God, Family, Church
I've been contemplating what it means to be a pastor as I begin soon my new appointment at Sycamore Creek Church. I've been asking pastors what their top three nuggets of wisdom are about being a pastor. I often get something to the effect of putting one's family above the church. So the received wisdom of the day is that the priorities of a pastor should be God first, family second, and the church third. But I've been wondering how our baptism changes this prioritization. Is the church our new family? Does the church come before family? If so, what is the difference between the church and the family? Is there anything unique about the covenant between spouses? How does that covenant interact with the sacrament of baptism? Do Catholics have something over Protestants here by also calling marriage a sacrament?
posted by Tom Arthur at 8:30 PM
28 Comments:
In good obfuscating fashion, I'd like to say the more interesting question is what has made pastors say that it is very important to family before the church.
The other more interesting question concerns ordination instead of marriage. What is Protestant ordination if a pastor's family is more important than the Church they are ordained to serve?
I think Scripturally, all you have are those haustefeln lines about an elder being a man of one woman, it says nothing about loving your family. In fact, Scripture says very little about loving your family or your wife or even your parents. It says honor your parents, it doesn't say love them.
As the good protestant you all know me to be, I'd say it is extraordinarily clear that marriage and family are far down on the totem pole. That's why that question is boring to me (and why I'm single:)).
Wilson makes some good points. But I'd like to broaden the view. Spouses are notably absent from the list of those family we are called to "hate" for the sake of the gospel. And Paul's common admonitins to obedience tell us to "remain in the state in which we were called. Though not decisive, these suggest a place for marriage alongisde ministry, at least for those already married when called.
Another issue is the sacradotalization of pastoral ministry. If we really belive in the priesthood of all believers, what is it that pastors have to do that might detract from, or threaten their families? What aren't laypeople doing that doesn't threaten theirs?
All this is to say that our first mistake is to assume that we already know what ministry and family are such that we can answer the question. We do not have anything like an adequate understanding of either. Until we do, we cannot faithfully answer Tom's question.
Until then I'll say what my neighbor who was Bishop Overseer of the Mennonite Churches in Philly. He grew up Amish, was a missionay (wih his wife) in Kenya, and raised three daughters in the Badlands of North Philly as a neighorhood pastor. "Marriage and family in ministry, not after or against ministry." This is our interim answer until we can answer the other questions that would allow us to answer Tom's question.
See the PDF I sent for references for the following:
Unfortunately, the connection between baptism and family is not intuitive for many Christians because the American civil religion romanticizes the nuclear family, ignoring the biblical testimony that understands family quite differently. The first thing that needs to be said is that baptism weakens ties to families of origin. Our habit of baptism expresses a strong valuation of the traditional family unit, while at the same time teaching that our primary social unit is the Church; we are ontologically changed so that we understand that we are brothers and sisters, not because of kinship, but because of our shared baptism in Christ. Our habit of marriage reinforces these implications of baptism for the priority of loyalty to the Church over loyalty to the kinship unit. Our “Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage” is set within the Sacrament of the Eucharist, reflecting the truth that it is our shared friendship with God that is the source of all holy friendships, including the particular friendship of Holy Marriage. The Church understands itself as “a polity of good news,” and the kinship unit is no more and no less than a “grace-filled friendship within the fellowship of the Church.” So God meets our needs by reconstituting and subordinating our lives within a koinonia grounded in Christ.
Of course the kinship unit plays an important role in the Church. But parishioners often get confused about the relationship between Church and family, thinking that the purpose of the Church is to serve the family unit, which is an end in itself, by teaching kids good values. However, our habit of baptism reminds us that the household of kin (oikos) serves the Household of God so that the Household of God can serve the economy of God (oikonomia). The work of kinship units is to nurture the bodies of disciples by being the basic unit at which shelter is secured, food is procured and distributed, cleanliness and health is maintained. In other words, the holy work of the family is mostly repetitive and ordinary - food is cooked, dishes are washed, diapers are changed, children are bathed. But that is not all - the members of the kinship unit are members of the eucharistic community and thus are to practice sharing in the koinonia of sufferings - they are to be mindful of others, sharing their burdens, contributing their time, talents, and money, and constantly discerning-in-communion as part of a global communion striving for holiness. And, importantly, the kinship unit does the essential work of indoctrinating children into the culture of the Church by teaching and practicing the basic habits of discipleship, including the threefold Rule of Office, Eucharist, and personal devotion and ethical discernment-in-communion.
Wilson, how bout Ephesians 5 - "Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church"? This almost equates wives and the church, it does at least in the analogy.
