A Particular Set of (Pastoral) Skills
“I can tell you I don't have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career.” —Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills in Taken
Being a pastor isn’t very exciting when compared to a former black-ops soldier taking out kidnappers to rescue his daughter. But I do have at least two things in common with the fictional Bryan Mills: I don’t have any money to speak of either, but I do have a very particular set of skills. And I have acquired them over a very long career—23 years, to be exact.
Twenty-three years. My God.
I was twenty-five when I took my first appointment—the same age as two young friends I saw commissioned as provisional elders last week at the Dakotas Annual Conference in Bismarck, ND. To see myself at their age, I have to squint back half a lifetime to the moment when the bishop said, “Take thou authority,” and handed me a chalice to take with me to the ends of the earth.
I only lasted a year in my first appointment, two at the second. For my third try, Denise and I moved to Rapid City to work in campus ministry, at which I failed spectacularly. Three years on staff at a big Little Rock church brought me deep friendships and a renewed confidence to try campus ministry again. After seven years at Arkansas State University and eight more in my current appointment, I’ve got plenty to look back on.
Even with all that history, I still don’t understand much.
At its heart, the pastoral profession is not complex. You marry and baptize and preside over funerals—all of which have highly scripted liturgies to follow. You preach, you visit hospitals, you try to keep the church building functional and the budget from teetering too far into the red. You drive the church van full of kids to summer camp. You sit in the dunking booth at local carnivals.
From a professional standpoint, being a pastor is mostly about good management. You deal with a lot of different people, often with competing agendas and unrealistic expectations. You try to keep the peace.
Pastoral vocation, however, is different. Our real calling is the formation of souls, not the least of which is our own. We listen as people story and re-story their lives. We pray and sing and root around in the Bible in hopes of understanding who God is and who we are. We cry for justice in ways that are particular enough to be actionable and personal enough to piss people off.
My friend Diana once told me that teachers don’t get paid to teach. They love to teach. They get paid to grade assignments, because no one would willingly do that part of the job. I think a similar thing is true for pastoral ministry. Most of us got into this because of a deep-seated belief that God’s story is the one that matters, and that finding our place in it is the real work of our lives. But we also have to keep our congregations functional and our leadership teams satisfied, if we want to earn a living.
Both the vocational and the professional aspects of pastoral work require a particular set of skills, and developing them takes years of study and practice. But they are not the same set of skills. We confuse the two at the peril of our calling.
I weighed these different pastoral skillsets at the commissioning/ordination service on Friday night. I’ve never really understood the point of ordination, even though I’ve been part of the clergy for a quarter century. Exactly what can we do that baptized laity could not? The answer is “not much.” They can preach and teach and manage budgets. I’d gladly give up my turn in the dunk tank to any one of them. Ordination doesn’t make pastors wiser or happier or more capable. It doesn’t really even make us special.
So why put so much emphasis on ordination?
Good question.
About fifteen years ago, I had a conversation with Doug Pagitt, the activist and emergent church leader. When I asked him what he thought the biggest problems facing the United Methodist Church were, he surprised me with his answer. “Your polity is too masculine,” he said. “And ordination gets in the way of everything.”
I’ll leave his first observation for another blog post. But the second—that ordination is a major problem for us—has proven to be prophetic. Every Annual Conference meeting this summer has been dominated by the looming split in the UMC over…can you guess? Whether or not to ordain LGBTQ+ persons who present themselves for pastoral ministry.
Perhaps ordination is simply the chosen wedge for those swinging the hammer in the culture wars. If not this, then another issue might have presented itself as the tool for schism. But in our corner of the multiverse, it’s ordination that’s done the trick.
I don’t want to take anything away from my friends who value their commissioning or ordination. I know the work it takes to get to that point. Speaking for myself, however, I don’t value it enough to cling to it in a fight. If by giving it up I could take a weapon out of the hands of the zealots, I would gladly do so. But what then? I’ve been ordained for most of my adult life. Who am I without that piece of my identity?
The answer, I think, is that I am a person with a particular set of skills—two sets, as a matter of fact.
The management side may not be sexy, but it’s at least employable. I know how to build teams and accomplish goals and tell the truth. If I decided to make my living in another career, those skills would transfer. My tax returns would look different. My LinkedIn profile would not.
The other set of skills, however, is more central to who I am. My best work in ministry throughout the years has been putting into practice the things my mentors instilled in me about discipleship, grace, leadership, compassion, and most of all love. In bad times, I find myself going back to these spiritual formation skills, not by rote, but through a kind of spiritual muscle memory. I’ve been doing these things for so long, and even though I often do them badly, I know how to return to the basics. The way I live among people reminds me of who I am and who I want to be until my head and heart can get back into alignment with those habits.
Do I need to be ordained for any of this? No. Does ordination get in my way, the way Pagitt predicted it would for my denomination? Not really, on an individual level. Rather, ordination is something I hold loosely, a marker along my journey that describes but does not define the path. What matters more is how I have learned to live as one who cares for other people. Everything else is just garnish.
The chalice the bishop gave me at my ordination broke during one of our moves. Along the way I lost the Bible she presented me with, and I have only a vague idea of where the stole draped over my neck that night might be. I have never owned a clergy collar, and I wear my robe maybe once every two or three years. The trappings of the calling just don’t matter much to me.
More meaningful is the sticker on my coffee mug—itself a vessel of sacrament, in my book—that emerged from the benediction for our campus ministry. Take care of each other. Some days, I point the sticker away from me so that others will know what I’m about. Other days, I face it my direction in hopes that I’ll remember it myself.
The skills I have practiced most and value most in my years of ministry all point toward the message on that sticker. Take care of each other.
Those particular skills—not the theoretical authority bestowed upon me by a bishop long ago—are what make me a pastor.
