Advice to New Pastors

Jason Goroncy, on his blog, Per Crucem ad Lucem, has recently culled together four posts written by William H Willimon, and given them the collective title: Advice to New Pastors.

One of Willimon's main themes here is what might be called the 'cultural divide' between ministers freshly minted from seminary, and their congregations. Each often talks a different language, and have to learn how to hear each other. The ministers have to learn how congregations function, how this particular social group works, what its needs are and so forth; many of the things learnt in the seminary will not have prepared the minister for this.

In talking about his first congregation he writes:
I was impressed that they knew more about some things than I. Mostly, they talked and thought with the Bible. They easily, quite naturally referred to Scripture in their conversation, freely using biblical metaphors, sometime referring to obscure biblical texts that I had never read. If they had not read the masters of my thought – Bultmann, Tillich, and Barth, then I had no way to speak to them. I had been in a world that based communicating upon conversations about the thought of others, rather than worrying overmuch about my own thoughts. I realized that my divinity school had made me adept in construing the world psychologically, sociologically (that is, anthropologically) rather than theologically. The only conceptual equipment my people had was that provided by the church, whereas most of my means of making sense were given to me by the academy. Their interpretation of the world was not simply primitive, or simple, or naïve, as I first thought. Rather they were thinking in ways that were different from my ways of thinking. I came to realize that we were not simply speaking from different perspectives and experiences; it was as if we were speaking across the boundaries of two different worlds.

The world goes back to being the world

Postmodernism helps us to understand that, as ethicist Stanley Hauerwas of Duke Divinity School puts it, after a few centuries in which the culture at large snuggled up to the church and was its ally in forming a least-common-denominator sort of civic faith in its citizens, the world has gone back to being the world. While we may intially hear this word as bad news, Hauerwas insists it is good news in that it gives us permission (not that we ever really needed it) to go back to being the church, to being a human community shaped by the particular worldview of scripture.

from The Postmodern Parish: new ministry for a new era, by Jim Kitchens. Published Alban Institute, 2003, page 14

The Divinity Code

On the Christian News New Zealand site, there's a review of Ian Wishart's newest book, The Divinity Code. The review begins like this:

"Oh no not another Da Vinci Code fad book" was my initial reaction to reading the title on Ian Wishart’s recent book "The Divinity Code". However despite the unfortunate title, a brief perusal and the authors reputation provided sufficient grounds to part with some cash to obtain a copy to read over the summer.

Ian Wishart is one of the more significant (and in some circles notorious) figures in New Zealand Journalism. As editor and publisher of Investigate magazine he has for a number of years been the bane of politicians and the liberal elite in New Zealand, being responsible for bringing to public notice a number of political scandals in the last few years. In Wishart’s previous book "Eve’s Bite" he addressed a number of liberal and secular influences that are negatively affecting society. In The Divinity Code Wishart picks up on a few aspects of his earlier book and addresses the issue of what is the evidence for the existence of God and the truthfulness of Christianity?"

I'm alerting you to this review, because (a) it gives a good overall picture of the book, both positively and negatively, and (b) because, controversial as Wishart can be, he puts his money where his mouth is as a Christian journalist, and continues to write out of his Christian beliefs, and (c) even though he may not be the best writer in the world, he doesn't let that stop him speaking out.