The myth about pastors, simply stated, is that we are helpers; that ours is a helping profession, counted alongside doctors and nurses and emergency responders and teachers and social workers.
Over and over again in my ministry, however, I am reminded that pastors are not helpers. We are not fixers or healers or solvers. We do not, cannot, provide help. Which may sound shocking, because people often turn to pastors for help … and pastors, in turn, like to think that they provide concrete help to others. But no, it is all a myth.
A story might add some explanation to my myth-busting….
Pardon my German, but that’s stier scheisse! Maybe in the agnostic or unitarian world of the UCC a pastor is a walk-with-er, but in the Church of Jesus Christ a pastor/priest is a proclaimer of the Gospel and a minister of the Sacraments and the presence of Jesus himself in every situation. She essentially sees herself as drawing pay for doiing nothing but having coffee with congregants. I’m sorry, but I have no patience for clergy who don’t see their role as, to use the old-fashioned term, ministers of the Gospel with all that it implies. I know for certain that God has used my ministry- all facets of it- to reach into the souls of his people, probably more often in ways I’ve not been aware of at the time. The UCC, and its Canadian sister the United Church of Canada, is the religion of my mother’s family and the setting where I was baptized. But I have no time for their lukewarm fuzziness. True, there are many members who are zealous for the faith, but on the whole, it has gone very far down the garden path. (Sorry for the rant, but I had to get it out!)
I, likewise, have some mixed reactions to this article. On the one hand, I do agree with her that Pastors/priests are not called to be secular social service workers or clinical psychiatrists or other general hand holding fuzziness, if that’s what it means when people say clergy are in the “helping profession,” as if we are some sort of walking self-help manual.
However, we do help by proclaiming the gospel and being Christ’s hands in the world. If we are helping the poor and feeding the widow in Christ’s name, I would say that’s a bit of help.
I think I’d look at the Ordinal to get an inkling of what Anglicans think God calls priests (to use the language of 1662) to do:
Or if you want – the priest bears an aweful responsibility for the salvation through Christ of the people of the parish. (And of course for 1662 that means every inhabitant within his parish boundaries).
I concur with all the above, well said.