Spiritual Abuse

I spoke with a young woman recently about a tough situation in her home church. To describe her situation, she utilized the language of ‘spiritual abuse,’ and something about those words made me hesitate. It’s not language I typically use, or appeal to, and the more I reflected on our conversation, a series of questions began to work their way through my mind: What is spiritual abuse? Have I ever experienced it? Why do I feel like it is language that needs special nuance?

The last question is probably the best place to start. I think the language of ‘spiritual abuse,’ like the language of ‘spiritual warfare,’ may be misused in the church. What I mean is that when I encounter a difficult situation, I hesitate to explain those situations by an appeal to spiritual abuse in the same way I hesitate to account for difficult situations in the church by appeal to spiritual warfare. Don’t get me wrong—I believe that spiritual warfare is real, but I think we should look to natural sources of a problem before we appeal to explicitly supernatural sources. In other words, I feel like we should arrive at warfare as an explanation for difficult people and situations by means of a process of elimination. If something goes wrong, it might be spiritual warfare, but it also might be bad planning, or bad timing, or human error. To put it even more bluntly, sometimes the devil made me do it, but it’s far more likely that you were an idiot. Jumping too quickly to the overtly ‘spiritual’ explanation short-circuits the process by which we need to carefully examine our own motives and culpability in a given set of circumstances.

“See, the demons made me do it!”

I also hesitate to use the term ‘spiritual abuse’ because the language of abuse is freighted with quite strong cultural implications. To be labelled an ‘abuser’ is one of the worst things you can be called in today’s world. It implies intentionality and malice, suggesting that the person accused of spiritual abuse has willfully and consciously abused the people under his or her care. While this is sometimes the case (and I will return to these cases at the end), I don’t think most people who perform actions of spiritual abuse in the Church do so willfully, or maliciously, or even intentionally. I think most spiritual abuse can be accounted for by appeal to incompetence. To put this even more specifically, I believe that most spiritual abuse in the church is born from a lack of self-knowledge. This is a claim that may require some explanation.

What is spiritual abuse, and why do I think it comes from a lack of self-knowledge? I think spiritual abuse is, quite simply, the misuse of spiritual authority. Let’s begin by taking a closer look at the concept of authority, because authority is an intrinsic part of our relationships. Some people have been authorized to teach, guide, discipline, correct, model, and love others. The right use of their authority results in the proper teaching, guidance, discipline, correction, modeling, and love of others, while the mis-use of their authority results in vacuous, inept, or abusive relationships between those parties. In every relationship of authority there is an ever-present danger, because every entrusted matter can be misused, resulting in abuse. The authority invested in parents may be the clearest example of this—a parent has been authorized (by virtue of his or her parental role) to do all of the above tasks for their children. They are good parents when they utilize their authority appropriately, and mediocre or bad parents when they fail to use their authority properly (whether it be through neglect or excessive control).

Yes, parental authority even extends to explaining the facts of life!

What, then, is ‘spiritual’ authority? Spiritual authority is the natural authority of relationships as it manifests in a religious context. Speaking as a Christian, we have a religious text (the Bible), a body of dogma (theology), and a historic body of people who steward that book and dogma (the Church). Together these three factors comprise the primary sources of spiritual authority. Within the Church, specific members are authorized to utilize that authority in specific contexts. For example, parents are authorized to raise up their children in the Lord; pastors and elders are authorized to teach, rebuke, and disciple; and every member of the Church is authorized to call one another to greater faithfulness. But in each of these contexts we encounter the ever-present danger of authority—that is, every matter of spiritual authority can be abused. Additional dangers emerge when we contrast earthly authority and spiritual authority. If I am a prison warden, authorized to keep order and peace in a cell block, I may use physical force to enforce my will; as a pastor, I may not beat people into spiritual submission. If I am a parent, authorized to train up and discipline my children, I may hide their toys, or ground them, or take away their allowances; as a pastor, I may not rob or manipulate my people into spiritual submission. If I am a property owner, I may demand that people stay off my lawn, or park away from my drive, or sue them for property damage; but as a pastor, I may not demand or coerce people into doing anything spiritually. Whatever the context and privileges of an earthly authority, when it comes to spiritual matters we who are tasked to act in spiritual authority will find that our hands are uniquely tied. As a pastor I may not bribe, bully, or beat my people into submission; all that I can do is exhort them, and, moreover, when I exhort them, I may not manipulate them through guilt, fear, or shame. Spiritual authority always goes wrong when we make use of worldly tools of authority in its service.

