CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by St Andrews Research Repository TURNING DELIGHT INTO SACRIFICE : BEAUTY, GIFT, METAPHOR AND THE RECOVERY OF PASTORAL MINISTRY Ryan V. Moore A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of St Andrews 2018 Full metadata for this item is available in St Andrews Research Repository at: http://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/ Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15552 This item is protected by original copyright Turning Delight Into Sacrifice: Beauty, Gift, Metaphor and the Recovery of Pastoral Ministry Ryan V. Moore This thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of PhD St Mary’s College University of St Andrews 21 June 2017 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project marks a period in my life filled with people who have made the journey a great joy. I am grateful to my advisor, the Rev. Prof. Trevor Hart, who has been a more capable guide than I could have asked, and who has beautifully modeled the rich complexities of being a priest, theologian, and teacher. I am further grateful to Dr. Gavin Hopps and Prof. David Brown who have taught me much and shown me many small kindnesses. To Dr. Scott Hafemann and his wife Debara who seem to find their way in to my life at important junctions, I look forward to the next time we meet at the crossroads. I am deeply indebted to the many outposts of God’s kingdom that have invested far more in me than I could ever return. To the Rev. Dr. Rory MacLeod and the Holy Trinity Church of St. Andrews, thank you for welcoming my young and noisy family into worship and community. To the Rev. Allan Poole and Blacknall Memorial Presbyterian Church in Durham, North Carolina, through you my understanding of church moved well beyond bricks and mortar—after all these years Psalm 95:6 still echoes in my ears. To Second Presbyterian Church and Tabernacle Presbyterian in Indianapolis, thank you for letting a young pastor make mistakes and take risks. And lastly to the Rev. Dr. Jim Miller and First Presbyterian Church of Tulsa, Oklahoma, I never dreamed how good life on the edge of the Great Plains could be. Finally, there are those to thank who have been my biggest cheering sections. First, there are my parents, Craig and Cindy Moore, who have always required me to exercise my imagination in Jesus’ name. To my in-laws, Dr. Ted and Angie George, who have made a habit of faithfully pestering me to keep stepping out in faith. To my beloved and rambunctious boys, Elijah and Jonah, you have been an absolute delight and joy even as your mother and I uprooted you from Tulsa to St. Andrews and back again. Then there is Georgia Ruth—you have arrived just in time for the final act, reminding me that God’s best blessings come wrapped up in flesh and bones. And lastly, there is my wife Heather, to whom I dedicate this project. Thank you, Heather, for helping me to see that beauty does turn delight into sacrifice. ABSTRACT By many accounts North American Protestant pastors are in crisis. Some would suggest that this crisis is due to the increasing hardships brought about by the end of Christendom in the West. However, placing pastors in a narrative of mounting marginalization and victimization does not explain the vibrant and dynamic nature of pastoral ministry in other times and in other global contexts that are less than optimal. Instead, this project argues that pastoral identity suffers, at the hands of modern metaphors for ministry, because those metaphors fail to cultivate the pastor’s ability to behold Beauty. To say this is to make the bold claim that the crisis facing pastoral identity is at its heart a crisis of aesthetics; by which I mean, the ability of pastors to apprehend, through the senses, the beauty of God and God’s world revealed supremely in the person and work of Jesus Christ. This project is organized in three parts: Beauty, Gift, and Metaphor. The first section traces the loss of Beauty in the world and in the parish. It explores what difference this has made to pastoral ministry as it relates to the pursuit of the two other transcendentals, Truth and Goodness. Second, with the lost ability to behold the Beauty of the Lord comes an anemic understanding of pastoral ministry as charism or Gift. The result is a loss of joy (Nehemiah 8:10). Lastly, the third section argues that recovery of a vigorous pastoral identity and ministry requires (1) an honest evaluation of the modern metaphors exerting influence on clergy, (2) a grounding back in the ancient biblical and extra-biblical metaphors that have sustained pastors, and (3) the exploration of new metaphors for ministry that can aid the renewal of the pastor’s ability to behold the beauty of the Lord. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 BEAUTY 21 Chapter I: A World and Parish Without Beauty 22 Chapter II: Why Beauty Matters for the Pastor 68 GIFT 103 Chapter III: Ministry as Gift 104 METAPHOR 134 Chapter IV: Metaphors for Ministry 135 Chapter V: The Pastor as Poet 175 Bibliography 210 INTRODUCTION In Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel Gilead, the Reverend John Ames, an aging and dying Presbyterian minister, “Believes,” writes Greg Jones and Kevin Armstrong, “that God sees us in aesthetic terms and that we can see God in like terms if we cultivate the capacities to do so.”1 Ames has come to believe that beauty is at the heart of a right relationship with God, “Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense.”2 Experiencing the world aesthetically is not a sign of our otherness from God. Quite the contrary, it is rather essential to what it means to be made in God’s image. Therefore, and critical to an understanding of pastoral identity, cultivating an aesthetic imagination is as much about beholding beauty as it is about becoming beautiful. The two, beholding and becoming, are inexorably linked. Reverend Ames, late in the novel, reflects on an old Pentecost sermon he once gave. In it he remembers claiming that the Lord occasionally “breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation,” causing it, only for a moment, to glow hot and bright. Ames, now wizened by years, revises his theology, “The Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than that seems to imply. Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?”3 Rev. Ames represents a paradox: As he ages his eyesight actually heightens. It becomes keener. The glory of the Lord is more obvious than it was to his younger self. Moreover, sensing God’s glory is to become more fully human—to 1 L. Gregory Jones and Kevin R. Armstrong, Resurrecting Excellence: Shaping Faithful Christian Ministry (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 8. 2 Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004), 124. 3 Robinson, Gilead, 245. 1 express the image of God. Robinson describes a kind of theosis that is happening to Rev. Ames as he gazes on the glory of the Lord. Ames is like so many pastors—caught up in the good and necessary work of parish ministry, unable to sustain a vision of the world shining with transfiguration. The State of Ministry Every newly ordained pastor—armed with little more than a bit of naiveté, a dash of idealism, and a long endured Master of Divinity degree—has that moment early on in ministry that grounds them back in the grace of God. Of course, these moments happen throughout one’s ministry. For some it is the sense of inadequacy while giving a sixty second prayer and reading some Scripture at the bedside of a dying child. For others it is a parishioner’s letter highlighting the pastor’s shortcomings from the pulpit—the incorrect use of the English language, distracting mannerisms, or the lack of a common touch. In these moments pastors realize that they know far less than they need to, that the nature of the parish is vastly different than the academy, and that people in the pew are not so in awe of diplomas, stoles, robes, or titles as one might have thought. I imagine pastors, down through the life of the Church, have always struggled with similar challenges: balancing a life of public service with family and personal needs and demands, the dreaded “back to Egypt” committees that lurk in every parish, and the rollercoaster of emotions from the warp and woof of everyday ministry—attending to the sick, celebrating the Eucharist, officiating weddings, and caring for the needs of the less fortunate. The Church, in her wisdom has adapted, giving pastors metaphors for ministry that sustain pastoral excellence through a lifetime of committed service to Christ and His Kingdom; metaphors like shepherd, physician, and ambassador that strengthen and often times recalibrate pastoral identity as a profession, a calling, and an office. These are images that have served pastors and their congregations well for the better part of two millennia.