Ministry's Not "Running a Church"

Our local ministerium met today. We have a good group of pastors and wives who have been meeting together for years to discuss pertinent subjects. In addition to a summary of Sovereignty and Free Will, we discussed our common reading, which happens to be from Eugene Peterson's, The Contemplative Pastor. It's not always easy to know what subjects will pique another brother's interest, but one did seem to hit home today, viz., "Curing Souls: The Forgotten Art." Let me excerpt a few thoughts from it, and perhaps, if you are interested, you may want to read the entire chapter.

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 to work at the center, to concentrate on the essential. . . . 

Curing Souls Is Not the Same As "Running a Church"

Other pastors and church people will often (mistakingly) speak for us ministers describing what we do as "running a church." But whether mistaken or not, it seems that many pastors bow to such a description. Our calling is thus reduced to an objective work that we perform instead of the prayer-drenched curing of souls. Peterson writes:

It should be clear that the cure of souls is not a specialized form of ministry (analogous, for instance, to hospital chaplain or pastoral counselor) but is the essential pastoral work. . . . Curing souls is a term that filters out what is introduced by a secularizing culture. . . . A caveat: I contrast the cure of souls with the task of running a church, but I do not want to be misunderstood. I am not contemptuous of running a church, nor do I dismiss its importance. I run a church myself: I have for over twenty years. [He continued to 29 years at the same church] I try to do it well.

But I do it in the same spirit that I, along with my wife, run our house. There are many essential things we routinely do, often (but not always) with joy. But running a house is not what we do. We we do is build a home, develop in marriage, raise children, practice hospitality, pursue lives of work and play. It is reducing pastoral work to institutional duties that I object to, not the duties themselves, which I gladly share with others in the church.