Over the years, I have had more than a few coffees and phone calls with local church pastors struggling with elements of their personal faith. People have confessed how incredibly torn they are inside because their make jobs make change incredibly difficult. Many felt the pull into a season of personal reflection and, dare I say it, ‘deconstruction/reconstruction’, but were acutely aware that voicing concerns, perspectives, and questions around God, theology, or society, would mean the likely end of their job, reputation, income and congregation.
I have been wondering, for years now, how it might be possible for a local church senior pastor/leader to change their mind on things and still preach and lead in the opposite direction with conviction. I know pastors who have ended up in hospital with panic attacks because of the tremendous gap between what the Spirit has been speaking to their hearts about, and what they feel their congregation, board and denomination expects from them. Take my word for it; the struggle is very real. I know pastors that changed their minds on issues around the affirming of LGBTQIA+ and lost the jobs they worked their lives towards. I know pastors that adopted and announced different theological views around money, hell, welfare and politics, and lost their jobs, homes, and health.
What pew-warmers and church-goers fail to realise is that pastoring is one of the few jobs and vocations in the world where you are punished for changing your mind or maturing. Even if the congregation is full of doubters, disbelievers, dissenters and deviants, the human in the pulpit whom they elevated as good, pure, and holy is not afforded any such doubtful but normal expression. Instead, most local church pastors must adhere to the agreed creeds, rules, standards and cultural expectations (both spoken and unspoken) – lest they be crucified and abandoned.
We now have a world full of gifted preachers and thinkers–often with families, bills, and struggles like everyone else–who dig-in, double-down and do not afford themselves (and congregant) to walk through what might be labelled by developmental experts as ‘a necessary crisis of faith’. Sure, they are allowed to wrestle with God, but they are not allowed to lose. Because losing the wrestle includes losing your name (think Jacob-Isreal), and losing the ability to walk the same way (think about the limp Jacob/Israel lived with).
Thankfully, however, the world is full of men and women, once in a credentialed and endorsed position of pastoring, who chose to lose their wrestle with God. Some of these saints limped away from the ministry gracefully. Some made a mess of it. Some self-sobtaged. Some clung to pulpits, told the truth and reduced their congregation to unsustainable small numbers. Some were eaten alive by their sheep. And very few worked out a way to keep things under wraps and simply checked-out, reduced church to a 9-5 job, or confessed ‘feeling called to the marketplace.’ However it all happens, I think it is a tragedy that being 2,000 years into the Christian church, we (collectively) haven’t moved past the narrow social confines of how a pastor should behave across their lifetime. Who is allowed to grow up, mature, examine their beliefs, think for themselves, struggle with their faith? Not pastors, apparently…
I think the answer to this riddle might be solved by considering a role and recognition for the kind of rebirthed and reconstructed pastoral person who no longer fits the ‘local church shepherd’ description: metapastor.
For the sake of wordcount, I suggest you check out the article on my blog and socials titled ‘The rise of the metapastor’. In short, however, I think with the mass decline of church affiliation in the West, we need to reimagine how pastoral care is expressed amidst sincere faith across our postmodern / metamodern times and increasingly complex lifespan. Metapastors (meta meaning after) may be the people we need to companion the masses beyond the basic stages of faith that most church exist to serve and foster.?
David Tensen
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PIC: Hanna Barakat & Archival Images of AI + AIxDESIGN / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/