What is the purpose of a pastor? To teach you how to think (or vote)? To reassure you that you're safe? To heal your wounds? The goal of pastoral ministry is surely in question right now. Everything from the toxic masculinity of the bully pulpit, to the pastor as political pollster, to the staggering need to be cool of hipster celebrity pastor—there's lots of ways to go wrong in pastoral ministry, and a razors edge of getting it right.Amidst our consumeristic, narcissistic culture, what does it mean to pursue self-care? How does caring for oneself square with caring about what Jesus cares about? (Even and especially when Jesus cares about you?) Upholding the call of the pastor to take on the cares of Christ, Will Willimon (Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry at Duke Divinity School) suggests we've developed a disordered approach to self-care, proving the triumph of the therapeutic and mimicking our consumeristic world rather than embodying the oddity of the Christian Gospel. Interview by Evan Rosa.
As the political world casts a leery eye on Christians—especially as the meaning of "Evangelical" changes—the focus on the meaning and purpose of the pastor is especially relevant. Amidst our consumeristic, narcissistic culture, what does it mean to pursue self-care? How does caring for oneself square with caring about what Jesus cares about? (Even and especially when Jesus cares about you?) Upholding the call of the pastor to take on the cares of Christ, Will Willimon (Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry at Duke Divinity School) suggests we've developed a disordered approach to self-care, proving the triumph of the therapeutic and mimicking our consumeristic world rather than embodying the oddity of the Christian Gospel. Interview by Evan Rosa.
This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.
Introduction (Evan Rosa)
What is the purpose of a pastor? To teach you how to think (or vote)? To reassure you that you're safe? To heal your wounds? The goal of pastoral ministry is surely in question right now. Everything from the toxic masculinity of the bully pulpit, to the pastor as political pollster, to the staggering need to be cool of hipster celebrity pastor—there's lots of ways to go wrong in pastoral ministry, and a razors edge of getting it right. It's a demanding job. Perhaps its so demanding because the primary call of the pastor is to take up the cares of Christ, speaking the truth when the truth hurts, listening from both sides of the conversation between God and the Church, comforting the grieving when there's plenty in your own life to grieve, standing with the marginalized and oppressed when its the unpopular, difficult thing.
That is to say: it's a dangerous world, the world of pastoral ministry. But as my guest on the show today suggests, this danger ought to be faced with courage and eyes wide to the cares of Christ.
Will Willimon is Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry at Duke Divinity School and author of over 100 books, including Worship as Pastoral Care, Accidental Preacher, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (with Stanley Hauerwas), and his most recent, God Turned Toward Us: The ABCs of the Christian Faith. He's been a pastor in the United Methodist Church for a long time, including an 8 year stint as a Bishop.
Will Willimon is concerned about the direction the church is headed and is asking uncomfortable but necessary questions. Amidst our culture of consumerism, narcissism, where the vision of flourishing reaches no higher than getting whatever it is you want most, how does caring for oneself square with caring about what Jesus cares about? (Even and especially when Jesus cares about you?) Upholding the call of the pastor to take on the cares of Christ, Will Willimon suggests we've developed a disordered approach to self-care, proving the triumph of the therapeutic and mimicking our consumeristic world rather than embodying the oddity of the Christian Gospel.
About Will Willimon
The Reverend Dr. William H. Willimon is Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry at the Divinity School, Duke University. He served eight years as Bishop of the North Alabama Conference of The United Methodist Church, where he led the 157,000 Methodists and 792 pastors in North Alabama. For twenty years prior to the episcopacy, he was Dean of the Chapel and Professor of Christian Ministry at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. He is author of over 100 books, including Worship as Pastoral Care, Accidental Preacher, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, and his most recent, God Turned Toward Us: The ABCs of the Christian Faith. His articles have appeared in many publications including The Christian Ministry, Quarterly Review, Plough, Liturgy, Worship and Christianity Today. For many years he was Editor-at-Large for The Christian Century. For more information and resources, visit his website.
Show Notes
Production Notes
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu. This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.
