I Never Wanted to Be a Pastor—Turns Out I Was Right

Growing up in the SOUTH (you have to use all caps) means that you grow up in church, at least that is how it was in my small town, Albemarle, NC. I've had a front row seat for most of my life in the American SOUTHERN church: singing hymns, 80s big hair and Easter Sunday Best, pew jumping Charismatics...

btw this isn’t me

Pastors always seemed to be a different species. They had a way of talking to us that varied from smiling salesman to angry scream preaching. When I felt that God may be calling me to be a pastor, I outright refused. I don't know that I ever vocalized this, but, as a teenager, the last thing I wanted to do with my life was to ruin it by becoming a pastor. And for good reason.

Today, I am a pastor. And now that I have reached "midlife" (in my 40s), I look back at the teenage version of Nate and I have a very clear perspective on that hesitancy I felt. After twenty+ years in ministry and after pastoring in a few different settings, I can confirm that my teenage instincts were spot on-- at least as it relates to the version of pastor that I knew of at the time, and the version of pastor that seminaries and churches have tended to produce.

My experience with most pastors has taught me that most of us don't really know what we're doing (gasp). Many folks have written about this, and my experience certainly isn't shared by most. But what I have seen and personally experienced is that pastors are too often no different than other corporate leaders: they are bombarded by the need to succeed. And what does it mean to succeed as a pastor? Well, in our context (American SOUTH), it means more butts in seats (pews, back in the 80s and 90s), more bucks in the budget (good offerings), and more smiles on people’s faces than frowns. One of the biggest differences is that pastors usually have far less money, employees, and ways to generate income than most business owners.

The pressures for success are exacerbated in denominational meetings, which are more of an environment that fosters shame rather than encouragement. Successful pastors are often platformed and voted into important offices, while those who are less successful are perceived as the ones holding back the denomination. They are the pastors who need the "help" of the successful ones-- and this is practiced but never said out loud.

Of course, my teenage self didn't know any of this as I curled my nose in disgust at the thought of being a pastor. All I saw was the effect of such things, which I interpreted only to be that pastors were nerds, salesmen, serious all the time, sad, poor. I clearly see now what people like Andrew Root have written about. It isn't that pastors have a personality defect (well, some certainly do), but that the church has been captured by the secular age.

That last sentence is a pretty damning indictment. Let me unpack it. Root has written extensively about the secular age and the church (for the better part of a decade in multiple volumes), and the bottom line that I perceive is that the church of Jesus only has an imagination for the secular age (at least most of the churches that I've experienced in the American SOUTH) and interprets their success or failure to be a result of what their pastors do or don't do. Essentially, if a church has more butts in the seats and more bucks in the bank than they did last year, then they are considered okay, successful, and oblivious to the national decline in church attendance and efficacy. "The secular age accelerates our lives, and we can only imagine more or nothing. Secular logic tells us there are two speeds-- fast or dead."* And herein (according to Root) is the real threat: the American church embodies the secular age and no longer holds an imagination for their God to do anything that matters. It is all dependent on them.

Back to pastoring:

Eugene Peterson wrote of how pastoring is more than "keeping shop" in a couple of his books on pastoral theology. I see this description to be another example of Root's secular age descriptions. And we pastors will keep shop, fall into the secular imagination's rut of "MORE;" we have repressed our very humanity at times (to our own and our family's detriments). And why? Because our imagination has been hijacked, and it has, in turn, hijacked the church. This is the crisis as Root sees it.

The crisis isn’t that pastors and churches are bad. Please hear my heart, here— pastors and churches are victims to the secularization that Root points out. None of the pastors from my youth and childhood were bad people— they were products of the system (the secular system). I have much love for pastors. So much so, that I can see how dehumanizing the secular age of success has been for each of them, personally— and for me.

And this whole time I just thought pastors weren't cool (well, we aren't). It goes much deeper. It goes to our very human experience. "If we find meaning only in activities that pay us, then there is a very big draw to do more work. More work equals more value, and more value equals more meaning. Want a meaningful life? Work more." What a fallacy! And, if you stop to think deeply about it, this isn't just a pastor's experience. It's yours, too.

To this day, this is the person I never wanted to be (but tragically I have sometimes become), trapped within the prison of the secular imagination. Yes, I haven't walked through this vocation unscathed, and, thank God, the friction has never left. I thank God for that teenager who grimaced, because, even though I didn't know it at the time, I saw something that should have turned my stomach. I saw people who were refusing to be fully human, and I (to this day) want to be fully human.

I want to experience fullness, laughter that causes drink to come out of my nose, closeness with others that plunges past my insecurities. Root calls this "resonance" (a concept I first read about from Hartmut Rosa). It is "the opposite of more, an... experience of being so present to someone or something else that we feel like we have discovered ourselves again. Life must have resonance; otherwise it is just busyness."

This sounds more like the Abundant Life promised by Jesus in John 10 than anything else I’ve seen in our modern secular age. I want to write more on this way of being, because I’m going to keep grimacing like a teenager (side eye included) at our other versions of pastor.

*Quoted statements taken from When Church Stops Working by Andrew Root