What in fact, is the work of the pastor? Over my years in ministry, I’ve struggled with this question, particularly as it relates to its scope and my personal limitations. If you merely listen to the parishioners, you’ll quickly get confused. Some assume that between sermons, the pastor’s life is predominantly one of leisure, hence the question aired on occasion, “What do you actually do?”

In my own denominational background, this question was less likely to emerge, as the pastor was expected to have a full-time job during the week just like anyone else at church. Being a pastor was primarily a Sunday morning vocation. This brought its own set of challenges along with the more commonly raised question from fellow pastors, “How do you manage to get everything done?” The answer is typically, “We don’t.”

One of the works I found particularly helpful in defining the pastor’s role is a book written by Eugene Peterson titled, “Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity.” While I’m not intending to summarize that work here – it’s worth your time to actually read it! – I am taking some of the key ideas he presents and giving it my own spin from within the conservative Anabaptist world.

In Peterson’s model, the pastor’s work is illustrated by a triangle. Triangles can take many different shapes, but their structure consists of three lines connected by three angles. Peterson uses these six components to provide a way of summarizing the work of the pastor. I think it is quite compelling.

First of all, the three lines can be of various lengths depending on the size of church, the giftings of the pastor, or the needs of the congregation at any given point in time. These three lines represent preaching, teaching, and administration, which will be observed in any church. They provide the shape of congregational life. Unfortunately, pastors are often evaluated primarily on these three activities and viewed as faithful, effective, and successful depending upon their performance in these three areas alone.

Peterson argues that any church can have these three lines, and pastors can be good at each of these and yet fail in the most foundational roles of pastoring.  These cornerstones of ministry (in his illustration, the “angles” of ministry) must exist in clear, concise angles in order for the pastor to actually fulfill his calling. The three angles that give definition to the pastoring triangle are as follows: prayer, defined as being attentive to God; scripture, being attentive to the words and work of God; and spiritual direction, being attentive to people and how God is working in their lives at the present moment.

What makes these angles is so critical is that pastoral work is a mediated work. Jesus is the Head of the church, and the church rightfully belongs to him. We are not free—either as pastors or as congregations—to create churches that please us or merely make us comfortable. Churches are to be gospel communities where Jesus’s people gather to worship Him and where lives are reborn and reordered around His teachings and renewed for His mission. Unless pastors are regularly and deeply immersed in prayerful listening to God and attentive to Jesus’ message to us in scripture, we quickly veer off into sociological groupings or various forms of pragmatic communities.

The birth of the church through the preaching of the gospel was a radical call to abandon the ethnocentric patterns of Jew and Gentile and be united into one new body, the church, around the reconciling work of Jesus Christ. This central message of the gospel is often functionally lost as we fragment over and over into increasingly narrow sectarian communities that are fearful of outside influences and are often intentionally isolating themselves from the larger body of Christ.

Put all six of these together (angles and lines) in order to have the full triangle. If only the three lines of the triangle are considered important, a church will see what is most commonly perceived as the major roles of the pastor.  Without deep immersion in the three defining angles, however, the church can quickly lapse into a sort of institutional or sociologically defined club. If the three angles distinctly are in place, yet without the well-developed lines of preaching, teaching and administration, churches lack the tools for building an organization within which people can worship, grow and launch on mission.

In much of the conservative Anabaptist world, I see the lines quite clearly established. Our churches have regular preaching, teaching, and the basics of church administration. While there is enormous opportunity for development in any of these areas—and in some places a desperate need for development—I’m not sure they represent the greatest crisis.

In my conversations with pastors—and in recent months I’ve been privileged to hold quite a few—the desperate lack I’m noting is the absence of the “angles” that give shape to ministry. While few pastors completely ignore the work of prayer, it can quickly become a checklist item to get done because duty calls with unrelenting persistence. This duty includes not only the duties of pastoring, but the urgent demands of marriage, family and vocation in addition to preaching, teaching and church administration.

We are also in a desperate place regarding the level of attention we are paying to scripture. Very few have invested any significant amount of time in the study of scripture other than the perfunctory slots for sermon preparation. As a result, many sermons deal rather carelessly with the texts and at best represent shallow, sociologically determined readings. I’m not here particularly trying to call pastors out, but I do want to note that Anabaptist pastors are in deep trouble because of their lack of attention to God and scripture (prayer and study). As a result, many of our churches are impoverished on these fronts as well. Congregations do mirror their leaders eventually; and as John Maxwell says, “The leader is the lid to the organization he leads.”

One of the challenges we are facing in this area is the capacity of pastors to hold a full-time job and then be expected to lead churches from the margins of their time. (In some cases, it seems that the congregational expectation is that a pastor should be independently wealthy so that he can give his time to the work of the church—doing so without any compensation for the limits it brings to his vocational pursuits.) It is important to note that in the early, formative days of the church, when challenges arose regarding the care of certain people in the church, the apostles clearly outlined their primary calling as being “to the word of God and to prayer.” To meet the other needs, they appointed seven deacons.

Another impediment to investing in the angles of ministry is the extreme busyness that is a mark of our present culture. Add to this the extra weight of the care of the flock of God, and the emotional capacity of the leader is often stretched to the breaking point. In order to be effective in prayer and study, one must bring a sense of almost “leisure” to these tasks: a leisure defined as quietness of heart and mind, a rested, quiet soul with uninterrupted blocks of time for listening, reflection and thoughtful engagement with God and scripture. Without significant investment in these spaces, our ministry to people, with people, on behalf of people easily becomes rushed and superficial. We lack the language and insight to navigate our own spiritual journal with its emotional complexities; and as such, we have little to no capacity to provide spiritual direction to others who find themselves in deeply complex circumstances. Pastors either retreat from these people and their situations or enter them with simplistic platitudes that quickly collapse in the face of people’s actual experiences.

In my opinion, conservative Anabaptist communities have succumbed to a troubling form of pragmatism that has reduced “faithfulness” to a few key behavioral criteria that can be easily assessed. This could be described as an attempt to accomplish the pastoral role with a quick scan of the congregation in the two hours we are together on a Sunday morning. This has led us to a place where the life of the soul as well as the true central components of Christianity (faith, hope and love) are ignored and even fail to be understood, explained and nurtured. Increasingly, faithfulness is defined in sociological rather than theological terms.

I think we’ve likely “backed into this” rather than intentionally and deliberately embraced this error. Who has the time for anything else? Who is prepared for a different sort of ministry? Who are the “spiritual fathers” to talk to us about the life of the soul in relationship to Christ?

The pathway out of this dilemma will be arduous and fraught with peril.  Failure to address the issue will result in one of two options: the abandonment of their churches (and potentially the Christian faith entirely) by most of those who struggle with the “forms of faith” as practiced in conservative Anabaptism; and the leading of lives of quiet desperation by many of those who accept the package.

We can do better. However, one leader here and there is not going to change this. One church on its own is not likely to pull it off without a larger community of support. The ecclesiastical landscape is littered with far too many attempts that have been thwarted in times of conflict when the “system” has won out over the attempts for renewal.

The pathway back, as I see it, must begin with a return to “the angles”: prayer, scripture, and life-on-life spiritual direction. We will need pastors who are equipped to pastor pastors. Teachers who will equip other teachers. Pastors who will serve as spiritual guides to other pastors, or as Paul calls them in I Corinthians, spiritual fathers. It is, in my perspective, the challenge of our generation.