Working the Angles (and the Brakes): On Pastoring Pastors

On Sundays one of the busiest roads in our city gets shut down for car traffic so people can walk, bike, and do all sorts of other things along the beauty of the riverbank. My daughters love it when we rent a tricycle built for two, complete with a steering wheel and brakes, and join in the bustle of bodies up and down the road.

My older daughter Monica is a cautious driver, although her Mom would argue otherwise. But Olivia, the youngest, still needs help. She gets too close to others only to swerve at the last second without looking. Sometimes I have to yank the brake between us to avoid a collision. One day she’ll learn how to work the bike better, but I’d hate to have her take out a meandering toddler or a biker before then. However, in ministry no one will yank the brake for you. And before long a collision usually comes.

Our pastor took a month’s-long hiatus recently. When he first announced this, we as a church prayed over him and his family, and then then we didn’t see them for some weeks. On his first Sunday back he didn’t get right to preaching. Instead, he talked about his time away and how he was in a crisis and wanted to quit then and there. I thought to myself “Oh no. I’ve seen this before.” I’ve even seen it at this same church when the previous pastor quit suddenly amid burnout. I’ve seen it in the States too, when my pastor abruptly quit and moved out of state one Sunday morning. I mean, it happens.

While thinking of all that, I had to go back to paying attention to what my pastor was actually saying. Instead of leaving he was saying that he’s back, but he’s weary. In other words, he never yanked the brake, and I imagine the ensuing collision was rather messy.

I was happy to see him back, but I also wanted to get together with him to see if I could mentor him from the passenger seat. Our wives worked it out for us to have supper at their place this past Friday. The food was delicious. The kids chased geese. We taught them how to play Skip Bo. And I had açai for the first time - not bad.

Then I asked my pastor, Tiago (which is the same name as James), if he wanted to talk about his time away. He felt empty. Restless. Overwhelmed. And a little lost. I asked him about mentoring, who his mentors in ministry were. He said, he didn’t really have anyone. Pastors he worked under would talk about how many people attended programs at their churches, but they didn’t talk about much else, not about things that mattered.

This reminded me of how one pastor looked around at his colleagues and thought that they acted more like a bunch of managers of stores, rather than pastors. They were too busy “with shopkeeper’s concerns – how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that the customers will lay out more money.” Such shopkeepers can mentor one, directly or indirectly, in how to be busy, be invited to speak, be emulated, and also, sooner or later, to crash.

So I made Tiago an offer to be his mentor, using one of my favorite mentors along the way, Eugene Peterson who wrote those words above about shopkeepers more than thirty years ago. We’ll meet every other week and go through one of Peterson’s books entitled Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity, although it has a different title in Portuguese about shaping a pastor’s heart. And that’s what I love most about Tiago is his heart. It’s soft and open, and I don’t want to see it break.

Peterson uses triangles as his main image, because when we imagine one we immediately think of its sides, but it’s the angles that actually determine everything. Peterson identifies three main angles to pastoral ministry: praying, reading Scripture, and giving spiritual direction. If the pastoral call is to keep the community attentive to God, then these three acts keep pastors attentive to God personally in prayer, in the broader community of faith in Scripture, and with the person God has put in front of us at a particular time in spiritual direction.

Sadly, Peterson laments, these three acts are largely neglected by pastors and those who pay their salaries. He writes: “They [the three pastoral acts] do not call attention to themselves and so are often not attended to. In the clamorous world of pastoral work nobody yells at us to engage in these acts. It is possible to do pastoral work to the satisfaction of the people who judge our competence and pay our salaries without being either diligent or skilled in them. Since almost never does anyone notice whether we do these things or not, and only occasionally does someone ask that we do them, these three acts of ministry suffer widespread neglect.”

In my classes about the theology of the church I begin with a renewed theological vision of the church on mission. In one sentence it’s the idea that the church gives testimony to the reality of God. We are the church outside the walls of the building we meet in and on other days than Sundays. The main role of the pastor in this vision is to keep the community attentive to God. To do this pastors need to be trained to be attentive to God themselves, and Peterson argues this is best done at the angles of the “soul, in Israel and the church, and in the neighbor as we work away at our trigonometry of prayer, Scripture, and spiritual direction.” He goes on, “For the most part none of this is exciting. It is much more fun to watch someone going to the moon than to make the machine that gets him there. [. . .]. Working the angles is what we do when nobody is watching. It is repetitive and often boring. It is blue collar, not dog collar work”.

And that might be why it’s more exciting to fill your church’s calendar with programs nearly every night, as a lot of our churches do here. After fighting traffic and grabbing a bite to eat, not much time is left for anything else. Such things will surely get those pedals of your tricycle flying down the crowded road, but who's gonna yank the brake? 

I offer to mentor not because I have figured everything out. But I am attentive to what the church is, who God is, and how to be attentive to his presence, whether in Kansas, South Dakota, or Porto Alegre. And I am all too happy to direct pastors on where their brakes are and how to apply them when needed.

Tiago, and others like him, are one reason we have started up Kairos Brasil, which focuses on the mentored life and continuing education for our pastors. We cannot do this without our generous scholarship donors, so thank you for those who have helped, and for those whom God is calling to help. You can learn more about our scholarships, including how to give to our fund, by clicking here.