Spiritual Authority?

How do you think of your pastor/s? Do you want them to be spiritual experts that tell you what you should believe and how you should believe it? Or do you want them to help you see connections between faith and life that you might be missing on your own? Do you want someone who is an authority or someone who sometimes struggles with faith and belief and is honest about it?

I came into ordained ministry with the idea that I would be the spiritual authority for the people I served. I had been through four years of post-graduate studies and had promised to uphold the theology and doctrine of the Lutheran church. Furthermore, I found that people came to me looking for spiritual advice and many were willing to accept what I told them as absolute truth without another thought.

What I found out was that there are a whole bunch of people who know a whole lot more about life and are more acquainted with the Bible than I was. Whenever I sat down at a Bible study there was always someone who had spent more time reading the Bible than I had. Whenever I applied lessons from the Bible to daily life, there was someone present who had experienced more of life’s ups and downs than I could imagine.  

It was hard not to feel like an imposter. I was in my late twenties and had just started a family and a career. How could I even begin to talk about the relationship between faith and life? What could I tell people in their fifties or eighties that they didn’t already know deep inside themselves? I wondered how long would it take before people noticed that I wasn’t the expert that they expected me to be.

This is the tension and dilemma that I live with most days. I am trained and called to lead a community as an expert while at the same time I am certain that I am no more an expert on the ways of faith and life than anyone else. Yet every time someone asks, “What I am supposed to believe about                                   ?” I’m reminded that I am expected to be that expert.

My natural impulse in the face of this dilemma was to become even more of a spiritual expert. I didn’t want people to think that I wasn’t qualified to be their spiritual leader. Instead I wanted them to think that I was able to provide something they didn’t have. I wanted them to turn to me when they were in need of spiritual care and guidance. So in my spare time I read more theology books and attended leadership conferences. I spoke with certainty and confidence in my sermons and classes even though I didn’t feel that way inside.

That I would do this based on the fear of being discovered as a charlatan should be a clue that it is not a good impulse. Whenever I hold myself up as an expert in faith and life I sustain the notion that a spiritual life is a complicated endeavor filled with indecipherable theological thoughts and language. I also give the false impression that there is one, right way to think about God, faith and our relationship with the world. And because many people believe that what happens to them after they die depends on making sure they have that one, right way figured out (even though I was telling them it does not) I was likely adding to their anxiety at some level.

 

When religious belief is tied to communal identity it is important to believe the same thing as everyone else in the community. This is the way religion has been for ages. But up to this point in history personal identity has been tied community. Today we live in a world that is increasingly individualistic and identity is found in things other than community. (This has been a long and gradual change in the Western world but now accelerating and becoming a global shift in the way we understand who we are.) Therefore what it means to be a spiritual authority has to change as well. At best I can share with someone what I believe to be true and perhaps help them discover what it is that they believe. This is a very different than trying to be an expert.

These days I find myself straddling the line between being an the expert in faith that many people expect in a pastor, and trying to be more like a spiritual partner and guide to those who are trying to travel their own faith journey. I find a greater sense of peace surrounding those people who look to me as a partner and resource in their journey than in those who want me to be an expert. Maybe that’s because of my own place of comfort or maybe they really are more at peace. I don’t know for sure.

And that is a phrase that I am trying to become more comfortable with every day.

Speaking for Others

A colleague once pointed out to me that pastors speak to the congregation as the voice of God in sermons and we speak to God as the voice of the congregation in liturgy and prayers. I still fight within myself to do these things with any sense of honesty and integrity.

“Pastor, would you mind giving the blessing?”

“Pastor, could you open our meeting with a prayer?”

“Pastor, when you go to the hospital can you stop and have a prayer with               ?”

At first it feels like an honor. People turn to me for something they want and it feels good to be of service. I am valued and looked up to. People wait for me to say something to God, to ask for something from God and I like it. It’s what people expect a pastor to do. It’s what I’ve been trained to do. And it doesn’t seem to be that hard. At first.

There are Psalms and prayers written in the little books that pastors keep in their pockets. There are prayers for blessing a house, for losing a job, for relocating, for people who are sick, people who are dying, people who are getting married or divorced or having a child or just about anything else a person can experience in this life. All I have to do is find the right page and insert the person’s name in the blank as I read it.

But sometimes this doesn’t work. These specifically generic prayers don’t quite speak to the exact issues at hand so I begin to develop my own prayers. I learn to ad-lib. Good sounding petitions get repeated and before long I have a list full of phrases that can be mixed and matched to sound like fresh prayers straight from the heart. This, by and large, seems to work. It might not be completely genuine but it becomes my “style” of praying.

I begin to wonder though, “Why am I the only one who prays out loud in a group setting?” I’m aware that my prayers reveal one perspective; my own. Where is the voice of elderly wisdom? Who is giving voice to the feminine viewpoint? How can I speak the grief of someone who’s child or spouse has died when I’ve never experienced that? I can ask God to be with and bless these people but how can I ever truly be their voice?

It seems right to let others pray too. But when I ask for a volunteer to pray on behalf of a group that is gathered, there is a moment where it feels like I’ve requested a volunteer for a suicide mission. The problem with public prayer is that it is extremely self-revealing. When we pray out loud other people get a glimpse into our soul, into our most personal and private beliefs. When we pray in front of others we risk exposing our deepest doubts, fears, longings and joys. And the truth is, we don’t like being exposed like that in public.

I realize that as a pastor I’ve learned how to hide behind the prayers I say in front of other people. I’ve learned how to construct prayers that are theologically correct but not true expressions of my own feelings. I’ve learned how to create formulaic prayers that sound good to the ear but never speak to the heart. I’ve learned how to pray with bold confidence but have never been willing to pray with the uncertainty that lurks below the surface.

What would that be like?

What if a pastor stood before God and spoke out loud the uncertainty of faith; the doubt, the wonder, the speculation, the hope and the disappointment of the congregation? How would it be received? How would it change the pastoral role in the community of faith? Would it make things better? Is it even possible?