Why, then, do I think that spiritual abuse tied to a lack of self-knowledge? This explanation may appear complex but hang with me for a moment. At the heart of the matter, a spiritual abuser has confused what I want with what God wants. In other words, the spiritual abuser lacks the self-awareness required to distinguish between his or her personal desires and the mandates of ministry. This is why I can, if I am an abuser, appeal so easily to spiritual rhetoric in the service of earthly agenda; in order to get what I want, I slave the Kingdom of God to my personal desires. Spirituality then serves as a tool for manipulation. Examples abound: If you really loved God, you’d obey me. If you really had faith, you’d tithe more. If you were really humble, you’d agree with me. If you knew Jesus, you wouldn’t act like that. In each case spiritual rhetoric is employed to drive someone to do what I want; it is a rhetoric that shows up in building projects and vision statements, in marriage seminars, revivals, conference programs, and elder board minutes. It’s pervasive.

Behind this confusion (between what I want and what God wants) lies a deeper unacknowledged issue—namely, that the situation faced by people with spiritual authority produces anxiety. In short, spiritual authority comes with a deep mandate to powerlessness. It is God and God alone who changes people, not preachers, parents, or Sunday School teachers. But as ministers who are charged with communicating the good news of Jesus Christ, it is all too easy to take on the life-changing aspect of that message as our task. When we do that—forgetting that it is not our job—we revert to worldly methods of power; we manipulate through our words, we bully our people through our actions, we attempt to bribe them. It is in this way that spiritual abuse is born form this gap our self-knowledge, because no minister consciously wants to manipulate or abuse his people into action. But to men and women who haven’t come to terms with this powerlessness—who haven’t permitted that look in the mirror where they begin to come to terms with their own weakness and ineptitude—then such people must rely on their own power. Oblivious to the innate powerlessness of the call to ministry, we utilize the tools of earthly authority in our spiritual mission. Feeling powerless, such a person appeals to methods that ‘work’, even if they are wrong. The result is inevitably a form of abuse.

There are perhaps four more things I want to say about spiritual abusers—each rooted in this lack of self-knowledge. In the first place, I think it is very important to acknowledge the fact that abuse begets abuse. Men and women who abuse spirituality most often learned their habits from other ministers, who themselves didn’t know they were being spiritually abusive. We should not be surprised that ministers who lack self-knowledge struggle to lead others into greater self-knowledge. In some respects this means that spiritual abuse is nothing more than a bad habit—albeit a very bad one. Nevertheless, this situation raises some alarming reflections: if a given pastor models spiritual abuse from the pulpit, in his personal life, and in relationships, then the congregation will begin to learn those lessons tacitly. The pastor who abuses his congregation spiritually will give permission to associate pastors, elders, deacons, lay leaders, and parents to utilize those techniques in the authority they exercise over their wards. (To my mind, this raises again the seriousness of a passage like James 3:1, “Not many of you should presume to be teachers, for we will be judged more harshly.”)

Students at Heritage Christian school dress like their teacher once a week. To be clear, this isn’t abuse–it’s proper formation!

Second, I think it is terribly important to recognize that a spiritual abuser doesn’t know that he or she is abusive. This is, in a way, unsurprising—if spiritual abuse is a product of ignorance, how can you possibly know you’re doing it? This fundamental gap in self-knowledge makes it all the more difficult to grow out of the habits of abuse. But there are a few additional reasons that make this situation even more troublesome. In the first place, to the abuser’s thinking, spiritual abuse works. More often than not, bullying and manipulation can succeed at getting people to change—at least on the surface. (After all, the abuser is someone who has in all likelihood himself or herself been abused spiritually—“It worked for me, didn’t it?”). To this situation is added a troubling logic—if I do something in ministry and it works, that means my ministry is blessed by God. If God has blessed what I am doing, how could it be wrong? In this way, my earthly metric of success reinforces my bad habits. It becomes far more difficult to self-examine when everything appears, on the surface, to be successful and ‘blessed.’ But in the second place, and more importantly, to admit that I am a spiritual abuser will mean admitting my powerlessness. This is a deeply alarming prospect, because it invites a confrontation with anxiety, with sin, with my own history, my wounds, and those places where I am appealing to spiritual matters to control my own anxiety. Growth in self-knowledge is painful, and willful ignorance is a wonderful way to keep that pain at bay.

Third, because the spiritual abuser does not know the boundaries of her self, her sense of spiritual authority has been collapsed into her sense of self. Because I don’t know where I end and God’s authority begins, this is why I can so easily confuse my agenda with God’s agenda—this is the root of the thinking that “my way is Yahweh.” But the more, in ignorance, I am committed to this collapse, the more I can be convinced that I am doing the right thing. Once again, where an idea of success is linked to a concept of blessing, then success in abusive methods will be interpreted as a blessing upon those methods. Because it works, I am right, and God loves me and agrees with me. This situation also produces a wonderful sense of confidence—even an imperviousness to criticism. God is for me, who can be against me? All of this leads to a further side-effect. For many spiritual abusers, they have so deeply identified with their authority that they perceive opposition to that authority as direct opposition to the self. To disagree with or oppose a person in spiritual authority who thinks this way is to violate their sense of self. Oppose the abuser, and they will respond in the strongest possible terms.

