“I Want To Be a Pastor, a Real Pastor.”
Bishop Bo Giertz, author of The Hammer of God
This clip is illustrative.
It shows the divergence between Church Growthism and genuine Lutheran doctrine and practice. Even their language betrays them. They speak of “worshiping a hundred,” etc. The object of the verb “to worship” is, for them, literally a number. Not even a number of deities, but of people. This crass way of using the word “worship” is ubiquitous among the professional church growth set.
At the same time, they want “volunteers” to visit people at home, in crisis, in the hospital, etc.
It’s all about the numbers for them, and they want churches to be so big that you don’t get a pastor to visit you with the body and blood of Christ, to hear your confession, to comfort you with God’s Word. No, you get Doug from the bowling team or Sally the attorney. They want their churches to be so massive that the pastor becomes a kind of executive at the top of a pyramid with a bureaucracy underneath him to do the “ministry work” (ostensibly while the pastor is involved in high level strategizing, planning, and other important entrepreneurial and managerial tasks).
This is the Joel Osteen model. This is the megachurch model. It doesn’t work for confessional Lutherans who believe in the Real Presence and the Office of the Holy Ministry. We all have “successful” megachurches of this ilk in our areas. Some of us have even lost members to them. Some of them may even have satellite campuses, in which the pastor only appears on a screen. In such congregations, there is no way that the pastor is ever going to deign to go to the trouble to visit you in a smelly hospital room (although maybe if you’re a big donor…).
Do you really want a church so big that you are nothing more than a number to the pastor? Is this what Jesus established?
Do we really want our pastors to be so self-important as to be insulated from not only the sickroom, but also from the homes of our shut-ins, from the time it takes to actually build rapport with families, to earn the trust of the children whom they are catechizing, to invest in the time teaching the faith to young and old alike? That is the pastor’s job. Imagine worshiping numbers to the point where you want the pastor to be unable to carry out his vocation, that you actually need the laity to step up and do what the pastor simply doesn’t have the time to do.
Maybe he’s on the golf course meeting with some church growth experts (who charge a nice hourly fee for their consulting services). Maybe he’s too busy “raising up leaders” to take that emergency call from the distressed person who needs soul-care. Maybe he’s running his own side hustle of visiting churches and districts that are rich enough to pay his own speakers’ fees. Is this what you want your pastor to be doing? And when you are in desperate spiritual need, do you want to be visited by a volunteer who runs a small group?
Lutheran ministers are Seelsorgers: givers of soul-care. We are pastors, pastores, that is, we are shepherds. We are there with the sheep. We don’t leave the sheepfold and ask for volunteers to show up and do our work while we attend planning sessions and come up with mission statements. We are the fathers of the family. We don’t delegate our paternal work to some other guy who likes our wives and children and wants to be in our houses with them while we do “more important things.”
Is this really why you went to seminary, pastors? Is this what the Holy Spirit called you to do? If that kind of effete life of distance from the front lines, refusing to get your own hands dirty, delegating your pastoral care to other people in your downline - if that is what modern ministry is supposed to be, you can keep it.
In fact, you can do something else with it.
If you want to be an entrepreneur, a CEO, or an executive, there are wonderful opportunities for people with those kinds of gifts. And there is a lot of money to be made for those who do it well. But the ministry, the holy ministry - the actual, real, authentic ministry of Word and Sacrament, established by our Lord Jesus Christ - is not that. It is like no other calling. It is sui generis. It is lived in the gritty, real world of blood and sweat and real people, and simultaneously in the very real spiritual world of angels and demons. It takes time. It takes presence. It takes contact. It takes intense spiritual formation and fortification. It is a habitus and a vocation. It takes men with integrity and intensity who have been intentionally called and set apart by the Holy Spirit, men who are willing to gird up their loins and fight, speaking God’s Word that He has commanded them to speak by virtue of their office. If you’re not up for that, men, then go and do something else.
Real pastors give real people real Seelsorge, real sermons, and real sacraments.
If you are a pastor trapped in a church-growth world of numbers-worship and boardroom busywork, but seek authenticity in your ministry, or if you are a member of the laity who yearns for that which is true and eternal, something greater than “vanity and a striving after wind” of your church chasing worldly “success,” you might want to temporarily lay aside your Stephen Covey and take up your Bo Giertz. It may be time to read (or hopefully re-read) The Hammer of God. It may be time for the pastor to take a page out of this reminder of what the pastoral office is all about. For in the first novella, the pastor was forced to rely on a pious lady in the congregation to do what he was supposed to be doing in giving soul-care to a troubled parishioner on his deathbed. In response, and after contemplation upon his own calling, Pastor Savonius tore off the decorative rosettes from his breeches, and “he straightened up and said [to the rector], ‘Sir, I am through with all this now. I want to be a pastor, a real pastor.’”