On Reading and Pastoring

I first read Eugene Peterson’s Working the Angles in my initial years of ministry. At the time, I struggled because most of the metaphors used to describe pastors and churches were drawn from the business and technology worlds. Church life seemed to be framed in terms of boards, committees, and monthly profit-and-loss reports from QuickBooks. The typical “how-to-be-a-pastor” books focused on things like vision casting, networking, adaptive change, family systems, and conflict management. While some of these concepts are necessary and useful, they didn’t seem to align with the deeper spiritual work we were trying to do as a congregation.

My first call was to a church in a town with only one hundred permanent residents. Having a flashy graphic for the next sermon series wasn’t a top priority. As I read the New Testament letters to the churches and the teachings and trajectory of Jesus’ life, our purpose seemed straightforward: the local church is a group of people learning to follow Jesus together. However, the conditions of our culture and our hearts make following difficult. I needed a better metaphor.      

Eugene Peterson kept using the word “personal.” He assumed that if pastors were going to help members follow Jesus, they needed to know what was going on in the specific lives of their congregation.

People don’t follow Jesus in general; they follow Jesus in the details.

Peterson’s vision for the pastoral life resonated. But where did he find this alternative vision of ministry? Reading Peterson, it didn’t take long to discover he wasn’t reading how-to-be-a-pastor books either. He was reading novels.

In an essay entitled On Novels and Pastors, Peterson explains his rationale for being a pastor-reader:

I am setting out vocational, not personal, reasons for pastors to read novels, reasons that have to do with the kind of work we do and the conditions in which we do it. Pastors proclaim the story of God’s salvation in Christ to specific people in a particular place.

Anyone serious about the distinctive conditions of the pastoral calling, story, person, place, will welcome these novelists as friends and spend time in their company…

Pastors and writers care about the same things. Our lives are spent with unique people in specific places, and our primary calling is to proclaim the story of God and help others pay attention to how their stories connect to Jesus’ story. Reading Peterson’s thoughts on the connections between pastors and novelists felt like an invitation to begin reading literature again.  

This past May, I read the short story Small Things Like These by Irish writer Claire Keegan. Keegan manages to open up more of the world in a few sentences than most of us can in a thousand words, giving voice to the women and lost children of the Magdalen laundries of Ireland during the 20th century. In her acknowledgments, she notes that as many as 30,000 girls may have been incarcerated and forced into labor in these convents “run and financed by the Catholic Church in concert with the Irish State.” It is a story about another unspeakable failure of the church, the complicity of an entire town, and the latent compassion emerging out of the depths of the local coal merchant, Bill Furlong. Near the end of the story, Furlong asks himself, “Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?” How can reading such a sentence not shape me as a pastor? As a person?

Russell Moore, Editor in Chief of Christianity Today, once remarked in a lecture, “It is one thing to say, ‘I believe in the forgiveness of sins.’ And it is another thing to say, ‘There was a man who had two sons…’” What we declare in the Apostles’ Creed is true: I do believe in the forgiveness of sins. But Jesus knows how our hearts work. We need more than propositional truths. Jesus’ story of the prodigal sons and the waiting father in Luke 15 does something that the creed, by itself, cannot do: it grips the imagination and the heart. Keegan’s Small Things Like These does the same. She shows the horrors of the Magdalene laundries and the inertia of indifference that allowed such horrors to occur through the awakening conscience of Bill Furlong.

Fiction can do things that nonfiction cannot. I still read thick tomes of theology. I even pick up a how-to-be-a-pastor book every now and then. But when it comes to learning the art of pastoring, novelists have been my greatest allies. Somehow, though fiction, novels keep me closer to real life. As Nial Williams says, “Books… are not life, can never be as full, rich, complex, surprising or beautiful, but the best of them can catch an echo of that, can turn you back to look out the window, go out the door aware that you’ve been enriched, that you have been in the company of something alive that has caused you to realize once again how astonishing life is.” If being a pastor is learning how to be a human amongst other humans with Jesus, reading literature has helped me remember what it is to be human.

Footnotes:

1. Eugene Peterson, “Pastors and Novels,” in Subversive Spirituality (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1994), 186.

2. Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These (New York: Grove Press, 2021), 116.

3. Keegan, Small Things Like These, 113.

4. Russell Moore, “Why We Need Fiction for Spiritual Formation,” February 1, 2021, in The Hutchmoot Podcast, produced by The Rabbit Room Podcast Network.

5. Early in ministry I was greatly encouraged by a how-to-pastor book by David Hansen entitled, The Art of Pastoring: Ministry Without All the Answers (Downers Grove: IVP, 1994).

6. Nial Williams, This Is Happiness (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), 73.