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My first love in church life was always the church itself. I was the kid making calls Sunday afternoons to ensure friends felt invited to youth group. I loved the van rides to synod assemblies. Summer camp was especially my jam, there really wasn’t a camp song I refused to belt out or dance to around the campfire. And at the center of this was always Jesus: I can still remember the way my whole body felt kneeling at the altar for a 5th grade communion event. I’ve never looked back.
Except for a short stint during high school when I considered becoming an actuary so I could retire young and play a lot of golf, the call to pastoring in the church has always been central to my sense of vocation.
But this sense of call has never been narrow. In college my psychology professors encouraged the possibility of doctoral research because I loved and was good at statistics, and I seriously considered. Similarly in seminary I both felt drawn to, and was encouraged to, consider life in academia.
I’m the student who reads all the assigned texts and if there is time also looks up some of the books in the footnotes. So in seminary when I had the opportunity to revel in the heady atmosphere of Trinitarian and systematic theology, I went for it. I can remember so many late nights burrowing into the finer distinctions of the Christian faith with neighbors and friends.
But, and this was the latest emerging theme if now also the most crucial (faith is developmental, after all), the sense of a call to pastoral ministry merged with a commitment to activism.
I think I’ve always figured that if you are going to care for people, you should address the source of that which is hurting them in the first place. For that, pastoral ministry of necessity moves beyond the personally pastoral and toward the socially or political pastoral.
This is why I’m committed to social justice as a pastor and so perplexed by the opposition to social justice by large blocs of conservative Christians: to me its simply pastoral ministry to the culture, the polis, the community. Christianity without social justice is like a table without any legs.
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The interweaving of these strands—pastor, scholar, activist—have really been just that, interweaving. At some moment or other varying strands of the three have risen to prominence at the top of the weave.
For example, when I finished seminary I was particularly into the scholarship. I received a grant to live in Germany for a time conducting research to facilitate the relationship between the EKD and the ELCA (and so studied German, at that time still considering a ph.D. in theology) and I subscribed to about seven academic theological journals, famous journals like the Scottish Journal of Theology, Pro Ecclesia, Interpretation, Word & World, Currents In Theology and Mission.
Like I said, famous journals. :)
I was also developing the Lutheran Confession blog on Blogger at that time, and somewhere along the way I paid attention to the subscription rates. Many if not most of the serious academic journals had about 2-300 subscribers, most of them libraries. This meant that although the articles contained in the journals were peer-reviewed, well-conceived, and honestly brilliant… almost no one was reading them.
In the meantime my blog which admittedly isn’t peer-reviewed and is maybe only periodically well-conceived and rarely brilliant was read 10-20,000 times a month.
I began to wonder: if scholarship is excellent but has no readers does it make a sound?
And of course the other question is also valid: if scholarship has millions of readers but is bad or harmful is the noise worth it?
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About three years into pastoral ministry I received one of the most formative and joyous opportunities of my career: I was accepted into the Pastor-Theologian program established by the Center of Theological Inquiry. I was placed in a cohort of pastors (all of whom were interested in theology) and a grant funded by the Lilly Endowment (the church’s one foundation) funded quarterly meetings of our cohort for six years.
This meant that quarterly for many years I went away for weekends in places like Tucson, Arizona and Memphis, Tennessee and Notre Dame, Indiana and talked theology with clergy who also nerded out on all things theological.
I remember the first gathering being a breath of fresh air. We’d gone about 24 hours before all of us realized we hadn’t done introductions or talked much about our congregations or families, we all just talked theology. In a way it was liking going to a science fiction convention or some other geek-con. We were all hyper-focused on the topic (theology) because we typically didn’t get to discuss it with others in the parish or at home.
It was like swimmers coming up for a breath after long submersion.
Those were some heady times, and what I’m uncertain about to this day is the direct or indirect impact it had on me moving (inexorably it seems) in the direction of liberation or progressive theology.
The main theologians at CTI were certainly not liberal or progressive. These were moderate theologians, members of the establishment. They were not beholden to weird right-wing evangelicalism, to be sure. But they were interested in rapprochement with movements in Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism1 even while maintaining mainline Protestant legs. And they were committed, unapologetically, to maintaining a strong connection to theology (academic theology) in conversation with other disciplines.
I think ultimately these academic theological currents benefitted me as I made the move more and more toward activist Christianity. It has meant that my commitment to activism is not just the Democrat political platform with a theological veneer, but rather I have come to many of my (I guess you could call them socialist) conclusions through careful consideration of Scripture and the theological tradition. I even happen to believe that we have what you might call modern day socialism in large part because of the impact of Christianity on western culture.
Of course I’m not alone in (at least attempting to live in) this “triple threat” modality. We have many role models. Some of the famous Pastor/Scholar/Activists that come immediately to mind include Dorothee Sölle, Martin Luther King Jr., Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Leonardo Boff. 2But of course I can also think of many colleagues who also fit the bill and just don’t have Wikipedia entries about them quite yet.
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I’ll admit I no longer subscribe to all the theological journals. I still read Word & World, my seminary’s rag, and I also read Pro Ecclesia sometimes, just because the essays are often amazing. But I’m more likely to read The Christian Century, which is thoughtful but more popular, and certainly not “academic.” Similarly, I spend much less time in straight-up systematic theological works than I did in the early years of my call. I sometimes intend to get back into Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics or dig into Katherine Sonderegger second volume of systematics (Systematic Theology, Volume 2: The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity: Processions and Persons), but it doesn’t happen with the same regularity it did.