Will Willimon: The most important part of self-care, I think, is what does it take to have the energy and the courage to preach God's word among people who don't want to hear it and that's hard. What does it take to speak up for the Kingdom of God in a racist, centuries-long white supremacists, world. Christians have a weird idea: take up your cross daily and follow me. You will be hated by the world for my sake. I'm getting ready to launch an assault on the empire, and guess who is going to help me. In dying you live. All that, maybe this is an opportunity for us to joyfully reclaim the oddness of the Gospel, the oddness of following a Jew from Nazareth who lived briefly, died violently, rose unexpectedly.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa, with the Yale Center For Faith and Culture. What is the purpose of a pastor? To teach you how to think or to vote? To reassure you that you're safe? To heal your wounds? The goal of pastoral ministry is surely in question right now. Everything from the toxic masculinity of the bully pulpit, to the pastor, as political pollster, to the staggering need to be cool of hipster, celebrity pastors.
There's lots of ways to go wrong in pastoral ministry and really a Razor's Edge of getting it right. It's a demanding job to say. Perhaps it's so demanding because the primary call of the pastor to take up the cares of Christ, speaking the truth when the truth hurts, listening from both sides of the conversation between God and the church, comforting the grieving when there's plenty in your own life to grieve, standing with the marginalized and oppressed when it's the unpopular difficult thing to do. That is to say it's a dangerous world - the world of pastoral ministry.
As my guest on the show today suggests, this danger ought to be faced with courage and eyes wide to the cares of Christ. Will Willimon is professor of the practice of Christian ministry at Duke Divinity School and author of over 100 books, including Worship as Pastoral Care; Accidental Preacher; Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony - and that one was with Stanley Hauerwas - and his most recent book, God turned toward us: the ABCs of the Christian Faith. He's been a pastor in the United Methodist Church for a long time, including an eight year stint as a Bishop.
Will Willimon is concerned about the direction the church is headed and is asking uncomfortable, but necessary questions amidst a culture of consumerism, narcissism, personal autonomy, where the vision of flourishing reaches no higher than getting whatever it is you want most. How does caring for oneself square with caring about what Jesus cares about? Even maybe, especially when Jesus cares about you upholding the call of the pastor to take on the cares of Christ. Willimon suggests we've developed a disordered approach to self-care, proving the triumph of the therapeutic and mimicking our consumeristic world, rather than embodying the oddity of the Christian gospel. Thanks for listening.
Will thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.
Will Willimon: It's a delight to be here.
Evan Rosa: I thought we'd get started by just a little bit of biographical storytelling from you. I thought you might start talking about your early spiritual life: what led you to the multifaceted vocations that you've encountered over the course of your career?
Will Willimon: Well, I in college felt called towards pastoral ministry. And I chose to prepare for that at Yale Divinity School. I spent, I also did graduate work at Emory and then launched into a career in pastoral ministry. I was a pastor in various forms for most of my life: campus minister for 20 years as Dean of Duke Chapel, then I was elected a Bishop in the United Methodist Church. I've seen ministry from a number of different perspectives and found it a fulfilling vocation.
Evan Rosa: You felt that call in college, I wonder if you could describe sort of experience of that? I mean, what was it for you to experience that, what that felt like from the inside, what it feels like to be called to ministry?
Will Willimon: Oh, wow. Gosh, I've reflected on this in my memoir, Accidental Preacher, which I really see the memoir as a memoir of vocation, because I think the most interesting thing about me is I got called to, I grew up in a single-parent family and very much enjoyed being a part of a big active United Methodist Church growing up. But by college, I had sort of thought, "Gee, the Christian faith is for dummies." And yet in college, became really intellectually engaged in the Christian faith in a way I had not before. But it was also, I played a minor role in the Civil Rights Movement with other college students and got to know clergy through that. And I'm sure that was influential on my sense of vocation. Here were clergy you really risking themselves and paying a price for that risks and, and white Methodist churches in South Carolina. I found that appealing. And then also the more I read and explored. I just found the Christian faith and its way of thinking to be so demanding intellectually and exciting, engaging, and all of that.