The Blues Brothers had some terrifying nuns…

This, in fact, is the fourth observation, because if you stand up to a spiritual abuser, you will be accused on spiritual terms. In fact, the most alarming thing to a spiritual abuser—who at core doesn’t know who she is—is the presence of a person who does know who she is. To the person who has become accustomed to bullying as a way to get what they want, it is deeply alarming to encounter a person who cannot be bullied. In response, they will pull out all the stops, “You’re so prideful!” “You’re not even very spiritual!” “I suspect that she is under the influence of demonic powers!” Sadly, many good people in the Church have been slandered by others, simply because they wouldn’t cave to the unacknowledged anxieties of their spiritual leaders.

I believe that spiritual abuse is a uniquely difficult problem in the church today (perhaps it is the case in all religious contexts, but I can only speak with authority about the Christian one). The unique difficulty is that to break the cycles of abuse we must grow in self-knowledge. But, as I’ve suggested, spiritual abusers are often by disposition immune to such growth in self-knowledge! I can offer only a few provisional suggestions. First, we’ve got to advocate for good theology of ministry—that is, a theology of ministry that properly emphasizes the power of God and the role of our own powerlessness. Second, we’ve got to encourage growth in the baseline of self-knowledge throughout the Church. Since spiritual abuse is a problem in the exercise of authority, I suspect that change in this area will need to begin with ministers, then work its way down into the pews. Third, and most difficultly, spiritual abusers must be answered by men and women who know who they are and cannot be bullied. This is a painful recommendation to make—it means encouraging faithful men and women to be accused of the worst kind of spiritual offenses, to be ostracized, shamed, and manipulated, but, being confident of who they are and who God is, standing firm.

Addendum: I said at the beginning that there are, indeed, situations of malicious spiritual abuse. These are people who manipulate others through spiritual means, and consciously know that they are manipulating others through spiritual means. Such people are psychopaths, and while there are occasionally psychopathic ministers in the Church, I believe such situations are rare (although newsworthy, when they are outed).

The Gospel, Seven Ways (Or, What is the Gospel?)

There’s a Vietnamese dish called “beef seven ways.” It serves beef in a series of, you guessed it, seven different courses: fried, boiled, minced, souped, and so forth. It’s all beef, but presented in a variety of mouth-watering preparations and courses. I am always reminded of this dish when I am asked to tell people what the Gospel is. It’s a question I like—not only because I’m a preacher committed to the Word, but because it gives opportunity to show how there is something of a magnificent variety in the Gospel itself. The Gospel, like beef seven ways, is too big to be served only one way; it can be presented to us in a variety that is spiritually mouth-watering.

Photo Credit: vietvisiontravel.com

“Gospel” is a word that means “Good News.” It is a report, a telling. When the messenger running from the battle of Marathon finished his 26.2-mile sprint (and before he collapsed, dead!), he announced victory. His message was an instance of euangelion—evangelism. He was bringing good news. The church also bears witness to good news. The content of that good news is our Gospel.

But the good news we have to tell isn’t just one thing. I fear that for many people in the church today, the Gospel message is limited to something like the Four Spiritual Laws, or what some have called the Romans Road. You are a sinner, God has sent Christ, Christ died for sin, through faith in Christ you will be saved from sin. For others, the to state the Gospel means to tell a story about a specific model of atonement (often, the model that is called “penal substitutionary atonement”). There is no disputing that these features are part of the good news, but I want to suggest to you that they aren’t the whole of it. The Gospel—the good news of God in Jesus Christ—is bigger than just personal salvation.

Like beef seven ways, I think the Gospel can be presented in a wide variety of ways—all while still being the Gospel! For the remainder of this piece, I want to offer you seven ways we can serve the Gospel. (Might there be more than seven? Of course! But these are my seven favourites!) So, without further ado, here is the Gospel, Seven Ways:  

1) The Gospel, as Jesus preached it, is the good news that the Kingdom of God was at hand. The most common oversight when we talk about the Gospel today is to neglect the fact that our reproductions of the Romans Road look so little like Christ’s Gospel in the New Testament. Consider again what Mark says about Jesus’s preaching at Mark 1:14-15, “Now after John had been taken into custody, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the Gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the Gospel.’” This is explicit—that before there was a cross and resurrection there was a Gospel to be believed, and that Gospel is good news about the coming Kingdom of God. What is God’s Kingdom? It is God’s reign, God’s justice, and God’s will for the earth. It is the inbreaking power of God for change, and its coming is fundamentally good news. Because God’s reign is coming, we should repent now of those ways that characterize the earthly kingdoms. To put this good news in other words, “God is coming, so get your act together!”

2) The Gospel, as the apostles preached it, was the good news that God has raised Jesus from the dead. It is an astonishing thing to realize that the apostles, when they preach the Gospel, also don’t talk very much about personal sin and salvation—instead, they talk about the resurrection. For them, this was the good news—good news first carried by the women who were watching the tomb, announced to them first by an angel of God (Luke 24:5-6), “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he is risen!” The resurrection is the Astonishing Fact—that a man came back from the dead, raised to life by the Spirit of God, that in his resurrection lies the firstfruits of the end of the world. Jesus announced that the Kingdom of God was near, in the resurrection of Christ the Kingdom is now here.

