Dear 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.
D. G. Hart
Adjunct Professor of Church History
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