That's sort of a 10,000 foot view of my vocation.
Evan Rosa: Demanding and exciting: those are words with deep implications. And today we're really talking about the role of the pastor in the contemporary church. I thought we'd start early on, just asking you about how you describe the purpose of pastoral ministry: it's telos, its goal, its end.
Will Willimon: Well, I go back I guess, to Ephesians 5. I think the purpose of the pastoral ministry is to equip God's people for the work of ministry, and that equipage takes the form of caring for them in their time of need. Although Christians, got some kind of weird notions of what care looks like than...
Evan Rosa: And I hope that we can talk about that shortly...
Will Willimon: Informed by Jesus Christ and his mission.
And we uhm, we preach, we teach, we stand with them, walk with them and thereby equip them to be, to fulfill their vocations that Christ has given them to be part of His mission in the world.
Evan Rosa: Would you think of, there's a kind of, it's a, is it a helping kind of scenario? I mean, when I think of all of those things it's helping, right?
Will Willimon: Yeah. Helping it's a good word. Helping them do that, as they help us in our vocations, as kind of what Christians do from one another and in ministry, and I'm using ministry now in a broad sense, but as service in the name of Christ, but that's particularly demanding in our time and place. It requires skills of discernment, it requires knowing the story, aligning ourselves with the story, which is Jesus Christ the Gospel. And the pastors help God's people do that.
Evan Rosa: I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the mutual nature of helping that is implied by the Christian community. If the pastor is there to equip, serve, care, there's teaching and preaching - generally help. I do want to get to that point of yours around the importance of taking a second look at what care means in the context of today's church.
But first, can we talk about that mutual helping the relationship between the pastor and their community - talk about that mutuality.
Will Willimon: Well I think you do well to focus on mutuality in the sense that, you know, from God's people, God and God's people select those who are called to the task of convening, orchestrating, supporting, teaching, caring for God's people - those who call clergy. And up for when it comes to pastoral care to think about the pastor, not as the sole giver of care, but as the coordinator, the leader of care, within the congregation. One thing has interested me over the years is how many people in the congregation are better equipped to lead a certain care-giving function than the pastor.
For instance, in my last church, I was teaching, traveling, you know, riding some and all, and I felt pressured. I convened 4 recovering alcoholics in my congregation and commissioned them to lead the care with addictions in our congregation. As one of them said to me, preacher, I've learned a lot more about addiction than you have the hard way. And I'm sort of ashamed I hadn't done that earlier in my ministry, but I realized throughout my ministry, I've looked at people say who've gone through marriage separation, those who have suffered the loss of a child, et cetera. These are often Christians that provide a wonderful resource for God's people, and the pastor, one of our tasks is to call forth God's people and to help them recognize their several vocations. So I like the mutuality. There's also that real sense that God's people minister to the clergy. That's not their purpose, and it kind of becomes sad when the purpose of the congregation becomes ministering to the needs of your pastor. That's sort of a misunderstanding of the faith. However, there are certain key moments when we pastors, we go out to offer care to someone and walk away saying, "wow, who was the caregiver in that situation?" And I'm working on a book now about listener response to preaching. And that, that sense of mutuality is very important. I say to students and my Intro to Christian Ministry classes: A big part of leading in ministry is listening and asking questions. And there's a sense in which the lay people will tell you what shapes your ministry needs to take, if, if you just try to listen and ask the right questions.
Evan Rosa: The sense in which you're describing, especially the act of preaching, insofar as it's a kind of human speech act, of course, a human speech act, that is, that has an important relationship to the Divine. But seeing it as a conversation, because I wonder if the inability of both the preacher to listen in the context of preaching and the congregation unable to speak back. I wonder if there's, if that leads to a kind of, well, an inability to live up to the potential for what preaching can be?
