places, the Word is preached and the Sacraments administered by lay people who are given a measure of instruction and official accountability and entitled “authorized” leaders. Since, in our understanding, the custody of the sacraments is entrusted to the clergy only for reasons of good order and not because of any gift conferred in ordination, it is technically possible for any baptized person to administer them. But this creates a new awkwardness. “Word and Sacrament” were the defining functions of our pastoral office; on that everyone agreed, and if we quibbled about other matters, we could always find consensus on a functional definition of clergy ministry. But now that a large number of non-ordained, non-clergy people are performing those functions, what is left for the “rostered minister” but this professional credential? I don’t know. I don’t have any personal or professional resentment of this development; I get validation from my work but I can’t seem to make myself enjoy any particular status within it. It’s just confusing. As so often happens in liberalizing reforms, the attempt to create equality, or at least the language of equality, by compressing the orders of bishops, pastors/priests, and deacons into one “rostered” category and then opening up all the work of those orders to lay people has left us with a new and obscure hierarchy. Now we don’t have lay and clergy, or deacons and pastors, but those who have been able and willing to pursue seminary education and received a “call” with a salary of some kind and those who haven’t. Would it be possible for me to resign my “call” and my “rostered” status, take “authorized” status and get hired by my congregation to do my job, more or less, with fewer roster-specific responsibilities (I do not want to do this, to be clear)? I don’t know that, either. Maybe the Gathering will help clear that up (it won’t).

Putting theology and ecclesiastical practice aside for now, I have been trying to consider the pastor in terms of cultural representation. What do people who are not pastors think a pastor is or should be? What are the unstated expectations, writ small or large, for this role? That’s to say I’ve made an informal study of clergy novels. I recently finished John Updike’s sharp, priapic A Month of Sundays (1975), about a Protestant (probably Episcopal, maybe Methodist or Lutheran) minister remanded to a rest cure for what today would be called sex addiction. And that led to me Harold Frederic’s differently but equally tart The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), which I’m still reading, about a Methodist minister in upstate New York being pulled this way and that by demythologization, consumerism, sexual attraction, and Roman Catholicism. I add these to my personal roster of clergy stories that have stayed with me, starting with Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2004) and eventually taking in Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry (1927), Elizabeth Strout’s Abide With Me (2006), Martin Gardiner’s The Flight of Peter Fromm (1973), Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory (1940), Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads (2021), and Shusaku Endo’s Silence (1966).1 That makes nine novels, enough for a review-essay. I have some notes. Maybe I’ll even write it someday.

The events depicted in all the North American novels fit comfortably into two lifetimes, from shortly before the Civil War to Watergate. Robinson’s John Ames and Lewis’s Elmer Gantry were born in time to read Frederic’s novel when it was first published. Strout’s Tyler Caskey is a younger colleague and contemporary of Ames. Franzen’s Russ Hildebrandt could have been an intern or pre-seminary visitor for either of them, and serves the kind of metropolitan denominational fortress Lewis’s anti-hero built forty years earlier. He serves just across town and a few years on from the site of Peter Fromm’s collapse. Updike’s Tom Marshfield (great name, that one) was born shortly before Greene’s nameless “whiskey priest” died. If Elmer Gantry makes it a few years past the time of the novel without succumbing to a heart attack or a jealous husband, Theron Ware made it a little past his three score and ten, and all their fictive universes coincided, there is a moment in the 1930s when every main character in all these novels would have been alive. Taken together, they make a cracked portrait of our continent in the age of urbanization, industrialization, mass migration, bitter conflicts between left and right, and rapidly changing social mores. And in all of them, the church is mostly present as a bystander. Lewis’s Gantry, probably the worst of the lot, is “successful” inasmuch as he builds a grubby empire on the fear and credulity of a dislocated populace. Updike’s sex fiend, too, at least reports increased attendance, though it’s because he’s not trying to build but leaves the wallets of his people in relative peace. And Franzen’s watches helplessly as a charismatic youth leader builds a following that ignores him and, it seems, the church as a whole.

What might you learn about ordained ministry from these books? One commonality is that the characters aren’t particularly good at their jobs. They’re good at some aspect of them2—carpentry, writing, having an iron grip on contemporary theological debates, avoiding detection by the militantly secularist Mexican state police—but they seem perpetually lost in particulars. Tom Marshfield is brilliant and manic; he likes to make visits, go to meetings of church groups, and provide counseling (especially when he turns it into a pick-up tactic), but he frankly calls this a “sundae of junk deeds.” He says this after driving thirty miles to the hospital of a parishioner dying of cancer who “with his last surge of vitality, bitterly resented my intrusion.” We’ve all been there, brother. John Ames has a voice so sad and beautiful that you can lose sight of the fact that he doesn’t appear comfortable outside of a very narrow conception of his role. He notes the arson attempt on the former Black church in Gilead with sorrow but not as an event that he, a notable man in the town, might have spoken about or tried to counteract. Greene’s priest succeeds at becoming a saint despite himself (Greene loved a dead hero because living is terribly complicated), and Gantry succeeds at building a big church with a neon cross, but the rest seem basically befuddled and aimless.

