Mr Greene, author of the classic book about ministry in the workplace, Thank God It's Monday (Scripture Union, 1994), brilliantly described the unwritten therapeutic contract between congregations and their pastors.
You, pastor, will look after me and support me and affirm me and in return I will come along to church and support your ministry.
Mr Greene of course affirmed that pastors should look after their people but pointed out that the pastor's God-given vocation is to be a disciple-maker, a calling that cuts across the pastoral expectation of most congregations.
People generally will not leave churches because the pastor neglected to make them better disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ; they will generally leave churches because the pastor broke the therapeutic contract by upsetting them.
This liberating explanation by Mr Greene explains the tension in pastoral ministry experienced by those of us frontline clergy who want to be disciple-makers rather than amateur therapists. Being faithful to the Lord Jesus involves subverting the pastoral contract and that carries a personal cost by the pastor, which must be courageously paid.
Your curate suggests it would be very useful if Mr Greene were to explain the concept of the unwritten therapeutic contract to church congregations, clearly a more difficult and prophetic task than explaining it to clergy.
Blogging off for the next few weeks, cc wishes the youth group a fruitful summer, especially in those parts of the United Kingdom where a hose pipe ban remains in force, and leaves you with the BCP Collect for the fifth Sunday after Trinity (desperately urgent for UK Christians):
Grant, O Lord, we beseech thee, that the course of this world may be so peaceably ordered by thy governance, that thy Church may joyfully serve thee in all godly quietness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
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Julian. I listened to Mark Greene's address to the 3rd Lausanne Congress for World Evangelisation in growing disbelief, for conspicuous by its absence was any attempt to relate evangelism to NT principles of ministry. Indeed the Bible was barely mentioned at all!
ReplyDeleteMr Greene critically alluded several times to "the sacred/secular divide, but failed to see the contradiction of his approval of the false construct of "lay and ordained".
I was certainly baffled by his question at one point: "Who is going to maximise the multinationals for good?" What was that meant to mean I wonder?
The same theoretical waffle emerges in your quotation of his theory of an "unwritten therapeutic contract between congregations and their pastors."
Whatever that actually means I think only he could try to explain, but surely he cannot seriously think that the collective minds of congregations work in that way?
Where do we find "therapeutic contracts" in the NT, or any hint of such a strange concept in say, the Pastoral epistles particularly?
And what is its link with "disciple-making"?
Thank you Graham - I personally find it helpful to think about Mr Greene's insight along these lines: it is the difference between a consumerist attitude towards church and a God-centred attitude. The consumerist attitude asks 'what's in it for me?'; the God-centred attitude asks: 'What's in it for the Kingdom of God?'.
ReplyDeleteThe calling of the pastor is surely to be God-centred in their own discipleship and to equip others to orient their lives in that direction as disciples of Christ.
. . . . ."the pastor's God-given vocation is to be a disciple-maker, a calling that cuts across the pastoral expectation of most congregations."
ReplyDeleteThis is certainly very true of the small rural congregations where I have spent all my ministry. Of course the people would not express their relationship with 'the Rector' as a 'therapeutic contract' but that IS the expectation. I have known two instances where the relationship has broken down for this very reason. In one instance the diocese concerned refused to renew the contract of the Priest-in-Charge and he left the ministry a spiritually broken man.
In many cases we are struggling with decades of in-built wrong teaching and expectations - harking back to the old 'paternalism' of the squirearchy.
The answer is straight down the line Biblical teaching.
Blessings
Terry
Thanks Julian- that's very, very helpful. I can recall conversations just in the last week where the "therapeutic contract" vs disciplemaking has been the issue. My experience is exactly that of Tio Tel's
ReplyDeleteHave a good holiday.
Stephen Walton
Marbury
Thank you Julian, very interesting!
ReplyDeleteMy experience is that an evangelical vicar can perpetuate the "therapeutic contract" themselves... at least to some extent. By which I mean, that whether or not they are pastoring the individual they CERTAINLY do not encourage or support serious evangelistic endeavours. Indeed, they can even be obstrucive, taking the attitude "You shouldn't be doing that, I didn't authorise it!" (Never mind that Jesus authorised us ALL to go and make disciples!)
In case this sounds like mere rebellion, it is not; it is not that I wished to work outside the church-structure - and indeed I personally would prefer to work in a church setting - but that the church does not run enough evangelistic projects for all of the congregation to be seriously involved in, and does not like people to start their own in the community.
A "thriving" evangelical church with a membership of 200 should surely have twice as much active and serious evangelism as a thriving evangelical church of 100, but that is not the case. And this is not necessarily because the vicar is concerned about losing the support of his congregation if he becomes more mission-focussed, but because (a) he simply does not have the time to oversee all the potential evangelism that the congregation COULD be involved in and (b) he appears to feel threatened by members of the congregation taking the initiative in the secular community.
Of course, members of the congregation taking the initiative could lead to heresy, but the pattern in Acts appears to be that when the Apostles heard of some evangelistic work elsewhere, rather than automatically assuming that there was something amiss they went and investigated and corrected if necessary.
Examples: Acts 11:19ff, on hearing about the new church in Antioch, the church at Jerusalem sent Barnabas; 18:24-28, Priscilla and Aquila corrected and encouraged Apollos rather than saying he should not evangelise; Acts 19, Paul corrected the false or inadequate teaching in Ephesus.
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