Why Pastors Need to Tell Their Story with Adjectives

“You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific. They say it has no memory.” (Andy Dufresne, The Shawshank Redemption)

My job lets me meet with current and would-be pastors, to hear about their sense of call. Inevitably, I ask each of them to tell me what they see themselves doing. More often than not—something like 80% of the time—the answer is, “Teach, preach, and lead God’s people.” (That’s not a summary. That is the answer, verbatim.)

My issue is not with the content of the answer but the one-dimensionality of the way it is conveyed. Being a pastor isn’t like buying a car—“I want one that is reliable”—but more like getting married. How many married men would be single today if they had applied the same one-dimensionality to their dating relationships: “Hi, I want to get married to have sex and not be lonely.”? (Answer; all of them!) At the point of pastoring and marriage, accuracy isn’t enough. In fact, anybody who phrases his desire to get married in the above terms is not just immature: he’s downright crass.

Why can’t these would-be pastors describe their work more…well, descriptively? Because often they have not learned to tell their own stories, adjectives and all! As addicted we are to entertaining narratives, we’re pretty poor communicators of our stories.

Before you can tell, you have to Remember!
Forgetfulness—which includes a "failure to be reflective"—undermines our ability to tell our own. Maybe this is why the Pentateuch commands (imperative) the people of Israel to “remember” even more than it commands them to love or obey. The Pentateuch uses the imperative form of remember fourteen times; ten of those are in Deuteronomy. The Israelites are commanded to remember the Lord, His faithfulness, His deliverance, their present dependency, their past sins, their enemies’ threats, and that they were once slaves. This is no one-dimensional list of things to remember. This isn’t a list of their accomplishments and awards. It’s a list of God’s faithfulness in the face of their failings.

Forgetfulness is easy. Do nothing and you are likely to forget. But remembering is hard—which is why scripture so often commands that we do it. As Christians, we must be self-disciplined in artful remembrance, even more if we are to communicate our own stories powerfully.

Power in Authority. Assurance in Submission.
Remember the woman to whom a man (hypothetically) said, “I want to get married to have sex and not be lonely”? She’s got to have more to go on, if for no other reason than that the flat, self-description applies to the vast majority of males the world over. There’s no differentiation.

Should a church expect less from its next pastor? When a congregation extends a call to a pastor, they are submitting their own lives, their children, spouse, finances, and some measure of their time to the oversight (and possible correction) by that man. (Now some will say congregations don’t do that, but we're talking about what should be.) Yes, in polities that endorse a plurality of elders, he is just one man among many. But he is still one man with lots and lots of influence over the shaping of lives and understanding of scripture. That’s such a dangerous place to be that scripture warns against it (James 3:1)

Before I submit my children, my wife, and myself to the leadership of one person, I want to know his character, his desires, and his passions. I want to hear him describe, in his own words, how God has gifted him and where he is weak. “Teach, preach, and lead God’s people”—while accurate—offers no reassurance.

The Place of Naming
One reason we’re bad at remembering is because forgetting is less painful. Who hasn’t suffered and would rather forget it? I’m sure the Israelites were thinking the same thing: “Moses, can’t you please stop reminding us of our past disobedience?” Remembering is not only hard work; it hurts.

This is where the little talked-about practice of naming is essential. Naming was the very first duty Adam was given. “Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and …brought them to the man to see what he would name them” (Gen. 2:19). Before Adam was fruitful and multiplied and filled the earth, he named, in detail. That’s why—instead of “cattle” and “gigantic-cattle” and “striped-cattle” and “cattle with brown spots and a long neck” and “cattle that make silly noises”—we have horses, elephants, zebras, giraffes and donkeys. Adam wasn’t afraid to be original, creative, and descriptive. Neither should we!

Remembering must include naming. It isn’t enough to remember how we failed, but to name what desire or longing urged us in that direction. It isn’t enough even to remember how other people have failed us; we have to name that, out loud, in detail, with words. I usually hear this when people are talking about the failings of their parents. Someone will vaguely comment, “Dad and mom did the best they could” and then go on to explain some truly tragic event. That isn’t naming! That’s ignoring the impact of the past on the present and refusing to name the realities that have deeply wounded our hearts.

Naming isn’t Blaming! But Adam showed us both.
The flip side of naming is blaming. It’s the other thing Adam taught us how to do. “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit…and I ate it” (Gen. 3:12). That wasn’t the answer to God’s question. God asked, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree…?” Adam could have named his failings, but instead he blamed.

Ironically, those who refuse to name reality—what they’ve experienced and how they have been treated, how they failed and how they succeeded—end up with a story full of words that sound like “cattle that make silly noises.” Accurate, yes; fully-dimensional, far from it!

Back to the issue of pastors and the way they describe their sense of call—it’s time to get descriptive and name the realities, strengths and weaknesses, that make up who you are. A couple of points that can be helpful from scripture:

1. God promises you have gifts; name them (Eph. 4:8).
2. This means you don’t have all the gifts; name as much (1 Cor. 12).
3. Remembering includes what God promises (see #1) and how I’ve failed (Deut. 9:7)
4. Naming involves all the above!

What a Powerful Personal-Description Looks Like.
Recently, I met with another pastor and asked him what he felt called to do. He answered with such believable passion, “I find encouragement in relating to members of the church, drawing out their stories, and sharing appropriate emotions with them—sorrow when sorrow is due; joy when joy is due; tears when tears are necessary; laughter when laughter is called for. From these stories, I find echoes of scripture dignifying the lives that these saints are living, fulfilling the promises of a good God. And I preach those promises—from the pulpit, from the lectern, at the bedside, on the ball field, and in my prayers for these people. As a pastor, I’m called to serve in the unfolding of human dimensionality, through the Spirit, for the glory of Christ.”

WOW! Kind of appropriately puts “teach, preach, and lead God’s people” in its place. I’m not suggesting that this man is going to be a better pastor, but I am positive that he’s given more thought as to what that role will require of him and how his gifts commend him for it. And the church that interviews him is going to have a lot better idea of who they are inviting to lead them. The fact remains that—in the words of Dan Doriani—“no Christian leader is self-qualified, either morally or spiritually. No one deserves to lead the church.” But the goal of honest, broad dimensional, self-description was never to self-qualify. If anything, it was to be fully human and name reality.

Of course, that can’t be your story until you have been willing to remember (and reflect) upon your own personal narrative and then name the promises of God—where you are strong and weak. In The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne says something else: “I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really: get busy living, or get busy dying.” For the rest of us, the simple choice comes down to this:

Get busy remembering, or get busy forgetting.
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Joel Hathaway
Covenant Theological Seminary
Director of Alumni and Career Services