Will Willimon: Yeah, preaching is one-way communication in the act of preaching. But most preachers can testify, when you're actually preaching in a congregation, it feels like a conversation. And that those comments that you get after a sermon and the conversations that you have all week long, I remember as pastor those moments, when I'd be kind of perplexed about a sermon gets, well, one might get unstuck in your preaching is reading, but reading is a conversation with various authors. But also I go out and visit my congregation, visit people where they work, so and it was uncanny, maybe it was just the operations of the Holy Spirit, but where someone would make a comment or say something that would really ignite and help and drive me back the Biblical Text. I must say, in my experience, it tougher than listening to your congregation, after all, you, you have a big stake in listening to your congregation, they pay you, they look like you, they're part of you, you need to get along. It can be also a challenge to listen to the Biblical Text, to listen to God speaking through the Biblical Text and preaching. And indeed pastoral work becomes this sort of double listening. The preacher stands in the middle of an intersection, where the traffic is coming from people as they articulate their needs and their hopes and fears, but also as Scripture communicates needs and hopes and fears. And then the preacher stands up in the middle of a conversation between God and God's people, and then you say, amen and see where the congregation goes in the coming weeks.
Evan Rosa: Right, right. I wonder if we can come back to just the concept of helping, because recently, you and Stanley Hauerwas published an article in the Christian Century that got plenty of attention. And there, and this is to kind of temper that, that comment of mine earlier about over, overemphasizing, the aspect of pastoral care as a helping profession. And I wonder if you can help strike the balance there. And this is what I'd like to, what I'd like to do is, you know, earlier you even brought up the kind of tense relationship that we have to thinking about the role of care and really the goal of care through pastoral ministry. So I wonder if you can help us balance that out with understanding the precise role of care in pastoral ministry?
Will Willimon: I'm not sure we can arrive at a kind of a precise definition of care.
Evan Rosa: Ok, we don't need to be precise.
Will Willimon: But I do think to me, the challenge of pastoral care is - it's care in the name of Christ. And I think in some of the response to the article that Stanley and I did, our dialogue there, probably we underestimated how the therapeutic as triumphs. So in the field of pastoral care and, and many pastoral ministries, we thought in our conversation, we were probably arguing that, that vocation, it is a kind of neglected aspect of some care, pastoral care as is offered that's pastoral. One of my first kinda big books about the church, was worship as pastoral care and which I did and heck. I'd only been out of seminary by that time, about eight or nine years. And they talked about how tough it is in a kind of therapeutic culture to do pastoral care, because our care keeps getting captured by certain secular therapeutic mindsets. Whereas I think Christians often care for people in and helping them to find something interesting to do with their lives. That is to be part of Jesus project, to be part of God's mission in God's world, to God's people. And that Jesus healed. And yet presumably he did not, he was not in the kind of culture we are, where healing has become such a dominant part of our mindset, of our culture, of our desires. And also Jesus was, had a kind of odd kind of ambiguous relationship to his healing. He didn't heal everybody. And on numerous notable occasions, he told people, okay, I've healed you, but don't you dare tell anybody. Well, what's that about? I think that's part of the, we, our care is offered intention. And as I said on my critics, you know, I am never more deceitful, self deceitful, manipulative, that is sinful, than when I'm in pain. And pastors spend a lot of their time with people in various kinds of pain and anguish. And so my word to pastors is: You wade into people's pain in an earnest effort to help them in their pain. You're kind of in dangerous territory and it's up to you to become equipped, to know the boundaries, to know the, have a sense that the goal of your care may be different than what passes for care in a lot of our culture.
Evan Rosa: In that context, I just want to, I want to probe and ask further about this because I think the image of Christ as the "wounded healer" and plenty of discussion of woundedness in the article that we're currently talking about, I wonder if you can help, just add, to add to the picture here, add to this mosaic, which is certainly deeply complicated and help, like paint that other side of the picture, where when I'm in pain right, there's this, we're likely to be acting out of that pain in a way that is harmful to ourselves or to others. But then there is this rich potential for flourishing that comes through someone who attends to their woundedness, in a particular way, and who perhaps meets in their woundedness. Can you say a little bit about that?
