Undisciplined Versions: De-Professionalizing Pastoral Identity?
On Andrew Root’s Ministry in a Secular Age trilogy, occupying time, and being prophetic
“Undisciplined Versions” will (hopefully) be the Tuesday posts of some of what I’m working on around the dissertation, and whatever other kind of research I’m doing that has to do with religion and race…gender, purity, etc. and other things. I’m hoping that this will 1) keep me accountable to making this work broadly accessible, meaningful and useful for understanding how to engage religion especially in people, places, and spaces that are unexpected. Because religion is everywhere! And it’s so interesting. When it’s not terrifying, I think.
“Undisciplined” comes from Frances Tran’s work to think with and beyond disciplinary borders and boundaries in order to imagine different ways of being and belonging in the world. I think, too, about how so much of this work is translation: a version of another version, and a conversation within a larger conversation. And, of course, I’m thinking unruly, rebellious, alternative.
Every November for many churches I imagine the program year is well underway. Kickoff, rally day or homecoming day, a distant memory buried under the weekly calendar of events that lists all the activities of the church ranging from AA meetings to committee meetings, choir rehearsals to staff check-ins, youth fellowship and fellowship hour. Of course, we can’t forget all that goes into worship on Sunday morning—choir rehearsals, bulletin preparation, and signing up those ushers and greeters.
Time always feels so crunched, and mostly I feel crushed by it—by its weight and speed. By the relentlessness, and ensuing restlessness I feel as parent, pastor, and simply, person. My calendar is overflowing—literally into the margins, or on Google calendar, it’s a kaleidoscope of colors. How can I possibly keep up? And yet, there are moments where I feel I can briefly come up for air. I began thinking about how we are in time and writing this in the early part of August 2023, when it was slow around the church, and the kids were not yet back to school. When the days felt like one continuous, luxurious day. I found myself sitting in what has become one of my favorite spots to write and reflect: the gazebo at the park where my youngest’s baseball team practiced a couple of times a week. Where I write allowed for a touch of a breezeway, which was especially welcome after a hot or humid Mid-Atlantic summer day. A few trees would provide an extra canopy of protection and cover around me. The leaves filtered the early evening light onto me in gentle ways. I was close enough to see some of the action and far enough away that I wouldn’t get hit by a pop fly.
In July of 2023, for a couple of weeks I was at the Massanetta Middle School conference with a handful of youth from our church, singing and playing, truly, a suspension of time, and then it felt like entering a whole other world as afterwards I travelled through multiple time zones in order to rush to catch up with high schoolers from our church who were at the Youth Fest in Iona. There were no energizers of middle schoolers jumping and dancing to Imagine Dragon in the Abbey chapel. But it was still noisy: I marveled at the persistent sound of the bleating sheep and wind through the tall grasses on the island. These sounds continue to echo in my ears.
And still at another moment, several weeks later, as I was in the midst of this writing once more, remembering how it always felt like at least dusk or dawn the way the light lingered in Iona, I found myself sitting in the sunroom of the manse, our home, as I gazed out at a darkening sky above a row of purple and pink hydrangeas becoming overtaken by the wild summer ivy always determined to hang on to the sides of our house. Especially persistent if one did not keep up with the weeding during those summer days.
Once more, I am looking out another window, this time in my office at the church, at leaves that have caramelized in the sun of this fall season, yellows and browns. Time is strange. Writing about time even stranger as I struggle with the right grammatical tenses … it doesn’t feel quite right in any of the linguistic containers. But, time, I often ponder time’s fragility … something we discovered in particular during the COVID-19 pandemic. How time compresses, and slows down, and still somehow seems to slide by like the whisper of the Chesapeake Bay through the trees. But our relationship with time didn’t necessarily change with the world-wide “shutdown,” as we discovered certain inequalities and inequities around everything from education to healthcare access come to light, we began to hear more and more stories of how this was actually the reality all along.
Time always feels so crunched, and mostly, I feel crushed by it—by its weight and speed.
By the relentlessness, and ensuing restlessness I feel as parent, pastor, and simply, person.
My calendar is overflowing—literally into the margins, or on Google calendar, it’s a kaleidoscope of colors.