3) The Gospel, as the apostles preached it, was the good news that Jesus is King. Once again, there are striking differences between the preaching of the apostles and our modern presentations of the Gospel. Consider again Peter’s summary argument from his Pentecost sermon (Acts 2:36), “Therefore let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made Him both Lord and Christ—this Jesus whom you crucified.” In this presentation of the Gospel we are not yet at personal salvation—here, Peter is announcing the Lordship of King Jesus. Jesus is the anointed one, the promised King of Israel. Jesus is kurios—the Lord Himself—that in encountering Jesus we are encountering the person of very God. Mortimer Arias noted that while Jesus preached the Kingdom, the disciples preach the King. Jesus is King; Christ is the Lord—and it is good news that in him evil has been judged and will be judged; in him will be found freedom for prisoners, release for captives, healing for the sick, freedom for the oppressed. In the Lordship of King Jesus every earthly lordship is judged—all politics and powers and systems and nationalisms are subject to his supreme lordship—so that (Phil 2:10-11) “at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

The letters at the top of the cross stand for “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” (In Latin, Iesus Nazarenus Rex Ioudaeorum.) Pilate, of course, meant it as an insult–but he spoke truer than he imagined.

4) The Gospel is the good news that in the death and resurrection of Jesus, our alienation from God has been removed. We come at last to that element of the Gospel which is most commonly preached—that our sin, which stood between mankind and God, has been eliminated in Christ. This is a message that Paul states clearly in Ephesians 2:1-10—that formerly we were dead in our transgressions, but now in Christ we have been granted new life through his resurrection. This is the good news that Christ’s obedience and death have cancelled out our transgressions, while his resurrection life enables our new life in right relationship to God. Moreover, Paul is keen to note that this Gospel is also the good news that this transaction is effected by means of God’s power, and God’s gift, and not our effort. We don’t earn salvation, nor do we inherit it by means of our genetics. God has given us the gift of salvation in the person and work of Christ—this is the good news that we receive it by faith!

When God declares all foods clean to Peter, Peter gets the message clearly: the Gentiles are now welcome at God’s table!

5) The Gospel is the good news that in the physical body of Jesus a new way for unity has been made for all people—both Jews and Gentiles. When the apostles began their preaching on Pentecost Sunday, they didn’t yet seem to have a vision for how expansive the message of the Gospel was to be—Peter even targets his preaching solely to “the house of Israel.” But God had a bigger plan—His Kingdom, and His King, would be for the whole world, for all people. Interestingly enough, the second half of Ephesians chapter two is also the Gospel. In that passage—verses 11-21, Paul describes how ‘formerly’ we were a divided people—divided by the law—but now we are now, in Christ, a unified people, a new humanity. This new humanity every bit as much the good news for Paul as is the language of personal salvation. This is the good news of the Church, that God has called from out of the world a people for Himself, that through His Spirit they will be made one, perfected, and purified for His purposes—agents and ambassadors of the Kingdom of God.

6) The Gospel is the good news of the Incarnation. Although I began this list with the preaching of the Gospel in Mark, the real beginning of the Gospel was the good news announced to Mary at the Annunciation (Luke 2:31): “Behold,” Gabriel said, “you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus.” To Mary, God first announced His plan to invade the world (and a close look at the Magnificat will reveal how politically Mary perceived this announcement!). But in addition to marking the fulfillment of God’s long plan for humanity, embedded in Christ’s birth there is a more fundamental good news: God Himself has taken on flesh, the world which we see around us, material reality, is good enough for God. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis on this point, God likes matter; He made it. It was His idea in the first place. And when Christ took on flesh he condemned once and for all any theology that views the material world as worthless. Subjected to frustration? Yes. Requiring submission and management? Of course. But what must not be missed is that, from day one of creation until now, God’s world is good, and in the incarnation of our Lord God affirms that goodness for all time. There is no greater condemnation of the evils of the world than that God declares the world to be good.

Rublev’s Trinity is a remarkable piece of artwork–note especially the posture of invitation!

7) The Gospel is the good news of the Trinity. I have saved, for last, what is perhaps the most important aspect of all—but since it is the most explicitly theological, I wanted to present those more explicitly biblical elements, first. Before Christ’s coming we knew God to be One, perfect, and holy. He was a monad; solitary, powerful, but alone. With the coming of Christ we have learned that while God is still One, He is also mysteriously Three. The ‘mystery’ here is not a kind of hand-waving over a difficulty, but rather our acknowledgement that God is greater than our concepts. Whether or not we understand the Trinity is immaterial—what matters at this moment is that this revealed doctrine is incredibly good news. Why? Because in God revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we have access to know and experience God. That because of Christ’s sacrifice, death and resurrection, we receive the Spirit as a deposit and gift—the Spirit makes a way for us to become like Christ, so that we can live in right relationship with the Father. In other words, it is the Trinity that makes it possible for us to know, love, and experience God! And if that isn’t good news, nothing is.