Will Willimon: Yeah. I noticed you guys have settled on the word "flourishing". You didn't settle on the phrase "cured" or "healthy". I know in my own ministry, when pastors talk about, "This is a very unhealthy church" or "I'm trying to help heal this church", I think "health" sometimes sounds kind of static. I like "flourishing" and "flourishing" also implies that even in my distress, even my pain, my illness, there can be flourishing.
And I think part of that "flourishing" is a sense that I'm part of God's activity in the world - vocation. Jesus loves to take sick, hurting people in pain, and give them a job to do - that is be a Christian disciple. And I've, I've seen that countless times in my ministry. The "wounded healer" image, thank you Henri Nouwen, has enriched our ministry. All of us find that in ministry, we are able to be helpful to people and we're able to empathize and connect with people oftentimes through our own wounds, through our own experiences of suffering. I've told students, one of my victims is nothing bad ever happens to a preacher - that is even the worst things that occur in your life, God can weave into ministry and enable them to be someone else's healing, someone else's helpfulness for someone else. At the same time, the "wounded healer" image has been fatigued, as sometimes my wounds debilitate me to such an extent, that I'm not able to be helpful to others, that I get confused into thinking that ministry is some kind of therapy for me, some kind of helpful way for me, to get out of my own woundedness. And I am troubled by some of the "woundedness" talk that I hear today, that implies that "woundedness" is kind of positive - that it can be a revelatory force. I don't know that there is much significant revelation to be had, simply from pondering one's wounds. I do think wounds can be enlightening, revealing, if, when viewed in the light of the wounds of Christ, when in light in the wounds of a cruciform face: yeah, things can be learned. But it's tough in talking about my woundedness, for me not to allow these wounds to define who I am, and the limits of the life that I'm called to live - my "flourishing", if you will.
Evan Rosa: I wonder if we can even press further and talk about how you see the recent efforts to talk about the concept of self-care, as opposed to caring what Christ cares about, is how you place it. And how would you introduce this in our contemporary context, where it really does look like where we're encountering a kind of reckoning around what it means to be a pastor right now? And that's why I started with thinking about the purpose of pastoral minister. And that's where I'd like to continue here is how can, how would you frame this contemporary crisis?
Will Willimon: I'm not much on the self-care thing, I mean, as I've heard it articulated. I think some issues they have some may our selves, like pastures, can't really say things like, "Hey, I'm a pastor, but sometimes I gotta just, I gotta be me." There's a self that is somehow detached, more important than my role that has been given me by God and the church, to be a pastor. Myself is a self on whom hands have been laid.
I have been told, "Take now authority to preach the Word of God. Take now authority to care for God's people, to administer the sacraments. So, what does it mean to care for that self, that, that seems to be an interesting discussion. And I must say that I think ministry is so peculiarly difficult and demanding, that it's gotta be more than like golf or a good hobby or taking a day off. The care also means continual refurbishment of my vocation, a continual going back to my core identity of why I'm here in the first place, of who I am, of my strengths and limits. I have students write out in my Intro class in five pages how God explains my presence at Duke Divinity School. And I love those papers, because generally some of those weird stories that they tell about how they got in seminary, cannot be psychologically, economically, socially, logically explained. They gotta be theological explained. But I tell the students, "You keep this with you. Why don't you, on the anniversary of your ordination each year, pull out this story to kind of remind you of that crazy young thing that showed up in seminary."
And so the "self" that's being cared for, that, that's a question. Also a worry when self-care language kind of plays into the hands of the consumeristic, narcissistic, therapeutic mindset that's all too widespread. So I think I'd like a more complex discussion of self-care than I'm hearing from some of those who talk about how important it is. The most important part of self-care I think is, what does it take to have the energy and the courage to preach God's word among people who don't want to hear it? That's hard, but what does it take to speak up for the kingdom of God in a racist, centuries-long, white supremacist world.
