Ministry of Reconciliation or Clowning Around?: A Seminary Student Reflects On "C.P.E."

Written by Michael R. Walker

Wednesday, 04 October 2006 18:00

This is a guest post from Alec Flynt, a student at Princeton Seminary who is preparing for ordained ministry in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). As part of the ordination process, most presbyteries require participation in a program called "Clinical Pastoral Education." This program varies from place to place, but it usually involves being a "chaplain" in a healthcare environment, a field where the definition and means of "healing" are often derived from the social sciences apart from a Christian theological foundation. Many people end up with the same question I had after doing CPE: "Why does the church want to train me for Christian ministry by asking me to learn how to be an atheological healthcare chaplain?" Or something of that order. The impact this required 'training' has on the ministry of the PC(USA) is significant. In this post, Alec Flynt reflects on his experience of CPE this past summer. His experience, like mine, should raise serious questions about the appropriateness of many of the CPE programs utilized by our church's governing bodies to train ordinands for ministering the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Alec writes:

“Alec, you’re always so focused on Jesus.” “Alec, you’re just too Christocentric.” “Alec, it would be helpful for you to stop focusing on the redemptive nature of Christ so much.”These were a few of the comments from my “mainline” peers during my summer of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE). Whenever we would have a “feelings-fest” (this is my name for the group counseling sessions that take place during CPE), I would share about my difficulty formulating a pastoral identity in my role as a chaplain. My peers, offering what they considered a very loving critique, would tell me to stop trying to formulate such a Christological understanding of chaplaincy. At first, I was very offended and confused by their comments. How could the foundation of Christian ministry be anything other than Jesus Christ?

Well, the CPE program did its best to show me how ministry could begin somewhere other than Jesus!

I’m not writing this to complain about CPE, my wife knows that I have done enough of that. I am writing because I believe my experiences in CPE are indicative of much of current mainline theology and ministry practice. It seems that most of the mainline, and this includes my own denomination (the PCUSA), has lost its foundation for ministry. Our ministries have become so obsessed with healing people through the social sciences that we have forgotten about our cosmic calling.

I had a friend tell me the other day that his pastor told him he did not believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. My friend was a little shocked by this statement, but he quickly asked the pastor: “So why are you in ministry?” The pastor replied, “Because I am helping people. I am making them happy.” To this my friend sarcastically said, “Well why not be a clown, clowning makes people happy?” (I am not trying to make fun of the clowning industry, they are a wonderful group, although I am deathly afraid of all clowns). The minister told him he would be a clown if he were good at clowning. But being a pastor was his talent. Therefore, he became a pastor.

Often times, when I entered a hospital room, I thought I might as well be dressed in a clown suit. Without the Gospel of Jesus Christ, I had very little to give away. I am not trying to say that the skills of compassion, presence, and listening are not valuable for incarnating the love of God. But if we are really honest, all of us want more than just a pat on the shoulder or a smile when we are confused, scared, and hopeless.

So what is missing in our ministry? How do we begin to have ministry that is founded on more than the existential search for personal meaning and happiness? Quite obviously, I think our ministry needs to begin with the Revelation of God in Jesus Christ.

For most of us, we are pretty good at realizing that it is necessary to care for others. We can easily connect that to the ministry of Jesus as he loved, cared, and healed ordinary people. But I would like to suggest that we need to simultaneously, or maybe more appropriately, dialectically, lead, point, and incarnate the ministry of reconciliation that was always integral to Jesus’ own ministry. When the four friends lowered the paralytic man into Jesus’ presence, Jesus immediately told the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven” (Mark 2:1-12). We know that Jesus cared about the man’s paralysis because he heals him in verses 11 and 12. But this comes after Jesus has forgiven the paralytic. Jesus understood that the man’s problem was not limited to his paralysis. His problem ran deeper. His problem was the sin that separated him from the one true God.

Is it possible to formulate a pastoral identity that does not separate the person and work of Jesus Christ? Is it possible for our ministries to be just as concerned with the spiritual condition of sin as they are with the physical condition of paralysis or cancer?

I never heard a thorough discussion of sin in CPE. We only discussed sin as it pertained to the therapeutic issues such as patients believing their sin lead to cancer. We discussed how to lead people away from the idea that their sin caused their illness or disease. But we never looked at sin as an important aspect of true pastoral care. The Presbyterian Church (USA) believes a theology of sin is fundamental to pastoral care:

The call to healing in pastoral care involves the recognition in each one’s life of the reality of sin which is the source of all human brokenness. The believing community announces the good news of God whose love gives people grace (The Book of Order, W-6.3009).

Our encounter with the living Jesus Christ calls us to become aware of sin and grace. Pastoral care that does not address the role of sin in our broken world will only lead people to confusion and emptiness. As we seek to heal and care for those who are facing sickness, death, abuse, and broken relationships, we must also help them find healing for their deepest illness and sickness: sin. As ministers of the Gospel, we know healing from sin is only found in the risen and living Lord Jesus Christ. It is in this Jesus that we find our true hope in lost times. It is in this Jesus that we find our true happiness in a painful world. It is in this Jesus that we find the fulfillment of our existential desires in a confusing cosmos. For the mainline church, to begin ministry at any other starting point other than Jesus Christ may just be clowning around.

