Faith Works 8-28-21

Faith Works 8-28-21

Jeff Gill

A preacher looks at sixty

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Jimmy Buffett wrote the song "A pirate looks at forty" and then had to rewrite it looking "at fifty." 

On social media I took a shot at rewriting it as "A preacher looks at sixty" which is not even worth reprinting here (and I'm not clear on how the whole copyright thing would work), except for the lines "Yes I am a preacher, two hundred years too late; the sermons don't thunder, there's too much to ponder - I'm an over-sixty victim of change."

Obviously writing a parody means you're trying to pound some round pegs into square holes. Rev. Dr. Buffet's original about a so-called pirate (a buddy who worked as a Key West bartender who caught Jimmy's imagination) perhaps underplays the basic wickedness of most piratical activity, but I do like the parallel of "two hundred years too late" for my context. 

There's an awful lot about earlier ministers like George Herbert in 1630 or Richard Baxter in 1650, or in my own tradition Barton Stone or Thomas & Alexander Campbell in the 1830s, which captures my attention and interest. Jesuit priests Claude Allouez and Jacques Marquette in 1670s North America have long had a hold on my imagination; my theological and philosophical development deepened in encounters with Søren Kierkegaard but grew into a more pastoral form with his 1840s contemporary N.F.S. Grundtvig, both Danish Lutheran controversialists (the latter always called himself a pastor and not a theologian, but he inspired me to think in terms of pastoral theology, a category that I think unpacks his American near-contemporary Thomas Campbell). And in the practice of parish ministry I've long admired Walter Rauschenbusch, whose work in Hell's Kitchen during the 1880s & 90s shaped his writing about the social gospel.

You can see where I'm going here. Most of my pastoral inspirations are well in the past; as part of an ancient spiritual tradition, that's to be expected, but when I push my sense of formation out a few more circles, I'm still pretty strongly rooted into influences whose circumstances are quite a bit different than the contexts in which I've worked.

In my own time, I regret that it took me until the 1990s with the help of Taylor Branch to see how the work of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. could speak to my own sense of calling and mission as a Christian minister; even so, it was who King was and how he worked in the 1950s and early 1960s that gave me some models to work with. Barbara Brown Taylor has taught me a great deal, but I really only encountered her writing after she had left parish ministry and everyday church life behind; James Forbes taught me, in a sense, how to preach, but I never have read or heard much from him about being a minister in the congregational setting.

So I worry that I have a somewhat dated image of parishes and church calendars and local missions. "Two hundred years too late" is less a specific time frame than a state of mind; I've loved the idea of a way of life that was perhaps largely gone before I entered into it. In seminary we heard a great deal about the prophetic and teaching and therapeutic models, and picked up on a strongly managerial approach in practice all around us that's never struck much of a resonant chord in my heart. Out into congregational work, the models that church members kept holding up were Billy Graham and Robert Schuller, and without criticizing them, let alone condemning, I always knew that wasn't going to be a mold I'd ever fit into.

In the last few years and even just the last few weeks I've celebrated, mostly from a distance, the ordination of some wonderful new younger ministers, with varying degrees of interest in parish ministry per se. As a mentor, I'm probably more of a good pirate. Or more appropriately, I hope, a frontier missionary at heart. Father Allouez died 332 years ago today, and was buried in a spot you can still visit on the edge of Niles, Michigan on a knoll overlooking the St. Joseph River. He was 67, a ripe old age for the Great Lakes mission field in those days.

Seven or twenty-seven more years I may have ahead, but I suspect I'll continue to look to the past for my role models, with the ministry still left in me.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's not saying Jimmy Buffett is a ministerial role model, either. Tell him who has guided your vocational journey at knapsack77@gmail.com.