When I was at Yale Divinity School, my Beecher lectures, someone said, "I'm sorry, but you talk like there's no pain worth having, and unless it's comes from those who are marginalized, the poor. And I serve a fairly athletic congregation and my people are anxious. My people are hurting. My people are in pain right now. I'm sorry." I said,"Yeah. And half of them voted for Donald Trump and a number of them, think it's their right not to be vaccinated and not to wear a mask. That's called sin. So let's be honest about that too. And some of their anxiety is induced by an acquisitive, capitalistic culture that encourages people to get in over their heads financially." So pastoral care in Jesus' name, quickly gets complicated.
Evan Rosa: How, how would you describe how we got to this moment? How do we get to the, in the words of Phillip reef, the "triumph of the therapeutic"? How do we get to a point where in American society - consumerism has taken over the concept of the job that Christ calls us to do?
Will Willimon: Wow, what a sweeping and pertinent question, that I don't know. In this kind of culture, you start out as Willie Jennings has pointed out so well in his After Whiteness book, you start out making possession a huge part, a necessary part of human flourishing and control and power. Wow. That, that is fertile ground for coming along and saying your main project in life, is you, and your feelings about you, are very important. Secondly, that you are a wonderful person without limits and with the right kind of techniques and all, your lives could be eternal and perfect. That's all fertile ground for the "triumph of the therapeutic" as Phillip price characterized it. So I do think that though, to be more positive perhaps, what a wonderful opportunity to proclaim, tell people that life does not consist in possessions, to quote somebody I know. Or that, that in, in giving you receive. Or that we are from dust, we have come. I used to love Ash Wednesday in Duke Chapel and stand before some 19-year-old with a good-looking biceps and say, "Hey, you're a great person and you really scored high on SAT, but you've come from dirt. And you're probably going back to there. I'll get there before you will kid, but there you are." What a message, you know, and TS Elliot said, "Why should people love the church? Because she tells him of sin and death and other unpleasant facts of life, they would just as soon avoid." And also to admit, darn it, I'm part of the therapeutic too and it it's got me in it's clutches! And I am also deluded into thinking if I can just buy this, if I can just get that, if I can possess a PhD, if I can publish another book, I will have a life worth living. And, um, it's the preacher's job to stand up and find the words to say, "I'm sorry, that's a lie. That's the way to death. And that's true."
Evan Rosa: What I hear is as you're helping us, kind of untie the knot of the therapeutic, and the consumeristic, and the American, especially the American church, but perhaps beyond, is partially a callback to "Christian humility". From, from dust and dirt, we came. To dust and dirt will return. That humus of, of the soil that we emerge from and that we go back to and the reminder of our limits, the reminder of who we truly are and what we've been called to be.
Will Willimon: I mean, there is a sense in which you can't go out and work for. Humility is sort of something the world does to you, if you work for Jesus. But also with humility, I'd add not only my finitude and sense of mortality, but also my own central inclinations in ministry. For instance, back to pastoral care, you know, the moment I say, "Look, I'm here to help. That's what I want to do. I'm just here to be helpful and to serve you. Now, where does it hurt? Okay. Let me help with that." I got to remember that, you know, I had to learn in early days of my ministry, thank God, it's painful to learn, but I need to be needed. I want to be wanted. I get as much out of going out late at night to some struggling person's pain and Lord, if that's also part of my own ego, my own acquisitiveness, I get as much out of that as I give to that.
Evan Rosa: You're honing in on something that I think is really deeply instructive. Insofar as we are in the midst of a "therapeutic culture" where we're baptizing narcissism, where, where the concept of the individual and so long as their life is comfortable, they're okay. People can see, people can see, that there is something wrong. There's something gone wrong. There's something wrong with them. There's something wrong with our communities. And there's something wrong with the world.
Will Willimon: As a preacher, I can testify. It's tough when I go out in, into this culture and I say, would you like to have a more fulfilling life, or would you like to find meaning and purpose in your daily life? Would you like to flourish? It, it's dangerous, because I really learned respect the power of this culture, to take otherwise noble human ends, and, um, rework those, pervert those in ways that are deeply unchristian. And so do you use a perfectly good word like "flourishing" - it, it becomes hard to distinguish now, what, what are we talking about? And I remember delving to a Duke student when I was in campus ministry. And I said to him, "What would you really like to do with your life in the future?" And he said, "This weekend, I mean, to be honest, I'd like to get laid and I'd like to get drunk." And I said, "Okay."