The Notebook

Calvin quotes

Here are a few quotes from Calvin's Institutes that I selected for inclusion in a church magazine to reflect the basic posture of Calvin's piety, oriented as it is toward magnifying the glory of God and subordinating self-concern. Unfortunately these don't convey the Christological centered-ness of his piety, but they convey where Christ leads us by the Spirit:

"We are consecrated and dedicated to God in order that we may thereafter think, speak, meditate, and do, nothing except to his glory."

"We are not our own: let not our reason nor our will, therefore, sway our plans and deeds. We are not our own: let us therefore not set it as our goal to seek what is expedient for us according to the flesh. We are not our own: in so far as we can, let us therefore forget ourselves and all that is ours. Conversely, we are God's: let us therefore live for him and die for him. We are God's: let his wisdom and will therefore rule all our actions. We are God's: let all the parts of our life accordingly strive toward him as our only lawful goal."

"We ought to we seek not the things that are ours but those which are of the Lord's will and will serve to advance his glory. This is also evidence of great progress: that, almost forgetful of ourselves, surely subordinating our self-concern, we try faithfully to devote our zeal to God and his commandments. For when Scripture bids us leave off self-concern, it not only erases from our minds the yearning to possess, the desire for power, and the favor of men, but it also uproots ambition and all craving for human glory and other more secret plagues. Accordingly, the Christian must surely be so disposed and minded that he feels within himself it is with God he has to deal throughout his life. In this way, as he will refer all he has to God's decision and judgment, so will he refer his whole intention of mind scrupulously to Him. For he who has learned to look to God in all things that he must do, at the same time avoids all vain thoughts. This, then, is that denial of self which Christ enjoins with such great earnestness upon his disciples at the outset of their service."

Ecclesiology and the Cartesian Turn

Janos Pasztor offers a packed summary of some of the ecclesiological consequences of the so-called "Cartesian turn" - the rise of the anthropological starting point -- and often endpoint -- in the pursuit of knowledge that became dominant among philosophers in the 18th century and has characterize "Modern" thought):

"Theology itself was very considerably influenced by this development. It was a 180-degree turn: it began losing its theocentric character and became more and more anthropocentric. For these kinds of theologies it was not God who would come to man addressing him in his life-giving Word, but man would make attempts to approach God by means of an intellectual enterprise. A late twentieth-century representative of this trend of thought says: 'God is the object of my consciousness which I perceive in so far as I perceive something, that is I allot him a place within the framework of a sign-system, in order to be able to talk to others about this matter.' Consequently, the church is the people, who, by virtue of having accepted the common sign-system, are seeking common answers to the meaning of existence.

"These trends of thought, however respectable they might have been otherwise, have rejected most of the things the Reformers stood for. The divine Logos, the eternal Son, 'true God from true God, begotten not made, of one Being with the Father,' became the Logos of the philosophers, a principle and idea, or a set of thoughts. As Blaise Pascal put it, here one has to deal with the God of the philosophers instead of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus Christ. Instead of listening obedience to the Word of God, one meets the rule of reason in rationalism; instead of the freedom of God's liberated children, one gets the freedom of the individual thinker in liberailsm. These ideas had a devastating effect on the field of Christology. They brought about what has been termed by Hungarian theologians, a Unitarian theology in everything but name."

"...the church is nothing but one of the many human organizations dealing with issues like religion and morals."

"....For people with that kind of idea, catholicity meant 'as opposed to confessional catholicity...the universal kingdom of spirit, but something other than the Holy Spirit,' if it meant anything at all."

Janos Pasztor, "The Catholicity of Reformed Theology," Toward the Future of Reformed Theology (Eerdmans, 1999), p. 29.

Recovering the Wounded: Healing a Church in Exile

Psalm 147:2: "The Lord builds up Jerusalem; he gathers the outcasts of Israel."

Commenting on this verse, Calvin expreses confidence that God would ultimately restore the Church from the ruinous state that formed so much of Calvin's own life:

"In calling God the former and architect of the Church, his object is to make us aware that by his power it remains in a firm condition, or is restored when in ruins. Hence he infers that it is in his power and arbitrament to gather those who have been dispersed. Here the Psalmist would comfort those miserable exiles who had been scattered in various quarters, with the hope of being recovered from their dispersion, as God had not adopted them without a definite purpose into one body. As he had ordered his temple and altar to be erected at Jerusalem, and had fixed his seat there, the Psalmist would encourage the Jews who were exiles from their native country, to entertain good hope of a return, intimating that it was no less properly God’s work to raise up his Church when ruined and fallen down, than to found it at first. It was not, therefore, the Psalmist’s object directly to celebrate the free mercy of God in the first institution of the Church, but to argue from its original, that God would not suffer his Church altogether to fall, having once founded it with the design of preserving it for ever; for he forsakes not the work of his own hands.

This comfort ought to be improved by ourselves at the present period, when we see the Church on every side so miserably rent asunder, leading us to hope that all the elect who have been adjoined to Christ’s body, will be gathered unto the unity of the faith, although now scattered like members torn from one another, and that the mutilated body of the Church, which is daily distracted, will be restored to its entireness; for God will not suffer his work to fail.

In the following verse he insists upon the same truth, the figure suggesting that though the Church labor under, and be oppressed by many diseases, God will speedily and easily recover it from all its wounds. The same truth, therefore, is evidently conveyed, under a different form of expression — that the Church, though it may not always be in a flourishing condition, is ever safe and secure, and that God will miraculously heal it, as though it were a diseased body."

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