Also a lot of them have problems related somehow to sex. Gantry is a dog (though he has an affair with a traveling evangelist clearly based on Aimee Semple McPherson, the only interesting character in the whole book) as is Marshfield. Greene’s priest hates himself for fathering a child, though he hates the child and her mother even more. Franzen’s pastor isn’t a predator on an Updikean scale but, well, I’ll let you find out for yourself if you’re curious, and I will say for the record that this newsletter absolutely does not condone the actions of the Rev. Russ Hildebrandt. Gardiner’s Fromm, like his mentor pastor, the narrator of the novel, is pretty normal and non-transgressive in his relationships. Ames and Caskey don’t abuse their office or break any rules as far as I remember, but they allow themselves to become foolish in their sober, vaguely unreal roles.

Yet at the same time, most of them seem to be meeting an inchoate social need. Theron Ware’s charges treat him as a hireling and give the impression of caring as little for God as they do for the affairs outside of their small city. Sinclair Lewis is at least as cynical. But everyone else seems to think there’s something real being sought. Updike touches on it venomously (please pardon my inclusion of his crudity, which, I feel obligated to stipulate, has not at all been evident in my own work). The narrator calls his sermons “so fetchingly agonized, so fashionably antinomian”:

I suffered, impaled upon those impossible texts, weeping tears with my refusal to blink at the eschatological, yet happy in my work, pale in my pantomime of holy agitation, self-pleasing in my sleepless sweat, a fevered scapegoat taking upon myself the sins of the prosperous. The blue-suited businessmen regarded me with guarded but approbatory grimace as a curious sort of specialist, while musk arose thicker than incense from between the legs of their seated wives. But enough of such shoptalk. I was sincere, if the word has meaning.

Strout offers a rhyming counterpoint:

It might have been this quality, as much as any other, that continued to make this minister so popular with his congregation: these moments of sudden bafflement, deep uncertainty. Surfacing from a man who appeared always in control of himself, who shouldered his misfortunes with the gentle air of abstracted acceptance, these instances of open-faced bewilderment allowed people, particularly women but by no means only women, to view him surprisingly and suddenly vulnerable, and caused him to seem even more stoic in between these glimpses. Heroic, almost.

I love that “heroic, almost.” Many adjectives could be modified by that “almost”: holy, scholarly, spiritually ambitious, wise, distinguished, revered. The pastor, in these novels and I suspect not infrequently in the minds of worshipers today, is an ambassador from a respected but distant state, grown too comfortable in residence to be altogether admired, but too enduringly alien to be fully at home. “Otherworldly,” an amiably non-churchgoing friend called it, but otherworldliness is a game you can only lose. Too much and the smallest departure looks, at best, foolish—John Ames putting tonic in his hair on Sunday in case Lila shows up to church. But push too hard in the other direction, to being a swearing, drinking, warts-and-all person of the world and the faintest residue of imputed sanctity will make you stink of desperation—as Tom Marshfield basically acknowledges he does. Is there anything more pitiably, cravenly emasculated than the whole Mark Driscoll manly-man act? One turns away less in disgust than in embarrassment.3

So is the collected wisdom of the clergy novel that people expect, and maybe want, their pastors to be aimless, horny ciphers? The bafflement and the agonizing are real enough, and perhaps necessary. Even Greene’s priest, given the comparatively straightforward task of haring around the province administering sacraments until he gets shot, has to grapple with them. John Ames, whose novel is much the best of any of these, battles all the way through to a climactic act of pure ministry that he understands as a failure. But it’s the disproportion between the person and the office, the message and the venue, the conviction and the ceaseless petitioning of qualification, the vastness of a fragmented reality and the little heaps we have to make from it, that makes anything true and good within the role possible. Otherwise we may as well be replaced by AI agents or drop the notion of office altogether. Professionalization is, so to say, not even wrong as a way to think about the substance of it.

For all I know, that is true of any other vocation. At least I would believe a doctor who told me that the professional credential is only incidentally connected to the work of the office, though it is nevertheless necessary for the sake of accountability. Between the black-letter functions of the role and the professional rostering of the people who do it falls the shadow. And, I suppose, the light. No one, not even Marilynne Robinson, is going to tell us what a pastor actually is. We’ll have to figure it out as we go.

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