Westminster Seminary California alumni

I am not in the habit of quoting Eugene Peterson, the mainline Presbyterian minister with fairly conservative convictions. But when suspected authors confirm my own prejudices I generally find their reflections more congenial -- funny how that happens. In his book, Take and Read, Peterson observes the value that an agrarian (as opposed to an industrial) outlook can yield for understanding the church and Christian ministry. He writes that when reading Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer and accomplished poet and novelist, he invariably substitutes parish or congregation every time that Berry writes farm. Peterson adds, "it works every time."

That might go too far but Peterson does make a helpful point that the ministry and the work of the church is more akin to the practices of farming than it is to those aspects of planning and methods of efficiency that govern urban-industrial society. Berry makes this point starkly in the following quotation, which if you follow Peterson's advice and insert pastor whenever Berry writes farmer might confirm your own perceptions about the nature of pastoral ministry (you should also probably substitute congregation whenever he writes farm or land). Berry argued:

I conceive a strip-miner to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of the farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter's goal is money, profit; the nurturer's goal is health his land's health, his own, his family's, his community's, his country's. Whereas the exploiter asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce, the nurturer asks a question that is much more complex and difficult: What is its carrying capacity? . . . The exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, "hard facts"; the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind.

Without getting into the politics of environmentalism or economic development, the agrarian understanding of nurture is an important one for ministers as well as church members to consider. One reason is that so many of the metaphors from Scripture are agricultural. Of course, one reason for this is that the Bible was written before the rise of machines and cities that depend on fossil-fuel for their expanse and allure. In justifying his ministry the apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians, "I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are equal, and each shall receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God's fellow workers; you are God's field, God's building" (1 Cor 3:6-9). Yes, Paul does refer to the church here also as a building but this is to establish his approaching metaphor of the temple, a kind of structure that was common in ancient farming communities. Today if a city has a temple it is usually the one built and run by the Masons.

Our Lord himself often appealed to agricultural images to explain the nature of the church and the duties of pastors. In John 15 Christ tells his disciples, "I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing." Whatever the importance of union with Christ in our understanding of the application of redemption, this union as this verse makes clear is not a mechanical but an organic one in which the very operations of plants have something important to tell us about our relationship to Christ. So too when he told Peter how to express love for his Lord, Jesus invoked the metaphor of sheep farming: "Feed my lambs," "Tend my lambs," and "Feed my sheep." This image not only pointed back to Christ's own instruction about himself as the Great Shepherd but also to the character of pastoral work, namely, as endeavor that involves persistent attention to the quality of the flock's life.

The agrarian themes of Scripture as well the qualities inherent in tending to land and its produce, whether plants or animals, are helpful for reflecting on the nature of the Christian life as well as the work of pastoral ministry. One way to apply this to the Christian walk is to consider the difference between various sources of energy. Are the means of grace -- word, sacrament and prayer -- more like what happens when we recharge batteries or are they closer to what occurs when we eat food? The Belgic Confession has an arresting answer to this question in Article 35 which echoes Christ's own teaching in John 6 about eating his body and drinking his blood for the sustenance of spiritual life. It reads:

Those who are born anew have a twofold life. One is physical and temporal, which they received in their first birth and is common to all men. The other is spiritual and heavenly, which is given them in their second birth and is effected by the word of the gospel in the communion of the body of Christ. This life is not common to all but only to the elect of God. For the support of the physical and earthly life God has ordained earthly and material bread. This bread is common to all just as life is common to all. For the support of the spiritual and heavenly life, which believers have, He has sent them a living bread which came down from heaven (Jn 6:51), namely, Jesus Christ, who nourishes and sustains the spiritual life of the believers when He is eaten by them, that is, spiritually appropriated and received by faith. To represent to us the spiritual and heavenly bread, Christ has instituted earthly and visible bread as a sacrament of His body and wine as a sacrament of His blood. He testifies to us that as certainly as we take and hold the sacrament in our hands and eat and drink it with our mouths, by which our physical life is then sustained, so certainly do we receive by faith, as the hand and mouth of our soul, the true body and true blood of Christ, our only Saviour, in our souls for our spiritual life.

In other words, God feeds and tends his flock during their wilderness wanderings with manna (read: word and sacrament) which in turn build strong spiritual bodies.

But God has also chosen under-shepherds as the ones to distribute this food to his flock. Like the work of farmers, the pastoral ministry is humble, aggravating and at times onerous. It requires constant and steady attention to members who like sheep are prone to wander off. But just as God uses the efforts of those who till the land and raise live stock to feed the creatures that bear his image, so He uses the work of pastors to feed and care for his new creation, those who belong to him.

These considerations should humble pastors who need to remember, as Paul wrote, that they merely plant and water, and that God ultimately gives the increase. The flipside of this point is that pastors should not feel as if a productive church depends on them. They labor faithfully and God uses their efforts to accomplish his ends. So too church members may need agrarian images to be reminded that the Christian life is just that, a life. For most people this means a lifetime of something akin to being a branch in which the bearing of fruit depends first on being united to Christ and also on the care and feeding of those farmers who tend to God's vineyard. Church officers may even learn to think about the size of congregations and the proper scale for delivering care that is appropriate to the health of God's flock. We do live in an age of industrial agriculture, just as we live during a period when the mega-church dominates discussions about the ministry. But if we are truly concerned about the quality of pastoral care and the health of congregations, we may need to learn that to cultivate trees like those described in Psalm 1, planted near streams of living water and that produce fruit in their appropriate season, we need to think more like farmers than industrialists. That means looking on the church and her ministers more in terms of nurture and quality than efficiency and numbers.

Permissions: You are permitted to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do NOT alter the wording in any way and you do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction. For web posting, a link to this document on our website is preferred. Any distributed copy must contain the following statement: By [author's full name] © [date] Westminster Seminary California.
Website: www.wscal.edu. E-mail: info@wscal.edu. Phone: 888/480.8474