Doubtless there are more ways I could have carved up the Gospel—but these are the seven that are on my heart this week. I could easily have broken some of them into parts—for example, I could have made salvation by faith its own course on the menu. But maybe I’ll ask you, reader. Are there any you would add?

Extraversion, Covid-19, and Spirituality

In the midst of our present global scenario—of social distancing, lockdowns, and quarantines, of distance learning, work from home, and digital churches—a phrase from Bonhoeffer’s Life Together keeps coming to mind: “Whoever cannot be alone should beware of community. Whoever cannot stand being in community should beware of being alone.”

Bonhoeffer’s meaning is simple enough. We regularly make use of either solitude or groups to hide our insecurities—whether those insecurities are the stillness of being alone or the energy of being with others. Whole people need both. The Church needs both.

Drifting prominently across my news feed these past weeks have been the increasingly urgent concerns of my more extraverted friends. Typically, it is the introverts in my life who post plaintive image macros about how much they’d rather be inside, alone, and about how much they relish cancelled plans. But a notable reversal sees my extraverted friends panicking that they have to stay inside. Desperate for connection, they’ve jacked up their online presence: they’re posting photos and videos of themselves doing things (any number of things), they’re standing in their doorways and shouting to their neighbours, and they clarify with some urgency that “social distancing” isn’t human, or humane, that we’re not made for this, and then follow up their concerns with a correction: “Social distancing isn’t right—it’s physical distancing that matters!”

Go ahead and google it. “Introvert memes.” They’re a dime a dozen.

In these moments I hear Bonhoeffer in the background: “Whoever cannot be alone should beware of community.” With this in mind, I think there are two things I want to speak into this situation. One is to the church generally, the other is to clergy.

To the Church: Our present situation warrants serious reflection on Bonhoeffer’s warning. In particular, it seems to me that certain extraverted church members have collapsed being social into being the Church, while certain introverted church members have collapsed being alone into being spiritual. No doubt the Church is a social entity; no doubt significant spiritual activity happens in solitude. It is also beyond doubt that neither tells the whole human story. Today, however, I want to focus on the distortion of my extraverted friends.

In case you’re not familiar with the terms, ‘extraverted’ and ‘introverted’ are personality types devised by Carl Jung, based on his broad observations of a multitude of clients. Some of them, he came to see, were recharged by being with people, while others, he perceived, were recharged by being alone. I’ve put ‘recharged’ in italics both times because it’s the key phrase here—extraversion and introversion are measurements of energy, not social skill, as is commonly thought (there are socially incompetent extraverts and socially expert introverts).

See, my extraverted friends, I used to be one of you. I used to be addicted to being with people, around people, and they gave me immense energy and I was energized and enlivened by being among you. But something happened during the ten years I was a pastor. People went from energizing, to utterly draining. I still loved my congregation, and still used a lot of energy while in groups, but it would take me, on average, about double the time in solitude to recover from any meeting I had. I suddenly needed lots of time alone. I’ve now come to terms with the fact that I’m an introvert.

I tell this story is because I want you to know that I’m not one of those smug introverts who, confident in the superiority of being alone over being in groups, is taking advantage of your present confinement to tell you how bad you are and to dish out a little of your own medicine. All the same, the person who cannot be alone should beware community. What is Bonhoeffer teaching us right now? Many of you are revealing that you cannot be alone, and I suspect that this incapacity to be alone is impacting how we think about spirituality. More to the point, I fear that we’ve collapsed the complexity of communal spirituality into the simplicity of energized gatherings. We get together, we chat and visit, we sing and listen to a sermon, and we go home feeling good about ourselves, but the ‘good feeling’ may or may not be spiritual in origin. It might just be that a group of extraverts have been recharged by being together and doing extraverted things. Doing ‘churchy’ things is no guarantee of spiritual benefit. Neither, for that matter, is feeling ‘churchy’ feelings.

The Babylon Bee even posted about the joys of introverts during the quarantine.

To put this another way, I fear that a lot of our spiritual practice may be dominated by extraverted dispositions. Extraverted pastors, cultivating extraverted churches, where extraverted people engage in extraverted forms of spirituality. And I see evidence of this domination in our ecclesial response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Why should not being able to meet, temporarily, result in such panic for so many of the people I see? Why should staying home for two weeks be so deeply frightening? Why is it that we must immediately set up a host of Zoom meetings to keep our Churches meeting, meeting, and meeting?

Even this little one can’t enjoy Christmas.

