Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Marva J. Dawn is an author and educator with Christians Equipped for Ministry, Vancouver, Washington, and adjunct professor of spiritual theology at Regent College.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

THE UNNECESSARY PASTOR

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Introduction EUGENE H. PETERSON.................................................................................vii1. On Being Unnecessary EUGENE H. PETERSON......................................................................12. Preludes to Rediscovery MARVA J. DAWN........................................................................213. The Call to Be a Living Doxology MARVA J. DAWN...............................................................414. Paul: Finishing Up in Rome EUGENE H. PETERSON................................................................595. The Call to Triumph over the Principalities and Powers MARVA J. DAWN.........................................796. Timothy: Taking Over in Ephesus EUGENE H. PETERSON...........................................................1217. The Call to Be Formed and Transformed by the Spirit of the Ascended Christ MARVA J. DAWN.....................1398. Titus: Starting Out in Crete EUGENE H. PETERSON..............................................................1839. The Call to Build Community MARVA J. DAWN....................................................................205For Further Reading..............................................................................................249

Chapter One

EUGENE H. PETERSON

Introduction

We begin with the obvious: the gospel of Jesus Christ is profoundly countercultural. "I came to cast fire upon the earth," said Jesus; "and would that it were already kindled!" (Luke 12:49).

There are powerful cultural forces determined to turn Jesus into a kindly, wandering peasant sage, teaching us how to live well, dispensing homespun wisdom, arousing our desire for God, whetting our appetite for higher truths — all of which are good things. These same forces are similarly determined to turn us, the church's pastors and leaders, into kindly religious figures, men and women who provide guidance through difficult times, who dole out inspiration and good cheer on a weekly schedule, who provide smiling reassurance that "God's in his heaven ...," and keep our congregations busy at tasks that bolster their self-esteem — also good things.

And if they don't turn us into merely nice people, they turn us into replicas of our cultural leaders, seeking after power and influence and prestige. These insistent voices drum away at us, telling us pastors to go out and compete against the successful executives and entertainers who have made it to the top, so that we can put our churches on the map and make it big in the world.

In such a culture, it is continuously difficult to cultivate an everyday identity that derives from the crucified and risen Jesus Christ. No matter how many crosses we hang around our necks, paste on our bumpers, and place on our churches, the radical life of repentance and baptism is mighty hard to sustain.

But the Christian is a witness to a new reality that is entirely counter to the culture. The Christian faith is a proclamation that God's kingdom has arrived in Jesus, a proclamation that puts the world at risk. What Jesus himself proclaimed and we bear witness to is the truth that the sin-soaked, self-centered world is doomed.

Pastors are in charge of keeping the distinction between the world's lies and the gospel's truth clear. Not only pastors, of course — every baptized Christian is part of this — but pastors are placed in a strategic, countercultural position. Our place in society is, in some ways, unique: no one else occupies this exact niche that looks so inoffensive but is in fact so dangerous to the status quo. We are committed to keeping the proclamation alive and to looking after souls in a soul-denying, soul-trivializing age.

But it isn't easy. Powerful forces, both subtle and obvious, attempt either to domesticate pastors to serve the culture as it is or to seduce us into using our position to become powerful and important on the world's terms. And so we need all the help we can get to maintain our gospel identity.

A Few Words about This Book and Its Title

The purpose of this book, then, is to reconnect pastors with the authoritative biblical and theological texts that train us as counter-cultural servants of Jesus Christ. We want to be free of the Egyptian slavery to the culture and free to serve our wilderness world in Jesus' name.

The leading premise is that pastors are "unnecessary," but unnecessary in a defined sense. I don't mean worthless or irrelevant or shiftless. I mean unnecessary in three ways in which we often are assumed to be necessary:

1. We are unnecessary to what the culture presumes is important: as paragons of goodness and niceness. Culture has a fairly high regard for pastors as custodians of moral order. We are viewed as persons who provide a background of social stability, who are useful in times of crisis and serve as symbols of meaning and purpose. But we are not necessary in any of those ways.

Several years ago, I was invited to the Pentagon to meet with the chaplains of the various services — Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines — to talk about their difficult position. We'd been in a peacetime mode for a number of years, and the Pentagon was trying to cut back on budgeting for chaplains. Chaplains weren't high-profile, necessary figures. And these chaplains had called on me to come and try to convince their superiors that they were necessary, that they had to be there. They were being used in all sorts of programs — drug counseling, marriage counseling. They were finding all sorts of ways to keep their jobs, and none of them had to do with anything they thought they had signed up to be chaplains for. In the middle of all this — and I wasn't much help to them, for I was thinking about what I'm talking to you about — they told me that in wartime, on the front, every captain, every colonel, every leader of a force demands to have a chaplain. When the bullets are flying and the bombs are exploding, they want a chaplain right there. Chaplains are important, everybody knows they are important. They are life-and-death people. But in peacetime, who needs a chaplain? And in the course of all this, one of the men slammed down his fist and said, "What we need is a war!"

Three weeks later, the Gulf War broke out and their jobs were assured.

2. We are also unnecessary to what we ourselves feel is essential: as the linchpin holding a congregation together. Some of us have been reared with an idea that being a pastor is the apex of ministry — we hold the highest position in the hierarchy of those who serve in Jesus' name. We are entrusted with the Word of God and the souls of men and women — no one else occupies this privileged position quite like we do. We come to take ourselves very seriously indeed. But we are not necessary in these self-important ways. None of us is indispensable. Mordecai's message to Esther puts us in our place: "if you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another quarter ..." (Esther 4:14). We have important work to do, but if we don't do it God can always find someone else —...