Pastor in a Secular Age (Ministry in a Secular Age Book #2)

Andrew Root

Description

In Faith Formation in a Secular Age, the first book in his Ministry in a Secular Age trilogy, Andrew Root offered an alternative take on the issue of youth drifting away from the church and articulated how faith can be formed in our secular age. In The Pastor in a Secular Age, Root explores how this secular age has impacted the identity and practice of the pastor, obscuring his or her core vocation: to call and assist others into the experience of ministry.Using examples of pastors throughout history--from Augustine and Jonathan Edwards to Martin Luther King Jr. and Nadia Bolz-Weber--Root shows how pastors have both perpetuated and responded to our secular age. Root turns to Old Testament texts and to the theology of Robert Jenson to explain how pastors can regain the important role of attending to people's experiences of divine action, offering a new vision for pastoral ministry today.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 18 juin 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781493418220
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Cover
Endorsements
“This book is a must read for anyone preparing for pastoral ministry or currently in ministry. Highly readable, it seeks to reclaim a pastoral identity that is rooted in the divine action of a ministering God. Building on the work of Charles Taylor, Root first lays out the historical evolution of the current hollowing out of pastoral identity through an excellent exploration of six pastors from Augustine to Rick Warren. Then, turning to Foucault, Jenson, and Old Testament texts, Root boldly asserts the identity of God as one who ministers to his people. Root encourages pastors to reclaim an identity based on their participation in God’s acts of ministry. It is in these very acts of ministry that a window is opened to the transcendent and ministering God in a secular age.”
— Annette Brownlee , Wycliffe College, University of Toronto
“In a world longing for enchantment but too cynical to accept it, pastors can understandably feel irrelevant and confused. In The Pastor in a Secular Age , Andrew Root provides a helpful overview of how our world became so disenchanted and what it might look like to attend to God in a world that has forgotten how to do so. As a spiritual director, I continually encounter people who are longing to sacralize their lives and who desperately need help learning to find God in the events and emptiness of life. Root harks back to the holy event of God’s presence and asks us to consider the power of a ministry that can both sit in the silence of emptiness and point to the sacred in wonder.”
— Danielle Shroyer , spiritual director and author
“Andrew Root’s The Pastor in a Secular Age is an inspiring read and a wonderful resource for ministers and others who care about the role of the church and the vocation of ministry today. As institutional churches and denominations in the West continue a steady decline of social influence, ministers face a crisis of identity. This work situates and explains that feeling of crisis, and articulates a powerful vision for recapturing a sense of ministry as the conduit of God’s presence, of divine action, in the world. Drawing from his in-depth understanding of Charles Taylor’s philosophical insight, and utilizing case studies of pastors from history and the present, Root offers a compelling portrait of a fresh and invigorating way to approach the vocation of ministry. This is a timely and significant resource for churches, seminaries, and pastors, a vision for ministering in the immanent frame.”
— Kyle Roberts , United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities
Half Title Page
Previous Title in this Series
M INISTRY IN A S ECULAR A G E P R E V I O U S T I T L E S :
Faith Formation in a Secular Age: Responding to the Church’s Obsession with Youthfulness
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2019 by Andrew Root
Published by Baker Academic
a division of Baker Publishing Group
PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.bakeracademic.com
Ebook edition created 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-1822-0
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations labeled Message are from The Message by Eugene H. Peterson, copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations labeled RSV are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Dedication
To Mike King, the best example I know of a leader who seeks the action of the living God in and through ministry, with gratitude for your friendship, support, and encouragement
Contents
Cover i
Endorsements ii
Half Title Page iia
Previous Title in This Series iib
Title Page iii
Copyright Page iv
Dedication v
Preface ix
Introduction xiii
Part 1: Welcome to the Pastoral Malaise 1
1. A Historical Map of the Pastor in Our Secular Age 3
2. The Lifting Fog of Enchantment: Thomas Becket and Pastoring in a Disenchanted Age 25
3. Keeping Enchantment from Flaring Up: Pastoring to Private People 45
4. The Force Field of the Buffer: Augustine and Pastoring to Sel ves 59