Face it—we’re really bad at being alone. We’re even worse at being still. We fill and populate our minds and our time with noise and things so that we can hold the stillness at bay. I feel this general noisiness especially around Christmastime. For years now I’ve felt that there was something deeply wrong with how we approach Christmas. Busy, busy, busy! Buying, cooking, cleaning, wrapping, preparing, getting Christmas cards together, gathering the last of the shopping—and then, finally, we all take one day off to rest, Christmas Day. But by the time we get there we’re so knackered from preparing for a day off, that that day itself is nearly ruined.

The reason this seems so odd to me is because even when I was growing up, the world was much better at taking a weekly Sabbath. This wasn’t that long ago, but on Sundays all the shops were closed. Need to shop? Do it another day. Need groceries? Get them another day. Need to look at cars? Do it next Saturday. Need to make a business call? Wait till Monday. When the world was in the habit of regular retreat from the busyness of life, Christmas was a bonus sabbath in a year of Sabbaths. Nowadays, it’s the only one we take—and we’re so busy we ruin it.

The point, my friends, is that we have been given a gift—the gift of solitude, of extended Sabbath. Why are we trying to ruin it with our excessive busyness? Why are we struggling to remember the Sabbath Day, and its joy of retreat from the normative busyness of life? Now is the time to be still, to reflect on being alone, and to really learn what it means to be the Church in solitude—to separate our spirituality from our extraversion. That’s where the clergy come in.

Pastor Troy Dobbs at Grace Church Eden Prairie in Minnesota on Sunday.
Adam Bettcher/Getty Images

To Clergy: One of the most difficult aspects of pastoral ministry, I believe, is the unfair ratio of visible to invisible work, of tangible to intangible objectives. What I mean is that pastors typically get credit for their time for those things that appear to the church. For a small to mid-size church, that means an hour’s visible work on Sunday morning, maybe two if you teach Sunday School. People look at this visible work and conclude that you’ve got it easy. They say things like, “Well, you’ve done your hour’s work for the week! I wish I could get paid to do so little. Ha ha ha.” (You find you never laugh with them.) Members can ask, “So, what is it you do all week?” Their intonation makes it clear that they don’t think you do very much at all. The average time required for sermon prep, I understand, is between 8-20 hours per week. But you don’t get credit for that time, because it’s invisible. You don’t get credit for visiting sick families, teaching a weekly bible study, answering your phone, reading spiritually to enrich your own faith, praying for your congregation, or attending a board meeting. Pastoral ministry is dominated by the intangibles, and if we’re not careful this can be deeply frustrating.

The first reason this is frustrating is because clergy can fall into this visibility trap and come to believe that their chief value is in their visible work. This involves a severe flattening of the pastoral office—prayer, solitude, personal spiritual development; care, concern, support; vision, planning, implementation, management—each of these categories is a significant part of the clerical office. They are also invisible. The pastor who puts all of his eggs into the basket of visible actions will distort the office and enervate the life of the church. It’s like a gardener who spends more time posing for promotional pictures than tending to the trees. The pictures may look great, but the invisible work has to go on.

But we can compound the problem further with a second reason. Let’s imagine you’re a pastor who is extraverted, who gets a charge from being with your people. Suddenly, not only has the visible portion of your work been taken away from you, but you are also prohibited from connecting with the people who give you life. If you’ve only focused on extraverted spirituality, to the neglect of introverted spirituality, then there’s a good chance you’ve been skipping leg day in your spiritual workouts. And Covid-19 has commanded you to lift a piano with your legs.

To tie this all together, I suspect that, suddenly, a lot of the pastors in the world find themselves feeling the need to justify their existence. Their visible work is removed from them, and now they have to find a new and creative way to prove their value. It is all too easy in the pastoral office to allow identity to be intertwined with visible busyness, and visible busyness militates against stillness and solitude. Finding oneself in a place of hollow busyness, many pastors attempt to justify their busyness as spirituality. But the more activist we are in ministry, the less our contemplative muscles get worked. We need both. But for some pastors who are now forced to be alone and still it may amount to a crisis of identity, if not of faith.

But pastoring is so much more than public teaching, and there’s no time like now to show people what that looks like. I’ve got four suggestions:

1) Let the big churches be the big churches. There are a whole ton of great preaching pastors out there who are better than you, more professional than you, and who already know how to use the technology better than you. Why not just outsource your teaching for this season? Send your people out on ‘visitation’ to see how the big dogs do their digital ministry. Then, instead of you teaching, you can hold a discussion group for after the teaching. Go ahead and have your Zoom meeting, but instead of being the one talking, you get to do the listening and hear about what other people learned in their digital churches this week.

2) Focus on your people. As clergy, your job has always been your people. That hasn’t changed; the only thing that’s changed is the ability to gather in a big group. So this is as great a time as any to get out the phone list and call every single parishioner on it. Write down a few key questions ahead of time. Do you have everything you need? How are you holding up? How’s your spirit? How can I pray for you? If your people don’t like the phone, send them a chat or text. Your care for your people will be evident more in your connections than in your digital sermons.