What I’m seeing now is how time moves through individuals and institutions, and both masks and uncovers social realities all around us. Andrew Root’s Ministry in a Secular Age trilogy gives us a way to consider the impact of the changes in our relationship to time, through engaging philosopher and political theorist Charles Taylor’s work on secularity and modernity, and how this might help us reflect on both congregation and the pastoral role. The critique that is especially meaningful to me is what we do with “acceleration”—modern time moves much more quickly, and continues to do so—as Root especially lays out in The Congregation in a Secular Age: from social life to technology to moral norms. But we are in time in much different ways. What might it mean or look like to do (pastoral) ministry and be God’s church as we contend with the effects of time’s constant warping, expanding and compressing, and slippages? (Yes, I’m a big fan of Loki.) How do we occupy time?
There’s a beautiful meditation on being in time by James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now. I’m still working through it but am staying with something he offers in the introduction on “spiritual timekeeping”:
…spiritual timekeeping isn’t just counting, like ticks on the clock or crossing out days on the calendar. To “number our days” (Ps. 90:12) is not just to count down, making notches on the wall as we hurtle toward the day we can’t count. Rather, this is counsel to know when we are, to find our bearings by an orientation to time and history. We are mortal, not just because we die but because we are the sorts of creatures whose very being is lived in time. Being mortal means being temporal.
He speaks of inhabiting time, and although I choose the word “occupy” for the way this gestures to a way of being that is resistant (think of those occupy movements), as well as being-occupied, a different sensibility, much of what he explores in and through Ecclesiastes is compelling. I wonder about the way we keep time in the church and how it then affords alternative space, and another way in to how God is present in the world. Timekeeping as a way to position ourselves in and toward the world, as a kind of spiritual practice and perspective.
These questions press in on me because it seems to me to be connected to something else that is also pressing in Taylor’s work as Root shows us throughout the whole trilogy but especially in The Pastor in a Secular Age: transcendence, as well as what Taylor explains is “the malaise of immanence” (5). The loss of transcendence as not simply disenchantment but the discomfort that something is missing, is amiss. And time is right at the center of it. Time is connected to the change in our relationship to and perception of transcendence. And this emerges in peculiar ways these days for pastors, I think. What do I mean? I recently had a conversation with a retired minister who shared that she went into hospice ministry after serving at a “corporate” church for her first call. She explained that she felt she couldn’t be prophetic when she relied on the church to pay her but being a hospice chaplain freed her up to preach and teach, as she kept emphasizing, prophetically.
What I’m seeing now is the clear reality of how time moves through individuals and institutions, and both masks and uncovers social realities all around us.
Being prophetic has something to do with time—it has to do with how we are and what we see. I love Octavia Butler, a prophet in her own right, for the way she saw, and she knew, and in haunting ways, she showed us whole worlds in her work: a world that we find ourselves in today. And so, the brief conversation with the retired minister made me wonder (again, as this is certainly not novel or original): is it possible to be prophetic and … professional (or in the immanent frame or more familiarly, the secular)? Is it possible to be pastor/prophet and do so in the scaffolding of modern time? I posed this question on a few social media platforms and the general response was one of agreement: there are risks and the church, for all its ideals and values, cannot afford the prophetic. Indeed, if we are to understand being prophetic, in the way Old Testament scholar Walter Bruggemann encourages as a kind of relationship with the divine, with transcendence as truth-telling and reframing, and professionalization of the pastoral role as one of the tragic symptoms of modernity, these seem incompatible with one another.
But I wonder if there is an alternative through how we understand time. As pastors, and preachers, I’m always a bit mystified and in awe of the way we play in the stream of time: how we prepare for Advent and Christmas in the fall, and Lent and Holy Week/Easter shortly after the New Year’s resolutions have faded away. We slide between seasons celebrating all the saints who have departed from our midst over the last year even as we look towards Epiphany and the Baptism of the Lord. We visit older folks in homes and facilities holding their hands in prayer until suddenly they are gone. Babies we’ve baptized show up with their own babies. Stories and images seem transposed onto one another. Most days, I feel I am occupying multiple spaces, times and seasons, even as I seek to be present in the here and now.