5. When Ordinary Life Becomes So Much More Than Ordinary: Jonathan Edwards and Pastoring to Those Who Don’t Care 77
6. When a Pastor Was America’s Greatest Celebrity: Henry Ward Beecher and Pastoring by Personality 97
7. The Pastor as Chaplain of a Secular Age: Harry Emerson Fosdick and Pastoring at the End of the Denomination 109
8. When Purpose Becomes Mine and Authenticity Becomes King: Rick Warren and Pastoring in a Post-Durkheimian Age 125
Bridge: Winter Lectures in Paris 151
9. Foucault and the Rise of Pastoral Power 153
Part 2: The God Who Is a Ministering Pastor 171
10. The Weird God of Israel Who Arrives 173
11. Encountering a Speaking God Who Identifies with Events 191
12. A Run into the Wild: Meeting the Ministering God Who Sees 213
13. Say My Name, Say My Name: The God of Exodus 231
14. When Dry Bones Live Again: The God of Resurrection 247
15. Invisible Gorillas and the Practice of Prayer 269
Index 283
Back Cover 292
Preface
The summer before my senior year in high school, I saw Terminator 2 at least twenty times. You know the movie: the one when bad-guy Arnold Schwarzenegger becomes good-guy cyborg, now reprogrammed not to kill John Connor but to protect him. Yet, to say I saw the movie isn’t really right. Rather, it was on in the background, running on a huge screen, while I hung out with my friends. That summer, like 1950s teenagers transported to the early 1990s, we hung out at the drive-in movie theater. My friends smoked cigarettes and drank warm beer while I tried, with epic failure, to find a summer romance. I’d never seen the original Terminator , but that had no impact on my following and enjoying T2 . When I finally did watch the original, I had a much better grasp on the narrative that made T2 run; but watching T1 before T2 didn’t seem necessary, even with the gaps filled in.
This book you’re holding is volume 2. Braving hubris, I’d say it is a little bit like the early Terminator franchise. No, there are no “I’ll be backs” or liquefying robots. But it does continue with a story about our changed world, about the rupture with which we in the church have not yet wrestled enough. This volume particularly explores how our secular age has impacted the identity and practice of the pastor. It does this, like the movies, by playing with history and time.
Yet, most importantly for this preface and most like the Terminator movies, you don’t need to have read volume 1 ( Faith Formation in a Secular Age ) to find your way through volume 2. This book you’re holding can stand alone. And if you’re a busy pastor, my advice would be to read this book first before moving backward, like I did in the early ’90s with the Terminator franchise, to volume 1.
That said, this book does continue the task laid out in volume 1. That task was both a descriptive and constructive one. Like volume 1, this book delves headlong into a discussion with Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age . This time I show how the secular age challenges and shifts the identity and practice of pastors. If you’re looking just for a dialogue with Taylor, then part 1 may be as far as you need to go. If you’re coming to this book looking for theological discussion, then all the storytelling, historical examples, and philosophical genealogy may be worth skipping. In the end, however, I think these parts work best together, though like volume 1, the descriptive focus in part 1 of this volume will make part 2 feel a little like a different book. But in my mind this is necessary, for the story I sketch in part 1 is to show why distinct theological assertions about divine action are difficult, forcing me to take up this challenge in part 2.
So in part 1 of this book, I tell this story, like Taylor, by using history. I’ll offer you the tale of six different pastors, stretching from the fourth to the twenty-first century. Before going any further I need to be clear on why I’m using the story of these pastors and not others. I’m using them because they have been the elites. By elite I do not mean the best, brightest, or even most important. I think all six are flawed. By elite I mean they have directly impacted our imagination (our imaginary). Their works and ideas have shifted the ways many of us conceive of a pastor. I draw on them not because they are the best pastors, or even most representative (they are not), but because in their lives they moved us closer and closer to our now secular age, adding to what I call below a pastoral malaise. Using them this way, I ask you to read them as archetypes. They all, in their own way, are exaggerations that tell us something about how pastoral identity has changed.
As I’ve said, the point of this story is to show that this pastoral malaise has its center in our struggle to speak of divine action. It therefore wrestles with how this age radically changes the conditions of belief for the people the pastor serves. If I’ve done my job well in part 1, you’ll feel slightly overwhelmed, wondering what the point of being a pastor can be in a secular age. But that leads me to say something else clearly befo