Derek, I do think that lay people sometimes put their church first over the family. Working in a church I often saw this tension in lay people. Another meeting or time with family?
I also like your bishop's saying: "Marriage and family in ministry, not after or against ministry." I think I've seen this at work at the Isaiah House. But it works like that because we're all living together. Which goes back to your question about what is ministry. Perhaps ministry has something to do with geographical location, literally in the same house! But even here, Sarah and I found it necessary to set aside time (date nights) away from the house.
Craig, I like your work here. It is a little dense at times (I'd enjoy seeing you make it more lay-friendly), but I think I got most of it. I like how you talk about the family as an extension of the church. I have been influenced by The Youth and Family Institute (www.youthandfamilyinstitute.org) which refers to the family as the private church and the gathered community as the public church. (Perhaps there could be a better term than "private".) I wonder,as I mention above to Derek, whether this view does not also have implications about how and where we live. If we are isolated from one another geographically, I think that the intense bonds that are formed in the family or origin tend to override the bonds that are formed with the broader church community.
I agree that there is a kind of idolatry of the family in our culture. There also might be a kind of idolatry of the church too. What if ministry (back to Derek's question about ministry) was simply eating together rather than going to meetings? Then we'd be ministering with/alongside our families rather than against/instead of our families.
a) Spouses are not absent (Luke 14:26)
b) The response to Ephesians 5 is 1 Timothy 3, which discusses what it takes to be in the pastoral ministry (I am bracketing off from discussion what Paul means by bishop because i think that is a separate issue) and it just says to be a man of one wife.
c) When I spoke with such sweeping generalizations, I was trying to emphasize the fact that when Scripture speaks of anything that could be related to being a pastor, loving your family isn't in the vicinity of descriptions.
d) Thus, Protestants need to acknowledge that their understanding of family is not sola Scriptura (I know that is not any of ya'lls problem, but it is still a problem).
e) The priesthood of all believers, in my estimation, is more to do with Second Temple Judaism than the church, but that also is a different topic (id est, every believer is not ordered by God to preach to give the sacraments but is ordered by God to be able to be in the presence of God)
f) I'm not really arguing against anyone, I'm just trying to agree (in my own way) that we, the Church, we do not know what ministry is, nor do we know what marriage is (why can no one be married on a Sunday morning? Why is this an impossible ideal?)
g) The great challenge for the system, though, has to do with money. The reason why ministry is all meetings is because of the money involved (again, gross generalizations, but you get the point). If people are satisfied with near negligible budgets and no endowments, then the structure of ministry could change dramatically (hopefully).
Down to practicalities:
So we've had a nice theoretical conversation about all this. Here's some very practical situations:
1. Are you unavailable on vacations or family outings?
2. Do you schedule good and helpful meetings around time with family?
3. Do you ever preach on family? If so, what text and what's the gist?
4. Do you pass on a pastoral moment because you've got time already set aside to spend with family?
5. Do you ever step down or back from responsibilities because your family is suffering from your absence?
6. I'm sure I could come up with more. Feel free to add your own.
Tom,
The best way to know truth is to look at the practices of the community of faith under the assumption that they have been discerned in communion by the saints and thus give us confidence that when we perform them we utter truth.
In your examples, it seems to me the practice to look at when consider questions of time is sabbath-living. How does the practice of the sabbath inform how you might answer them? I urge you to read Eugene Peterson's chapter on the Sabbath (pp. 63-83) in Working the Angles to answer these.
Tom, you can't just bracket off everything prior as 'theoretical' if all you are going to ask are hypothetical s that are just as theoretical as anything else that has been written. Talk about hypotheticals is no more practical than anything else, and it could be less so because it deceives people into thinking that they are being practical. By skipping over the theoretical concerns about whether or not we know anything about ministry, you are accepting the status quo and so implicitly declaring your knowledge about what proper ministry and marriage is.
As far as Sabbath goes, I don't think that's the answer (in my good contrarian fashion) because the New Testament witness of what ministry is nearly silent about practicing Sabbath. We don't have any mention in Acts or in the pastoral epistles about keeping the Sabbath. I'm not trying to be Marcionite here, but the whole Lord of the Sabbath from the Gospels is pretty strong. It's not just that pastors need a good understanding of Sabbath because Sabbath (in the OT) isn't about how to rest (id est, it is not that a person should take a day off whenever they can fit it in), but about obeying God. I feel like I've had this debate on the blog before, so I will stop there.
