Just as you never step in the same river twice, you’re never married to the same person from one day to the next. Stanley Hauerwas has said this perhaps better than anyone:
Destructive to marriage is the self-fulfillment ethic that assumes marriage and the family are primarily institutions of personal fulfillment, necessary for us to become “whole” and happy. The assumption is that there is someone just right for us to marry and that if we look closely enough we will find the right person. This moral assumption overlooks a crucial aspect to marriage. It fails to appreciate the fact that we always marry the wrong person.
We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. For marriage, being [the enormous thing it is] means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary challenge of marriage is learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.
Sound advice for marriage. But I wonder if it might also work for the pastorate as well. You’re never the same pastor that the church hired. And the church is never the same as they were on day one. And that’s a good thing.
Hauerwas’ encouragement to “learn to love the stranger” is absolutely vital. It’s a daily opportunity to believe and apply the gospel. After all, such hospitality—of loving one another as we are and as we are becoming—is a reflection of how much we’ve actually grasped the gospel.
Where pastors and churches get in trouble is when we start to think this world—even the churchified bubble we’ve created—has become our home to settle into. That mindset will blow up in the face of both the pastor and the flock. It’s what Bonhoeffer called “human love”. Such human love desires ownership—for the pastor it’s a desire for this to be his church and for the congregation it’s a desire for the pastor to be theirs.
Human love is directed to the other person for his own sake, spiritual love loves him for Christ’s sake. Therefore, human love seeks direct contact with the other person; it loves him not as a free person but as one whom it binds to itself. It wants to gain, to capture by every means; it uses force. It desire to be irresistible, to rule. (Bonhoeffer, 24)
There is something beautiful in ministering in the ordinary. But there is something devastating when we minister in the predictable. One is love and the other is contempt. We must learn, both sheep and shepherds, how to love one another as who we are in that very moment in which we find ourselves–those unpredictable ordinary Christ-gifted moments.
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