Real Pastors and Real Pastoral Care
We are being bombarded by pastors of big, wealthy, suburban congregations who mistake their material and numerical success for some kind of program for the rest of us to follow, like a turn-key franchise model. And they insist on a political program of disenfranchising smaller congregations who are not typically placed in rapid-growth, demographically favorable places, by pursuing a model of governance that would give their congregations and pastors a proportionately bigger vote than the rest of us - kind of like a 3/5 compromise to reward them for their “success.” Check it for yourself. Get the zip code where these “successful, multi-site, best practices and growing” churches are located, and Google the demographics - especially the ethnicity and average income level.
They also want to change how we form pastors. They want to expand SMP. They want a kind of self-contained megachurch seminary system. They want an online MDiv option, even touting an institution headed up by a lady “pastor.” Nice. They want to change the LCMS the way that they have changed worship, changed the hymns, and changed the administration of the sacraments.
And look at what they want to change it into: a kind of church body that apes Big Eva nondenominationalism, with online trained pastors. Just listen to how they talk and carry themselves on their podcasts. It’s a word-salad buzzword bingo worthy of a Weird Al parody. It’s like being in a sales pitch for a timeshare: you know there’s a catch, you know you’re being bubulum stercused. It’s manipulation and gobbledegook driven by dreams of marketshare and not by that which is true and eternal. And if you have to be subjected to listening to one of these guys preach, it is like unto being a trapped animal considering gnawing off his own leg.
And then there is the liberalism, feminism, bad exegesis, open communion, and abuse of the sacraments. They want a seat at the table so that they can wear us down by “conversation” and “koinonia.” As the meme says, “It’s all so tiresome.”
Moreover, when your parishioners number in the thousands, how do you give them pastoral care? Home visits? Hospital calls? Private confession? How can you have a pastoral relationship when your parishioners are an anonymous multitude? This is why the “laity” are “equipped for ministry” in things like “small groups.” “Successful” pastors simply cannot do pastoral care - especially when they’re busy vision-casting and mission-statementing - and must offload it to those who are not called and ordained. How many of Joel Osteen’s members can call him on his cellphone and get him to visit them in the ER? When your “multi-site pastor” is a face on a screen, don’t expect him to show up and do a house blessing (I mean, why would they do something like that anyway?).
But outside of their happy suburban bubble, there is a real world, real people, who want real worship and real sacraments. Corporatespeak often refers to “authenticity.” But their version of “authenticity” is just more tiresome, manipulative phoniness that can be detected a mile away. It’s also gross. No man wants to hear another man say that he “fell in love with Jesus.” Yes, we love Jesus. But Jesus isn’t your boyfriend (its bad enough when women and praise songs talk this way).
The TV show ER had the scene above in which a doctor - who bears the moral injury and guilt over presiding over an execution by lethal injection of a man who was ultimately discovered to have been innocent of murder. The doctor is now dying of cancer. He doesn’t want a Theology of Glory type of “Hey, hope you have a Jesusy, gospelly kind of day” religion. He is looking for something authentic, something real. He is looking for real pastoral care. Instead, he is visited by a fraud: a woman serving where God did not place her, blathering psychobabble that has nothing to do with anything that is real.
We use the word “real” in conjunction with “presence” to describe our Eucharistic theology and practice. For the practice follows the theology. With our eyes we see bread and wine. But the reality - that we observe by faith in the Words of Institution given by Christ Himself - is our belief that what is there is the Real God. And we confess this reality the same way that Christians have always reacted to the Real Presence: with reverence, with awe, with fear, but with the fear tempered by the Word's declaration of forgiveness, and the invitation in that forgiveness to “fear not.” Indeed, “let all mortal flesh keep silence,” as the ancient liturgy of St. James confesses, which we sing as one of our Lord’s Supper hymns (LSB 621) that the “modern worship” crowd (that’s the new euphemism for “contemporary worship” now that the term “CoWo” seems to have become a pejorative) will not generally sing, being more interested in ephemeral, emotional “songs” rather than timeless confessional hymns that find their origin in ancient liturgical confession and expression.
We in our present era - especially our young people - have been marketed and focus-grouped to death. We have been surveyed, experimented on, and manipulated in every aspect of life: by governments, industry, entertainment, and even the church. We have entered a new age of John Tetzel: no longer hawking indulgences, but rather promises of “worshiping” a lot of people in your church based on following their “best practices” - which always seems to include ditching the liturgy. Although the Marie Antoinette quote “Let them eat cake” is almost certainly a fabrication, the idea that churches located in rapidly-growing, white-flight-fortified, wealthy per-capita enclaves of new subdivisions of the upwardly mobile have all the answers to the vexing issue of the decline of Christendom all over the west - is cut of the same cloth.
But at the end of the day, at the end of our life, at the end of the age - there is always a cross.
And so the Theology of the Cross has to reemerge, whether we like it or not. And we don’t like it. Who really likes the cross? But the cross confronts us. The character of the doctor in the above clip shows why we need that which is real. He wanted a “real chaplain” with real theology. Real people - though they say they want entertainment in church when filling out surveys - inevitably reach a stage in life, whether through tragedy or simply by aging and drawing near to death - where they seek that which is real. And maybe they don’t think they want what is real until it is almost too late.
The market-driven church, in search of happy customers, gives people what they say they want. The faithful church gives people that which is real: what is true, what they need - whether they want it or not, regardless of surveys and ratings and feedback on Google and Yelp.
In the real world of real life, we need real worship, real churches, real liturgy, real sermons, real sacraments, real reverence, real chaplains, real pastors (with real pastoral formation), and real pastoral care.