3) Make the most of your time. What a time you have to plan for the future! To pray, reflect, and read, to listen to God and attempt to hear what He wants for the future of your congregation. This is the best of times to write out some sermon outlines, or plan some Sunday School lessons, or just to take a break. Put your feet up and listen to some music, or spend time in your garden, or prepare a feast and eat it, or play games with your family. Now is the time to remember that busyness is not spirituality. Live it, and then you’ll be able to teach it better.

4) Be still and alone. The best of all is time to simply be still. Recently I’ve read through Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi—a book that argues that the training of attention is essential to the achievement of happiness. Csikszentmihalyi writes, that “unless one learns to tolerate and even enjoy being alone, it is very difficult to accomplish any task that requires undivided attention.” This is your chance, O clergy and parishioners, to develop your attention, to piggyback on enforced solitude as an opportunity for personal development. Take the time! Stop being so busy! And… just rest.

Some Really Terrible Coronavirus Sermon Illustrations

It’s Saturday night, and all over the world pastors are scrambling to put the final touches on their sermons this week. This week is unique, of course, since the spread of the Covid-19 virus has caused many churches to move, for the first time, to fully digital services.

More important than getting the tech right—which is a nightmare in itself!—is coming up with some killer eleventh-hour sermon applications from the coronavirus situation. After all, what preacher is worth his or her salt who cannot monopolize on a situation like this, to speak rich and profound spiritual meaning into a global situation by means of thin theology and vague reference points? That’s why I’m here to help. I’ve come up with the following awful terrible fantastic sermon illustrations, so you don’t have to.

“Pastor, tell me what it all means?!”

Pastor, your people are hungry for meaning. Are you going to give it to them, or not? In what is really the easiest of all sermon illustrations here you get to fill in the blank with whatever it is you (or your members) don’t like. “Do you want to know what this coronavirus means? I’ll tell you what it means. It’s God’s judgment against _______.” See that blank, there? You can put in whatever you want! Abortion, the Gays, NAFTA, Global Warming, Obama, the Kardashians. The possibilities are endless, so get creative!

Another easy sermon point is to utilize the play on words between coronavirus and corona beer. This one has potential because nobody, as far as I can tell, has noticed the similarities yet. It means we’ve got a great opportunity to take up the cause of Teetotalism again, and to get our all-too alcohol-sodden members to stop drinking the devil’s juice. “The virus is here because you’ve been drinking! Stop drinking, and the virus will go away!”

Another way to force interpret meaning from the epidemic is to start with some scripture. This model takes a little more thought, but can be really useful. Here, you’ve got to find a passage with a thin relationship to global events, then twist relate it so that it aligns perfectly with what’s going on. I’ll give you some examples.

Consider a passage like Leviticus 14:36 “Then the priest shall command that they empty the house before the priest goes to examine the disease, lest all that is in the house be declared unclean. And afterward the priest shall go in to see the house.” See, there were rules in the Old Testament about how to approach a plague-filled house (plague = coronavirus). The quarantine, in other words, is calling people everywhere to seek priestly purity. The purpose of this time is to make everyone purify themselves! The plague is God telling your members to get their houses in order.

Another great example is Numbers 32:13, which says that “And the LORD’s anger was kindled against Israel, and he made them wander in the wilderness forty years, until all the generation that had done evil in the sight of the LORD was gone.” Here, the Israelites are forced to wander in the desert until an entire generation has passed away. Since the coronavirus is most lethal for the elderly, clearly this is God’s judgment on that generation! The Israelites sinned because they were faithless upon entering the land, and you can pick whatever sins you want to lay at the feet of today’s elderly—the housing crash, the 60s, Joe Biden—as before, the list is only limited by your imagination!

A Final Illustration: Toilet Paper and Praise

No image has been more pervasive, or generated more outrage, than that of people hoarding toilet paper. The wise pastor will harness the outrage, piggy-backing on it to give punch to his sermon illustration. I’ll tell you how to do it (and I’ll also tell you that it’s so good I wish I was preaching tomorrow!) Here’s how to do it: you’ve got to link the odiousness of hoarding toilet paper to the odiousness of hoarding praise from God! See the link?! People are hoarding toilet paper, and we all think they’re horrible; but how much more horrible are we when we hoard what belongs to God—the praise He is due! Don’t you see, sinner, that you are as awful in God’s eyes for hoarding praise as those people at Costco are for hoarding all the toilet roll? Repent, now, or the virus will get you!

I hope these illustrations are helpful to all the pastors preparing sermons tonight. They’re guaranteed to make your people feel good about themselves, to make people you don’t like feel guilty, and above all to make you feel good about yourself. Oh, and one last thing—remember that when people groan at your sermons it’s a sign that you’ve really hit home.

Elitism

When Christianity Today published its recent article calling for President Trump’s removal from office, I watched the ensuing mayhem from a distance. While I had shared the article, from the start I had resolved not to blog or comment on the piece—too many people were already talking about it, and I didn’t consider it useful to add my voice to the chaos. I’m still not planning to comment on the article or its content today—what I do want to talk about is a particular response to the article that I began to see repeated in many places: the accusation of elitism.

