A minor Poet? A response on The Pastor as Minor Poet by Craig Barnes

In the book The Pastor as Minor Poet the author paints a picture on how the pastor is called to minister in the contemporary world as a poet while the Scripture and Theology functions as the major poet. By asking the pastor to be a minor poet, the book certainly doesn’t mean him to write poems but to find the portal where his congregation can come in contact with the text and how the poet can look beneath the ordinary lives of the members of the congregation to serve them better. A pastor is not just someone who stands on a pulpit on Sunday and shows his theological skills, a pastor is much more than that. There has been a shift in the way the pew has started looking at pastors— Does my pastor know the answers to all the questions? all life problems? Should a decision to choose a pastor be centered upon if he is an extrovert or good with kids? These avenues can be good to explore but they diminish the larger calling of the Church and its Pastors.

The Pastor and the Church

Barnes criticizes how contemporary churches have started to act like business enterprises. The church goers expect the church and the staff to fulfill all the needs in a sense as a business enterprise does, or they are always ready to go down the street to find another enterprise. The modern struggle of the pastor is different; it’s not spending long hours on sermon preparation, it is the challenge to be all that his pew expects and the pastor sometimes unknowingly sets up a success metric for himself on the basis of how much he can fulfill all the needs of his pew. This is not a mere problem of consumerism, but a problem of mis constructed identity. Barnes uses the doctrine of creation ex nihilo to explain how everything points back to nothingness if God is not accounted in for the meaning and purpose of things that we look around. Man was born out of dust, and the dust came from nothing, so the ultimate meaning of man without God is nothingness. The clergy struggles with these identity issues which manifests in the form of astronomical expectations for a church to be the perfect institution and the pastor to be their Saviour, but pastor is not the Saviour, Jesus is. It is the church—the community through which God is accomplishing his purposes. Likewise, the pastor should not be understood as a perfectly equipped professional who can become whatever the congregation wants him to be. The pastor is himself a broken person being sanctified, a work in progress. Christ loves the church sacrificially, and the pastor is called to participate in that love. But that love becomes possible when the pastor's identity and meaning are not dependent upon the church's approval, success, size, or ability to meet his own needs.

A poetic Pastor and an Unpoetic congregation

A pastor is thus expected to be someone who can look at the subtext of life or sometime dwell in the mystery of not knowing the answers. He certainly is not someone who can answer all the questions, but someone who can point at the major poet or sometime help you be comfortable in the mysteries of life. The challenge of a pastor is not figuring out solutions, budgets, and strategy for the next quarter but to get to the layer of subtext of the members of his congregation. Congregational conversations often remain at the level of small talk and ordinary concerns. Barnes beautifully brings the metaphor of fig leaves from Genesis— these small talks are like fig leaves meant to protect the individual from the exposure to the major poet i.e. The Scripture: thus, the congregation needs a minor poet to uncover the spiritual reality lying beneath their ordinary lives. Burnout at work, for example, may reflect an attempt to find significance in one's work. Thus, we can say a good number of the conversations are not deeply theological or even spiritual but simply ordinary; a pastor must learn to look at ordinary material life and see its spiritual significance. Ordinary things can carry a deep spiritual significance. The materialistic philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach said “A man is what he eats” meaning there is no significance to man after all, no deeper meaning to life. On the contrary, Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann agrees to this that we are what we eat but this very act of eating is spiritual. The biblical interpretation of life is that we were created hungry and the entire world is our food. Even a small act of eating is an act of communion with God. It is interesting how the major plot in Genesis is centered around eating. Thus, Material things can be means through which we encounter and enjoy God.

Barnes brings out an important question that particularly interested me — given the multi-faceted expectations of the pew from the pastor to be everything and to be the answer to every question, can the pastor be a role model too? Barnes’s answer is interesting — Pastors can be role models but not models of perfection. We often assume that a role model is someone who has figured it all, mastered life, overcome every weakness and knows how to handle every situation. If that is our understanding then we can be easily disappointed because the pastor also experiences fear, anxiety, uncertainty and certainly suffering. Then the question is what is he a model of? A pastor models confession, dependence on God, vulnerability, humility, and persistent hope. The ministry that a pastor does is from this place of human weakness and dependence, not from a position of superiority or completeness. Often times, parishioners mistakenly assume that the pastor has it all figured out which is why often times when a pastor encounters a rough patch which becomes visible for the parishioner, the parishioner goes through a sever discomfort and starts questioning God, this arises due to a misplaced expectation in the first place. A pastor's weakness does not necessarily disqualify him from ministry; his response to weakness can shape how he ministers. Pastors must not depend on congregational approvals or the feeling of being needed for their identity. In other words, the pastor is not the hero of the story, he is also a person being sustained by God's grace. Thus, the pastor is a poet who looks in the subtexts of life and models dependence of God in midst of his own weakness and failures. He helps the congregation to experience what Jesus is already doing and what has he already done on the cross rather than just being a person that spits out easy quick fixes of life.

A craft of the minor poet

Barnes shares some ideas on ways a pastor can act as the Poet. The Scripture is God’s word, which remains unchanged for centuries and continues to minister people, the minor poet is going to be an instrument for God in his ministry. Usually, we do exegesis over a particular portion and talk about it on Sundays. Barnes suggests that some passages of the Scripture can act as portals, and he advises the pastor to find the kerygma— the point where a congregation can encounter the text. Consider John chapter 4 where we read the encounter of the unnamed Samaritan woman with Jesus Christ. This is a well-known account and most probably the congregation already knows. Now kerygma can vary depending upon lot of things, in this story the main identifier of the woman becomes as someone who had five husbands, and maybe today we have such identifiers of our own like failed attempts in business, failed attempts in parenting and so on. Thus, the Scripture acts as the portal where it can meet the congregation. The text should not be read through the culture’s lens, but the text should be the lens that reads the culture. Sometimes kerygma can be found in the hard sections of the passage, and it may take some personal reflection and time for the text to meet the poet first. The kerygma is discovered through careful attention to the text, and the poet’s job is to find that and use it as a portal.

The advice is not to find portals to one’s psyche was striking to me. Barnes suggests that parishioners should be read biblically and we should be humble enough to realize where we can’t help and we may need to refer the parishioner to someone else who is trained in that trade instead of us imitating the trade. There might be occasions where there is a clear need for interventions of a therapeutic counselor and the poet should be aware of that need and should partner in the healing process.