Well, it was one of those kind of blunt reminder that Christians have a weird idea. Take up your cross daily and follow me. You will be hated by the world for my sake. I'm getting ready to launch an assault on the empire, and guess who's going to help me. In dying, you live. All that. Maybe this is an opportunity for us to joyfully reclaim the oddness of the Gospel, the oddness of following a Jew for Nazareth, who lived briefly, died violently and rose unexpectedly. We were talking in class about Jesus, talking about remarriage after divorce and condemning remarriage. And you know, what do we do with that? Now, a lot of wonderful people get divorced. And somebody said, "Well, perhaps Jesus just didn't realize the importance of authenticity and the importance of liberating oneself from an oppressive relationship."
And I said, "That could be, that he could be an ignorant 1st Century Jew. That could be, you know, that he didn't know what all that we know. It also could be. He has a very different definition of a human being." And that's what we are colliding with here.
Evan Rosa: What we've come to understand as self-care, it really comes back to how we understand the "self" and how we understand "care", right?
Because yeah, there are, there is a proper way to care for oneself, and there is a proper way to encourage oneself to, you know, love themselves so they can have some kind of standard for what it means to love the, love your neighbor as yourself. And so you really evocatively point out that, it's, it might be actually an ontological understanding about the human being that Christ has and what it means to be a human being that it needs to inform the concept of self-care.
Will Willimon: It begs the question who is the "self" you're talking. And what would it mean to "care" for that self? For instance, one of the things we struggle with is the modern myth of the role-less individual, the role-less individual. That you are most you, when we strip you down from all of your roles, obligations, responsibilities and connections and the person who says, "Hey, I'm a father yeah, but, and I'm a husband and I am a banker, yeah, yeah, but who am I really down deep. Who am I most me?" that's the modern myth. You can think of countless films, when people walk out of a bourgeois marriage or something and launch forwards, and they discover the Californian, their real self.
Now, what if Christians say, "Well, we think if we strip you down and detach you from your responsibilities for other human beings, your roles, your connections, you haven't grown, you've shrunk, you... that isn't a self worth having. That's a non-self, that is delusion and, you know, I met for instance, a lot lonely clergy. And the last thing I would tell any of these clergy, "What you need to do is take, keep Sabbath. Now I would say to these people, you need to find a friend. You need to spend some time connecting deeply with people. You need to get out with your people, talk to them, listen to them. They can help you out of your own isolation. But I'm hoping that comment is informed, as you put it, by an ontological vision of the "flourishing" self. And I just, when someone says to me, well, the center of my life is my family. I would do anything for my kids. That's when I quote the great theologian, Eddie Murphy saying, "Hell that's your job!" Uh, poor everybody! Even the pagans, too, that everybody loves, you know, your kids look like you. Freud can explain to you how they're simply an extension of who you are. The church dares to say a very un-American thing and that is you can't flourish without taking responsibility for somebody else's children. We call it baptism. Can you say that, "baptism"? And that's through flourishing. And I was in a baptism where the pastor called up a mother and three children and she spoke Spanish to them. And she asked them to give a testimony of their faith. And they said that they had never heard of Methodist, until they moved to Durham and that the Methodists were the only people who wanted them in Durham because Mr. Smith helped them buy a car. Ms. Jones helped them get them. And then the pastor said, "Okay people, I want you to think about this carefully now, before we do this, you're going to promise to God that you will take responsibility for this family. Now, if you're ready to, if you've got the guts to do that, let's continue with the ritual." Well, I thought, "Okay, that is so un-American. That is so weird."
Evan Rosa: I find myself listening and just being grateful to that pastor for that moment.