Concerning meetings, I'm with Matt (and obviousness) in supporting good meetings instead of pointless ones. The issue with money has to do with my belief that the more money a Church has, the more people feel the need to run it like a business and not a Church. This may be a false notion (I don't know of any Churches that are run like Churches), but that hasn't stopped me before.
I hear you, Wilson, but on this one I will stick with Stanley Hauerwas, Will Willimon, and Eugene Peterson in insisting that Sabbath-living is the key practice here by which we know what is true about how we are to manage our time. See Hauerwas/Willimon's discussion of the Sabbath in their book on the Ten Commandments. It's excellent. And, no, Sabbath is not an OT practice but a Christian practice, and it is not about obedience but about trusting God, which is to say it about about acknowledging our role as creature and God's as Creator. So it's about worship. As with all the commandments, it is not about us,but about who God is and what God is doing, and it is about God's creating us as a people set apart in order to bring all the nations into the gifts of worship, friendship, and sustenance that God provides in the Eucharist. And the first gift that God gives in the Eucharist is time. Sacred time. See Wells, "God's Companions"
Craig,
You're giving me an argument from authority? Come on! You don't need to do that. My brief comments here about Sabbath have to do with how the New Testament articulates ministry and Sabbath living is not part of that. I think that is interesting. Why didn't Paul say Episcopoi should keep the Sabbath? I don't know, but he could have. This is not a claim about whether Sabbath-living is or is not a Christian practice (which I am fine with, iff it takes place on Saturday (the seventh day) and supersedes personal planning and organization. My reaction to Sabbath talk is that I don't think you can have a personal Sabbath. Sabbath isn't about my personal well being or helping me to function as whatever I am. Sabbath is completely inefficient and overflowing.
Also, being obedient is trusting, those are not mutual exclusive terms, Americans just don't seem to like that word.
And I am happy again to have Kenneth backing me up.
First of all, these aren't hypothetical. They're real situations I have faced and pastors face every day/week/month/year.
Wilson, we've had this argument about Sabbath before. I agree with your sense of the communal nature of keeping the Sabbath. I also agree with your sense about it not being a personal day off. I also disagree mostly with your strict literalism about the NT and what it may or may not be silent on. Enough on that.
Craig, I think Sabbath has some to do with what I'm saying. How does Sabbath interact with family? And what if commitments clash that don't fall on Sabbath?
Marston, I watched 30 Rock a couple of times and it never really worked for me.
Sabbath is and is not a particular day. Mostly Sabbath is a rhythm of life in God where we rest in God. Rest, as I am using it, does not mean "day off" but rather is Augustinian - it means to cling, to enjoy. It's the reason we are. It's worship, which means it has to do with our identity. It's a way of life. If you lived in the liturgical calendar as I now do this becomes much clearer. The day begins at dusk and the first thing we do is cease work and sleep while God continues to produce our bread. We awake in the morning to discover things were taken care of while we slept, and we add what little we can as the sun shines. Dusk comes, and we repeat this for seen days. At the beginning of seventh day (dusk) -which has to do with the moon's phases historically, we cease work for the entire day, trusting God that the manna we have collected will suffice. On that day we worship and enjoy God. That's our purpose, and this is our rehearsal of resurrection. We repeat this week after week. If you read Politics of Jesus you will see how Yoder connects this with annual patterns of debt relief, also (every 7 years and every 7 sets of seven years (Jubilee). The parable of the Unforgiving Servant seems to assume this pattern. Sabbath living is thus about trusting God and trusting God is inseparable from our ability to forgive, and forgiving is about sustaining God's people in spite of our debts, which is why we rehearse it each day, each week, and each year.
Family fits into this - as my paper said - because family is a special set of friends with whom we practice and teach these habits, along with those of gathering and distributing bread and fish. Families are to practice Sabbath living together. And since Sabbath is about enjoyment, that may mean being together, or, tragically, it mean mean time and space apart.
I think it is err to segregate family and church. You are never outside the Church. But as a pastor family is a special calling. For Anglicans the wedding and ordination liturgies are nearly identical in shape, both contained within the Eucharist. We are set apart in both cases for special roles in service of the Church. So we have to allocate time as needed to both. There is no magic formula for this. But baptism means that family truly is your parish; the nuclear family is a pagan conception. So time with wife and time with Ms. Smith are both service to God and the commitment to wife is not necessarily a higher priority. Baptism weakens the kinship bond so that our unity is in Christ. We have to learn to live that, else we yield to idolatry.
Craig,
I like your reflections on Sabbath. And I think you do well in attempting to rephrase my questions with theological language. I almost ended my last post saying, "Craig, feel free to rephrase my questions."