In brief, a very visible (and visibly agitated) group of Evangelicals responded with some hostility to Mark Galli’s editorial, and one of their key accusations was that Galli—and by association so-called “Christian” never-Trumpers like him—are elites who are missing the point. “Evangelical elites,” Carl Trueman wrote in a rebuttal published in First Things, “are clearly as out of touch with the populist evangelical base as is the case in society in general.” Our needs and desires, he suggests, as the “people in the trenches” are different from what you think they are, Mr. Galli. The Ivory Tower has rendered you desperately out of touch.

There are two things to say in response to this deeply troubling accusation. The first is to note that it is not, in fact, an argument. In this circumstance, and in the subsequent repetitions of the phrase I’ve encountered, to accuse someone of being an elite is a handy way of dismissing that person’s ideas outright. This person doesn’t have to be listened to; he’s not like us. Elite—like other shorthand terms (Libs, Libtards, Snowflakes, the Dems)—is a handy label for summary dismissal of the person with whom you are having a conversation. It allows the label to make the argument for you, without any actual engagement at the level of what’s been said. Ironically, the accusation of elitism smacks of the communist accusation that someone is bourgeoisie. Your disposition, the argument goes, renders your thinking irretrievably irrelevant.

I shouldn’t have to tell you that this is a deeply un-Christian way of approaching the world. Explicitly in Matthew 5, when Jesus tells us how to respond when a brother has an accusation against us, we are told that to label our brother “empty-head,” or “fool,” is to commit a form of murder. In other words, to reject our brother by means of a label when he approaches us with a concern is to violate the Ten Commandments. To discourse in this way is beneath us.

A second thing to say in response to the accusation of elitism is that if it is an argument, it is a bad one. The best I can figure is that the argument goes something like this. We in the trenches have to make real-world decisions, and you elites are so removed from the world that your input is irrelevant. What we need is marching orders, and reliable trench-obedience, not uppity moral platitudes pronounced by people who claim to have clean hands. Those things may work in peacetime, but this is war, and war is ugly. So shut up.

Paul Fussell’s book offered fantastic insights into the mindset of average soldiers during The Great War.

The problem, of course, is that there is no more important time for truth, beauty, and goodness than in times of deep confusion. I am reminded of a strange irony. Recently, while reading about the First World War, I found out that the most commonly read book in the trenches was The Oxford Book of English Verse. Those English boys, with soaked feet and tattered uniforms, surrounded by rats, trench-fever, and dead bodies, a waste-land of unimaginable horror around them, turned in their spare moments to the sublime. They craved, in the midst of their horrors, something ‘elite’ to remind them of what mattered, of what was real. Similar examples abound. A key principle of Biblical interpretation is that you judge the unclear by means of the clear; you don’t judge the clear by means of the unclear. In times of uncertainty you appeal to what is eternal in order to make sense of the murky present, rather than projecting our murky present out onto the eternal. In other words, the solution to bad ideas is not no ideas, but good ideas. And good ideas are to be found among people who, by most accounts, have the time to think and reflect on them. In other words, the elite.

Roger Scruton, who died this past week, was reading de Gaulle’s Memoires when he was impacted by de Gaulle’s claim that a nation is defined “by language, religion, and high culture [and that] in times of turmoil and conquest it is those spiritual things that must be protected and reaffirmed.” It is during times of chaos that we require the clearest presentations of the true, the beautiful, and the good, and to dismiss an ‘opposition’ by throwing these things under the bus is a betrayal of our stewardship for the future. Get rid of the ‘elites’ and you get rid of whatever it is you think you’re fighting for.

I write this, of course, as someone who very likely qualifies as one of these ‘elite.’ I’m currently writing a PhD in Scotland, am well fed, am comfortably housed, and it is only wind, and not war, that clambers to distract me from outside my office window. Nevertheless, not only do I believe in ‘elitism,’ I believe that a certain elitism is the call of every Christian on earth. We are not called to be grunts for Christ, but elite troops; not minimum-wage workers in the Kingdom, but elite service providers; not jobsworths, but elite problem solvers. It is our very business to raise people up in the Church, to train, to teach them to read, to teach them in moral reasoning, to form in them the ‘mind of Christ’ so that whatever is good, noble, and true—on those things they will think and reflect and exhibit to others. In other words, we want Christians to inhabit an eternal, kingly, godly perspective in every situation—and what could be more elite than that?

This is literally steps from my office.

The problem, in my estimation, is not that the elites are out of touch, but that there are too few of them. The whole business of catechesis—that is, of training people in the life of faith—is the business of educating them for greater effectiveness and godliness. It is the training ground for elite and effective Christian disciples. That, in point of fact, is something I am very passionate about: to call everyone into greater Christian ‘elitism’—more reading, thinking, reflecting, questioning, asking, sharing—and, stemming from those things, more faithful action as well.