Will Willimon: Oh Lord. In fact, the question you might ask was who got baptized then? Was it this family? Or was it, Willimon who's written books about baptism, but had never seen more. I mean, you know, and, and I must say you, you got to ask yourself, "How many people are hungry, not just for helping keeping their marriage together, their family together - and I'm all for them, keeping that together, if they can - but are hungry for something else important to do, other than themselves. And I'm thinking about churches: it is not good enough just to say to Christians, "I know you're anxious. I know you're fearful. And therefore, I'm going to try and show empathy for you." Part of that says, "I wonder what God is doing with your pain right now. Could any of your anxiety be God induced?"
And I know the pastor who said, "My people are not coming back to church. We've opened back up, but they're not coming back. They're still feeling anxious. They don't want to be in crowds, et cetera." I said, "Yeah." And he said, "But I'm really worried. Have I done anything to lead them to believe that the body of Christ is option. That the corporate practice of Christianity is optional. I just wondered did anything I do, lead them to believe that erroneous idea?" And I thought, "Wow, that's a good pastor." And well, I remember at the beginning of the pandemic, Stanley Hauerwas, and I were talking about trouble all the pastors had. And he said, "I just feel so sorry for pastors." He's not a pastor. He's not. "How," I said, "How do you minister to people in a pandemic who think that death is optional or they think that death is an injustice that God has worked on them? That's going to be tough."
Evan Rosa: What is the answer?
Will Willimon: It's uh, well, one thing, pastors, one of my leadership principles for pastoral ministry is muddling through, and just seeing how far you can get to ask questions.
Evan Rosa: It sounds like we just need to listen to your previous words about really just staying embedded in one's community, taking on the role and expanding through those roles and realising that the particularities of those roles is what we're called to be responsible for. And, and then, and that is what I'm appreciating about, about, about the call toward cares beyond the self.
Will Willimon: Yes. Yeah. I, it's important to be embedded in the community, 'cause realize that, you know, the community, the crowd, the security guard would say the crowd can also be a source of sin. It also can bring out the worst in me. And along with community, I'm becoming suspicious of all of these calls for Christian community and community. It's community in Christ, it's community that submits to the Scriptures on a weekly basis. It's a community who says let's all make believe just for an hour that these ancient Jews. Were closer to God than we are, or know more about God than we do.
Let's just do that and see where we'll go with that. Should we be surprised that people even very, "good" people get in these situations with an imbalanced power and take advantage of someone's vulnerability. This is what people do. This is what we do. This is why we need to pray the prayer of confession with particular earnestness next Sunday.
And I love that when the community is driven from being just to kind of like-minded group of people who have a lot in common, to something looking more like the body of Christ and becoming a community worthy of the name of community in Christ. I hope in my own testimony and my own writing and all, I convey a sense of the wonder that it is that God called me to do work this interesting. I think that's amazing. I mean, knowing something about me, that God take a risk like that. But if you know anything about Scriptures, you know that God is a sucker for losers like me. However, it also convey some of the adventure of being in ministry. Maybe in God's hands, the present moment is not a call for lament and despair, but a calling for like, "Wow, let's roll with Christ."
Evan Rosa: Will Willimon thank you so much for coming on the show and thank you for opening up about really the, this essential question about what care means, who the self is, and the role of the pastor and all this. Thank you so much.
Will Willimon: Thank you.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured pastor and educator Will Willimon. Production assistance by Martin Chan, Nathan Jowers, Natalie Lam, and Logan Ledman. I'm Evan Rosa and I edited and produced the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu. New episodes drop every Saturday with the occasional midweek. If you're new to the show, so glad that you found us. Remember to hit subscribe, so you don't miss any episodes. And if you've been listening for awhile, thank you friends. If you're liking what you're hearing, I've got a request. Would you support us? It's pretty simple, really in won't take much time. Here are some ideas. First, you could hit the share button for this episode in your app and send a text or email to a friend, share it to your social feed. Second, you could give us an honest rating on Apple Podcasts. How are we really. Finally, you could write a short review of the show in Apple Podcasts. Reviews are cool because they'll help like-minded people get an idea for what we're all about and what's most meaningful to you - our listeners.
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