Your comments also make me wonder about what the wedding liturgy has to say to our understanding. I haven't spent much time reflecting on what the liturgy says theologically about marriage. It would be a good exercise to go back and reflect on that liturgy.
But Protestants cannot view pastor families as a special calling because it is the supreme majority. The assumed state is with married clergy, so much so that single protestant clergy are almost always assumed to be either weird or waiting. It is a special vocation for Eastern churches, but mostly because a decision is enforced ecclesiologically. That mostly what I mean by saying we have to rethink what ministry means. Catholic and traditional models do not fit because of how family has superimposed itself onto the standard model. The model shifted and yet no one has paused to think about what that means since the reformation. That is, no ecclesial body has done such (I could give a rat if some theologian has published on this since I haven't read it and it hasn't effected the life of the Church)
As far as Sabbath goes, I think we mostly have a Semantic dispute and I am fine with that (not with Tom, though, I completely disagree with Tom:))
Wilson,
I am having trouble finding your starting point. I followed you to Milbank and then to Balthasar and now suddenly you're calling yourself a Protestant again. I am confused. Is this an impostor? I think you need to pull out that paper you made me read on "Protestantism is dead" and remember why you gave it to me. I finally agree with it. The vast majority of your generation get catholicity much better than mine; the bulk of doctoral students seem to be much more catholic and impatient with Protestantism and angry at my generation for blowing it, and rightly so.
I thought I just read something from you saying we need to rethink ministry and family because the culture has spoken and we need to conform to culture. Of course, Wilson would never say such a thing, so I am wondering if you would go get the Wilson I know and tell him to tell me he was just being provocative and that the joke is on me. Cause I know he would never say "Catholic and traditional models do not fit because of how family has superimposed itself onto the standard model. The model shifted and yet no one has paused to think about what that means since the reformation."
Wilson,
I'm not sure I followed your trajectory when we were at school together. I'm also not sure I'm following it now. Maybe if you gave me an example or told a story or parable or something.
By the way, you did change my mind on several things over the three years we socratic'd it. I appreciate how you see things I don't see.
I'm just a contrarian pushing against claiming catholicity too easily. I haven't gone to Rome and I don't have a Pope, but I'm still a student of Balthasar and Newman and Augustine more than Wesley or anyone else.
With the models thing, by Catholic I mean celibate, single clergy cannot be a model for our respective Churches. As in, the standard upon which clergy are judged is married, but it is not in the same way that it was after the Reformation.
We need to rethink how we do ministry because I don't think we've thought about it in the first place and have just accepted what culture has provided. I'm not saying we need to adapt to culture, just that we need a strong identity of clergy to say Nein! both to the idol of the family and the ease of divorce in today's churches.
Perhaps I inherited a wealth of well-thought models of ministry by virtue of being an Anglican. I suggest "Treatise on the Priesthood and Six Books on the Priesthood"by John Chysostom," "The Christian Priest Today" by Michael Ramsey, "Pastor" by Willimon, "Being a Priest Today" by Chris Cocksworth, and "Pastoral Care" by Gregory the Great. So there has been a lot of thinking on this topic that we can mine. But 20th century thinking may be a lot less valuable than the classic thinking on this.
No, Craig, my argument purely stems from empirical evidence of every pastor I've ever known or seen or heard about and how they live out the function of ministry. People have written plenty, but it hasn't effected the overwhelming majority of actively ministering pastors.
More to the point, my argument is that the model of pastors prior to the Reformation was celibate. For Protestant Churches after the Reformation it was distinctly not-celibate but still working under a similar model as the pre-Reformation days. What I am saying is that the idol of the family and divorce have empirically altered our models of ministry in an ideological way (in that, we forget that the models are different because the new models hide themselves from view).
This is why churches themselves need to re-articulate what ministry means. Individual theologians are not up to this task and are woefully unhelpful in it, unless they can get their ecclesial bodies to act. Reading Chrysostom and Greg the Great is wonderful, but they cannot address the particular issues of divorce, of pastor salaries and paying for kids colleges, of hospital visits and clergy tax exemptions. These issues may seem trivial theologically but they are vital to the daily life and practice of pastors in a way that ecclesial bodies need to address.
Also, pastors are not CEOs. I'm just throwing that out there, yet the CEO model seems extremely popular right now and ecclesial bodies don't care because it is getting butts in the seats.
Ah. Now I comprehend. Excellent points, all. I am far from some of that here in Warsaw because this is an Anglo-Catholic diocese in which Luther is cursed and Wesley only means the ones in the hymnal. We have monks and nuns and I have celibate friends/priests who are your age. But the financial issues you mention are quite real.
