This article is by Cole Huffman:
Pastoral work, by volume, is done by famously obscure men and women. We have no brand other than normal ministry: parish, place, people. Francis Schaeffer used to say there are no little people, no little places. I believe that and, Lord, help my unbelief.
Two years ago, moving to a smaller church from a larger one was a bit unnerving. The way we talk about church size can feel like a values-clarification exercise. If we were in a lifeboat and had to toss overboard the church of 80 (average U.S. church size), or the church of 800, or the church of 8,000, based on perceived importance, which one goes down “to where all the fishes are frightening” (Death Cab for Cutie)?
At my larger church, I had lots of staff, spacious facilities, an ample budget, and a hefty salary. But in the deepest discouragement of my life — early 2021 — I threw myself overboard. I walked off the field one Sunday, like a quarterback tired of taking too many sacks. I convinced myself I couldn’t get new blooms off old branches anymore. I believed I climbed the mountain as far as I could and had to descend before I ran out of air. Pastoral departure is a metaphor pick’em.
After 18 years in that church, I spent a full year out of ministry, adrift on a kind of vocational ice floe. Some larger churches like the one I left showed interest, but I seemed like damaged goods to them. One told their headhunter I “looked sad” during my interview. Sorry to kill your search committee buzz.
What I’ve experienced moving from a larger church to a smaller one is not downward mobility. It feels more like driving an EV instead of an Escalade. The luxury SUV has a pillowy ride and generous room. But I recall asking a funeral director once, as her new hearse glided us to the graveside, what she thought of Cadillacs. “Comfortable,” she said, “but crappy motors.” (Let the dead bury their own dead, indeed!)
In Celebrities for Jesus, Katelyn Beaty calls celebrity “social power without proximity.” When I pastored the larger church, people I didn’t know would approach our table in restaurants to thank me for my teaching. It prompted my children to ask if I was famous. Famous in a way no one ever heard of, I told them.
In one of Cornelius Plantinga’s Morning and Evening Prayers, he includes the line “let me be willing to be overlooked.” That’s biblical, right? Like that guy Paul mentioned in 2 Corinthians 8—the one “famous among all the churches for his preaching of the gospel” (v. 18)? He goes unnamed.
Another celebrity for Jesus stumbled off his platform not long ago. Ministry hangs on such a thin thread for us all. But there I was, licking a schadenfreude cone as I scrolled through hot takes on his fall. Would I have done better in his place, though? Didn’t I sometimes use my bigger ministry to create distance from people? I did.
I have so much proximity now I take the church garbage cans in off the curb sometimes. The maintenance staff at my old church would marvel. And yet, mere proximity doesn’t equate to faithful presence, any more than taking in the garbage cans means humility.
One day, facing mounds of family laundry that needed folding, I turned on baseball for company. It was the College World Series’ championship game. It ended on a moonshot walk-off home run. Stuff of legend on a huge stage. With a few more linens to go, I flipped channels to another game: Bismarck v. Minot in the Northwoods League.
I didn’t know the Northwoods League existed. I would guess College World Series players don’t aspire to play in the Northwoods League, but I would be wrong, according to the league’s website, which boasts an impressive roster of former and current MLB players. Tell Northwoods Leaguers their baseball matters less because it’s played in North Dakota, and they’ll look at you like you just suggested a parka night in July.
I keep coming back to the Plantinga prayer book, to lines like these: “Let me keep my promises, sticking with people I’m stuck with and coming through for them when I’m needed.” And: “Today, I give up claim to my towering ambitions. I give up claim to my foolish dreams. I give up claim to hopes and plans that do nothing for your kingdom.”
The gist of those prayers is that I give up claim to power without proximity. And that must become a prayer because I’m not naturally inclined to it. Cognitively, I know I don’t need a few hundred people more knowing who I am. But I don’t always remember it emotionally. With Garrison Keillor, I confess that, “I lust after recognition. I am desperate to win all the little merit badges and trinkets of my profession …”
Maybe not desperate, but the shoe fits. And not to be preachy here, but I think we should reserve the term “pastor” for those who practice proximity to people, not just pulpit. “Celebrity pastor” should sound as strange to our ears as “celebrity plumber.” A pastor gets close enough to know most of God’s people feel like C-minus Christians, as Johnny Cash called himself, and don’t need guilting or shaming about it from platform communicators. They need coffee with their pastor, preferably within the week they ask.
Landing in a smaller church after so long in a larger one, I’ve reconsidered pastoral credibility. My call hasn’t changed. The call is always to faithful presence, regardless of size culture. Credibility involves my gifts but is more about receiving each of God’s people in my care as gifts. I need proximity to do that well.
Credibility and proximity are meant to kiss each other, like righteousness and peace (Ps 85:10). And obscurity needs a side-hug at least when we think about flourishing in ministry. Obscurity might even be a gift from God, because through it we get the chance to re-personalize what has become depersonalized in the elevation of persona. As Eugene Peterson put it in a letter to his son, Eric, also a pastor:
The act of Sunday worship, the access to homes, the almost total lack of commercial and commodity considerations in your work, the cultural ‘uselessness’ of your work — all these put you in an enviable and strategic way of life to develop a community in which people discover and develop lives that are lived in response to the God who reveals himself in Jesus and works by the Holy Spirit to customize every part of the revelation of salvation and holiness to the uniqueness of each person.
An enviable and strategic way of life to develop a community. In that aim, the three rules of shepherding that James Rebanks, a UK sheepherder, gives in his book, The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape, I’ve made my own:
First rule of shepherding: It’s not about you, it’s about the sheep and the land.
Second rule: You can’t win sometimes.
Third rule: Shut up and go do the work.
COMMENTS
4 responses to “The Gift of Proximity”
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Yes to “parish, place, people.” Yes to “proximity.” This helps explain my boredom at superhero movies–placeless, limitless. I want to be where my feet are.
https://youtu.be/k-N5JBVBdzM?si=6VvmVen4XWKIus7K
Well-written & well-lived afresh, my friend! Personhood > Persona
You write as well as your mother, which is a compliment
Yes! Obscurity, anonymity, living local like Downton Abbey.
https://www.livegodspeed.org/watchgodspeed