PASTOR AS STRUGGLING POET

The model of ministry that is being shaped in me–and that I propose and recommend to other pastors–is that of STRUGGLING POET… 

Consider these quotes:

“When the text comes to speak about this alternative life wrought by God, the text must use poetry.  There is no other way to speak.  We know about the future–we know surely–but we do not know concretely enough to issue memos and blueprints.  We know only enough to sing songs and speak poems.  That, however, is enough.  We stake our lives on such poems (Walter Brueggemann, Finally Comes The Poet, 1989:  41).

“Poets are the articulators of experience.  They image and symbolize the unarticulated experiences of the community, identifying and expressing the soul of the people…  Many voices speak in the church today at a superficial level.  They speak of how our personal needs may be met, of patching up the old ship so that it sailed as it did before in the sea of the culture, or one more new method of renewal and evangelism.  But the poet hears voices at a deeper level–the fragmentation and alienation of modernity, the loneliness of our individualism…  The poet is of no pastoral use to the congregation if he or she can do no more than express personal feelings of anxiety and confusion.  Such poetry is little more than therapy, the reconditioning of people to live in the ambiguity of their context.  Rather, the poet writes so that the congregation hears their story as God’s pilgrim people.  Thismeans writing with as much intellectual engagement with the culture as passion for the experience of the people.  The tapestry must be woven of both elements before the possibiliity of transformation can emerge in the condition of liminality (Alan Roxburgh, The Church Between Gospel and Culture, 1996: 330).

Much more to come…