I have found that the best way for me to transform my parishioners in the way you suggest - to subvert their secularity - is to suck them into weekly Bible study with me. These kinds of issues are what we discuss, but I am able to re-frame the questions theologically in the Bible study context such that I am teaching ecclesiology every day. I do three Bible studies a week right now. One of them is Disciple - Jesus in the Gospels, which is proving to be perfect for just this kind of subversive teaching. I highly recommend it.
I don't think a theory can solve this problem. I have, though, seen two pastors with families who "solved" this problem on a day to day basis. And continue to do so.
Both are Anglican priests and church-planters, one with three and the other with six children. Both home-school. Neither of the wives works full-time but both do ad hoc jobs to help make ends meet. One of the priests is bi-vocational (that means he works 50 hours a week as a 'tent-maker' in addition to his pastoral work).
If I could single out one common factor from the two families, it is that in both cases the priests' wives consider themselves to be equal partners with their husbands in the work of the ministry that God called them to, together. In both cases the life of the family is ordered toward and more or less shares in the mission of the husband-as-priest. And this is not forced. That is the real key. From the moment of the perceived vocation, husband and wife understood that they were called by the Holy Spirit, together, to Gospel ministry. Hence from the start their partnership as husband and wife assumed an evangelical significance in a specific sense, an intensification of the universal vocation of every Christian family which Paul speaks of in Eph 5.
I'm not saying this should only be the case for "ministry families" as that phrase is usually used. It ought always be the case of every family which consists of saints set apart for the work of the ministry (Eph 4). Every Christian family, every Christian marriage, is called to be an evangelical marriage, a Gospel-centered family. If this is true of every family, it is true of the priest's family.
This doesn't answer any of the 'do I go to the hospital or do I go to Noah's baseball game' questions. Those are real questions, and my little sketch of these families doesn't resolve them. What I do want the sketch to do, however, is to provide what I think is the essential assumption to any working answer to these kinds of questions.
This might seem elementary to some and it may really offend others, but I think it's true.
Last year I was in Boston and I met a "clergy couple," both TEC priests. I assumed they served together in a single parish. I assumed poorly. One worked on one end of Boston, the other the opposite, and they lived in the middle. I'm not saying they have no common mission, no shared labor in the Gospel. Clearly they must, at some level. But the "energy" of the family is divided. And a house divided cannot long stand.
"It ought always be the case of every family which consists of saints set apart for the work of the ministry (Eph 4). Every Christian family, every Christian marriage, is called to be an evangelical marriage, a Gospel-centered family. If this is true of every family, it is true of the priest's family."
And let the people say, "Amen!"
Some interesting conversation going on here. I can't keep all my replies straight. But I appreciate Phil weighing in on the conversation and your stories about your friends. That is helpful.
Wilson, I wonder if there is a pre-catholic model that we might tap into here: the Old Testament. I believe the OT priest was married. Even the prophets were often married. I think that would make for an interesting study.
To push the conversation in a different direction, I was having dinner with Sarah last night on our weekly date night (something I intend to keep religiously as a pastor) and we were discussing this conversation (I wish I could get her to join in!). I think that together we came up with another way to think of the family or at least marriage: as a distinct non-celibate procreative order that some are called to but others are not. This might then provide some models for how Franciscans or Benedictines who were both priests and monks continued to live in the community of the order but also minister in the church that was not part of the order. This puts marriage as an order in the church and thus makes it an extension of the church and yet distinct from the full gathered church. I think this also takes into account Phil's friends who consider their marriage as part of the call to priesthood.
Craig, I've read several of the books you mentioned. My favorite thus far is Gregory the Great. I think I'll probably do a sermon series based on that book some day.
Tom,
That is an interesting way of thinking of it, as long as we are using it as an analogy only. Marriage is not quite an order in the sense of the beloved Benedictines because it is a sacrament, or at least a sacramental rite. So I think we are saying something more than mere membership in an order. We are saying that Christ is sacramentally present in our practice of marriage. Perhaps you and Sarah can work that into your thinking and tweak it?
Craig,
You've gone back to my original question about whether the Catholics have something to add to the idea of marriage by viewing it as a sacrament. Although UMs don't see it quite that way. Perhaps, "sacramental." I think I might also call an order "sacramental." I am soon to be a provisional member of the order of the elders. Its not quite as strong a commitment as a marriage (its not considered so bad if its not for life), but its still a pretty sacramental.
Where are the women in this conversation? Come on ladies. Join in.
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