And this is because around 2014 I moved heavily into the “builder” phase of ministry. I had just finished up my book, Mediating Faith: Faith Formation In A Trans-Media Era, and wouldn’t you know, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that legalized same-gender marriage. Within a few short months around this event faith communities all across the country had to make decisions about their position on same-gender marriage, and I knew where I stood. I’d been clear about it since 1995 when as president of the campus ministry I helped facilitate (together with an amazing church council) Luther College in Decorah, Iowa become a Reconciling In Christ congregation.
Anyway, our church changed dramatically over the next year as a result of a church split (a group left and joined a more conservative Lutheran group that does not affirm same-gender marriage).
The combination of the move to Arkansas and shifts in the political landscape, plus my ongoing reading of liberation theologians like James Cone, then honestly the church split itself, moved me further and further toward a position I think had already been emerging into in seminary. I started thinking of myself not so much as a “Lutheran” and more as a “progressive” in the Lutheran tradition. Progressive is a complicated term so I’m also comfortable with social gospeler or liberation theologian.
In any event, I believe Christian communities are closest to the gospel of Jesus Christ when they stay close to the subaltern3 and allow that proximity to shape the life of the community.
So the building phase: over the course of a few short years we established a now thriving refugee resettlement agency; launched a Queer Camp for LGBTQIA+ youth; and a member of our church, inspired by the kind of anarchic church practice emerging out of the social gospel tradition, launched The Little Free Pantry movement on our church driveway.
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As I have some time to reconsider the balance and inter-relationship of my vocation as a pastor, scholar, and activist, I’m beginning to rethink some things (yes, I just turned 50 so am starting to think as much backwards as forwards). A lot of this has to do with how I think about the need for me to be the one doing X, Y, or Z, and/or the role of mentoring and inspiring others to engage them.
I don’t know that very many people in any given local congregation are going to commit themselves to the life of scholarship. Even in seminary the set of students who were actually scholars was much smaller than the student population. So I think inasmuch as I am called to be a pastor/scholar/activist, scholarship should remain central and I could likely benefit from reinvesting in that aspect of my ministry. Who else is going to do it?
The activism is the one I have some reconsiderations on. It seems like being an activist pastor can gain one a bit of street cred and attention. If you show up at a protest or a municipal meeting in collar and say some things (or do some things) the community-at-large sees this happen, understands the activist pastor as “standing in for” their community, and so either respects it or despises it, depending on their political perspective.
But political power and positive social change doesn’t move because of the voice of one or a few folks of valor. It moves when there is a movement. I’m thinking about the way in the Civil Rights movement they trained people in non-violent protest so they were prepared to make their activism a Christian witness. They prayed and practiced before they acted.
I’m thinking of the embedded Starbucks employee who went from Rhodes Scholar to barista in order to organize workers into a union. A union of one does very little. An entire unionized coffee shop launches a movement. I don’t need to do it, everyone needs to do it.
Note in both instances there is an intrinsic relationship between the scholarship and the activism. MLK Jr.’s doctorate was important to him (it was at the very least formative and clarifying and also gave him professional stature and informed his preaching) and our sense of who he is/was, just as we think of him as Civil Rights organizer and pastor of Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church.
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And the baseline for all of this is the pastoring. Although I was—in fits and starts—intrigued by the possibility of teaching theology in the academy, honestly grading all those papers and sitting through interminable faculty meetings sounds now, as I consider it, unappealing. More power to those for whom that is their vocation. It’s an important one.
For me, it’s the grounded life pastoring in a local congregation that is so joyously connected to the scholarship and the activism. Day in and day out a pastor finds themselves woven into the lives of a community that is unlike any other. A day can be book-ended by a morning visit to the local preschool and an evening keeping watch at deathbed at the hospital, with a walk or jog with parishioners mid-day. Pastoring asks of those who do it engagement with academic scholarship concerning sacred texts and then preaching those texts to a congregation most of whom have not read the scholarship but likely would love to learn just a bit (but not too much) about it.
And pastoring asks of us (and asks of more pastors than are currently willing to do it) to inspire activism. Religious faith has become so devastatingly privatized even the clergy think their main job is to keep it private and never apply it in politics. How much more does the average person of faith, then, only rarely if ever consider how they have a responsibility to articulate their faith in the public realm, in public spaces, at university faculty meetings and in front of corporate boards and letters to the editor, willingly taking the hits that will inevitably ensue.
I started this essay telling you how much I love the church. It really is my first love. It’s falling on harder and harder times but I’m not the kind of person to give up on something just because it’s struggling.
I’m hoping I can live deeply and well with a local community of faith, know the people well, love them and be loved, and then move in such a way so that it is not the pastor who shows up to represent everyone else as the avatar activist, but rather so pastorally care for a community that it as a whole rises up in common voice with the subaltern.
If that ever happens, then we’ll know it really was a triple threat.
In fact two of the academic theologians I studied with in the Pastor-Theologian program converted to Roman Catholicism: Reinhardt Hütter and Bruce Marshall.
My most recent discovery in this vein is Alan Ecclestone, who I’ll be doing a podcast on soon.
Yes, I am going to leave this term undefined and ask that you read the Spivak essay: https://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~sj6/Spivak%20CanTheSubalternSpeak.pdf
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Reflections from a progressive Lutheran pastor in the South.
Thanks for the inspiration , Clint!
The Whole Church needs your passion and depth of commitment. Thank you and keep taking good care of yourself.