What might it mean or look like to do (pastoral) ministry and be God’s church as we contend with the effects of time’s constant warping, expanding and compressing, and slippages?
How do we occupy time?
Perhaps the pastor’s (and the church’s) persistence in being okay with being behind (the times)—as is often bemoaned about and from within the church—and holding not necessarily alternative (or sacred) time, but rather being in time in this way, being present in multiple ways, in the here and now while maintaining a healthy critique of this culture’s “depreciation of memory and a ridicule of hope,” as Bruggeman says in The Prophetic Imagination, might be a way of being prophetic and “professional” (or fully in the immanent frame, Taylor gives us). Because are these necessarily opposed to one another? It may seem so. But could the professional setting, the professionalization of the pastoral role, be the exact setting or space in which being prophetic is all the more necessary and potent? Because of this exact relationship with and engagement of the challenges and trappings, and inevitability of time?
I felt compelled to think with and about time because I was inspired by a post that popped up in my email recently from The Marginalian, by Maria Popova, who provides a regular “record of the reckoning — a one-woman labor of love, exploring what it means to live a tender, thoughtful life of purpose and gladness, wonder-smitten by reality, governed by the understanding that creativity is a combinatorial force: ideas, insights, knowledge, and inspiration acquired in the course of being alive and awake to the world, composited into things of beauty and substance we call our own.” (I include this bio because it’s too lyrical to skip it). To simply read Popova’s engagement is inspiring in and of itself, but I offer what she offered that day when I went down a rabbit hole of her entries, which is a poem by Ursula K. Le Guin, perhaps mildly apropos to us church folk who speak in hymns and this theme of time in Hymn to Time:
Time says “Let there be”
every moment and instantly
there is space and the radiance
of each bright galaxy.And eyes beholding radiance.
And the gnats’ flickering dance.
And the seas’ expanse.
And death, and chance.Time makes room
for going and coming home
and in time’s womb
begins all ending.Time is being and being
time, it is all one thing,
the shining, the seeing,
the dark abounding.
Perhaps the pastoral role today rather than the closed off system suggested by “identity,” might instead be a mode, and an ongoing practice, of being in time, being time, a work of as Le Guin says in the poem “making room,” and “for going and coming home,” as simple as that—making space and journeying with others. What about all the structures of time, its institutions, and the norming work of administration and organization? The pastoral work, I want to suggest, is not simply towards re-enchantment, a re-introduction to the divine and what is transcendent, but helping all of us to see that the borders between what is secular and sacred is actually (and has always remained) quite porous.
In other words, as some prophets have told us already in so many words, the pastoral work comes out of an orientation and posture towards God’s (kingdom) in-breaking which is persistent and ever present.
Again, perhaps all of this for me, as I struggle with the crush of the weight of time—and not only time, but responsibilities, along with what lies ahead, and what lies forgotten, and then all those seeming interruptions to our ever increasingly shorter days—is, at the risk of sounding cliché, a reminder to stay open. Time actually makes room for it all: the meandering, the skimming, the depths. Perhaps we will feel it all, or maybe we’ll only feel an ounce of it, but the wonder is in the seeing. I wonder if part of our pastoral (prophetic) call is the miraculous work of putting to words what we see, whether in proclamation or over a pot of tea, no matter how difficult or strange, with what may seem, at best, like a shaky trust, but a connection to and confirmation by God’s very (immanent) presence.
Do you see the possible ways things, moments, and creatures are tied together? Or a part of a bigger whole? A larger beauty? A wondrous magic. Maybe I’m being too sentimental thinking that this is the larger work. To see. To feel. To be awake to the world and all its entanglements. For example, the buzz of the church full of cheerful people on Sunday mornings, the buzz of the mosquitos around me in the gazebo as I watch my youngest hit a line drive, the buzz of the ferry surging though the Sound of Mull—like a chorus, a hymn. To which I can only breathe: Thanks be to God.
A version of this appeared as a blog for a devotional for the Presbyterian Foundation and then became something I worked on for the From Relevance to Resonance Project.