The 3 Challenges (Besides Keeping Their Job) Every Pastor Faces in the Next 9 Months

With the event previously known as the Iowa Caucus having taken place this last week, the US presidential election season is officially upon us. I think this is my fifth such cycle to live through as a lead pastor, and each time I am just happy to still have my job - and the majority of the congregation still speaking to one another - at the end of it.

As we get started on this nine month gauntlet of congregational danger, I decided to reflect on three reasons this is such a potentially challenging time for pastors. Here they are:

First, the church is political. Some will survive the next few months by assuming that the church is "spiritual" and not political. In fact, many lay-people will encourage pastors to stick to the spiritual and ignore the political. This view, that the spiritual and the political can be bifurcated from one another, has many similarities to the Gnostic heresy that posed such problems for the early church. Gnosticism essentially taught that the spirit (or soul) and not the body mattered. The early church opposed this view passionately. It is part of the reason the birth and death of Christ, as well as the resurrection of the body, were included in the creeds. The gospel is not a set of instructions about how to transcend the physical, it is the proclamation that God became flesh in order to redeem every aspect of the material created world, including its systems and structures. Jesus was not crucified for being a misunderstood spirit guide, he was killed for offering a politic (a "kingdom" way of living with both the neighbor and the enemy) that ran counter to the principalities and powers.

The weekly proclamation of the church that "Christ is Lord" is profoundly political (subversively so). Therefore, the first challenge of the next nine months is that the church can't help being political in its preaching. It just happens to embody a politic that the world cannot comprehend, nor embody, on its own terms. Which leads to the second problem. 

Second, the church is prophetic. Because the church embodies a largely foreign politic, as it enters the world it finds that there are places it fits and places where it doesn't. Especially in America's two-party system, it finds things in both parties to celebrate and affirm and also things it must prophetically reject. The church cares for the life of the unborn, but it also cares for peacemaking and reconciliation with enemies. The church is called to protect the vulnerable, but also called to welcome the stranger.

I find this to be where much of the danger lies for pastors. Eventually, people must cast a vote one direction or another. And they will always do so imperfectly. Christians cast votes knowing that they have had to choose some core faith values and likely overlook other significant kingdom values in the process. For this reason, personally, I never fault a believer for choosing to vote one direction or the other.

However, the church must not shy away from being willing to speak prophetically to even those parties or candidates it supports. I think it is very dangerous when any critique of one side or any affirmation of another side is heard as some kind of betrayal and lashed out against. Nathan has to be willing to say, even to the divinely anointed David, "You are the man!" or God's people fail to be uniquely holy. Blindly justifying immoral behavior or overlooking unjust policies of any leader can become a kind of idolatry. The church can and should be gracious. Judgment begins with the house of God, but its prophetic voice does not stop at the boundaries of the church property.

Third, the church is transformational and contextual. Perhaps the biggest challenge is not the tensions that the next nine months of politics creates, but the way it shifts much of our energy and focus away from our immediate context and those in need within it. The political world today has become a form of "reality" television. Once news programs started selling advertising and having 24-hour broadcasts, the focus became less on informing the public and more on keeping our attention. Unfortunately, the best way to keep our attention is to scare us and keep us angry.

Personally, I have felt convicted this week at the amount of time and energy the national political drama has taken up in my mind and spirit. It is not that the decisions before the public are unimportant. Public policy and the symbolic representation of our collective leadership do have profound effects on our life together. However, the vast majority of the transformational work of the church in the Spirit will be done within the local context where God has planted it. I must confess I know more right now about the machinations of the Senate trial than I know about my neighbors. That is not healthy for me or for the church's mission.

Voting in November is very important and it has important repercussions. However, casting a vote for the right candidate is not even a fraction of the church's political and transformational mission in the world. And so we must constantly work to keep it within a divine perspective.

Blessings on my fellow sisters and brothers in Christian pulpits over the next nine months. Preach the kingdom, be graciously prophetic, and seek the welfare of the broken at your gates.

Comments

[Jesse C Middendorf]

Excellent! Thank you, Dr. Scott. This is on target.

[Isaac Finkbeiner]

not a pastor, but thank you for these wise words.

"the church is political" and/or the "gospel is political" is everywhere, as a slogan. do you think we can do better? in my view, it causes unnecessary division - the equivalency tends to funnel the church into political solutions at the expense of a broader vision of the kingdom.

on the same note, i have always interpreted the "just stick with the spiritual stuff, pastor" crowd to mean they want the gospel to remain upstream of politics... not to advance some sort of gnostic dualism.

[Scott]

I appreciate the sentiment. I don’t want it to be a slogan, but it would be good if we could not allow the “political” to be defined so narrowly.

[Elmer Guido]

This article is quite interesting, good to share with others about the philosophy of the Kingdom and politics. I am a Hispanic Pastor and many of our members handle very little about this issue, and some prefer not to speak, so as not to involve them personally or their family, to avoid confrotations, about the Faith they have in God. and I dare to think that much of our Pastors independently of the political Party (political candidate) avoid talking to the church about this issue. Lack of knowledge and little importance. I think it would be great if we talked about this to be a Voice for the people that I need so much.Pastor Elmer Guido elmer.guido@yahoo.com