How to avoid parodies of pastoral work

If pastoral work is removed from its ground it loses...the strength to grapple with the complexities inherent in the work. Separation, by ignorance or forgetfulness, from the biblical pastoral traditions is responsible for two parodies of pastoral work: one, the naive attempt to help people on our own, as best we can, out of the natural compassion and concern we have for them; and two, the insensitive harangues from the pulpit, where, safe from the unmanageable ambiguities of bedroom and kitchen, shopping mall and workshop, corporate boardroom and legislative caucus, we confidently declaim the pure word of God to our confused flock. The Bible has the power to prevent either parody, either the naive humanist absorption into the world or the pseudo-spiritual aloofness from the world. The Bible's paradigmatic interchanges of divine and human reality inform and renew pastoral capabilities so that the work can be practiced among the commonplaces of sin with no loss of the extraordinariness of grace. But if that is to be done, the idea of quick achievement and instant exploitation must be abandoned in order to develop, painstakingly, lives in Christ that are coherent and many-dimensioned.

Eugene H. Peterson, Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work, p.7

Wisdom in the Bible

It is important...to recognise that "wisdom"...finds its home above all else in the poetical books - among metaphors, wordplay and more imaginative literature. Wisdom is not primarily interested in relating a list of theological truths, an account of history or a picture of the future. Wisdom is about the ways of things - how they are meant to exist and work - and so we find it popping up all over the Bible.

Bartholomew and O'Dowd, Old Testament Wisdom Literature, p.23

An alert and loving confrontation

Writing about the poets and others who have influenced her, and of the 'inherited responsibility' of being formed by exposure to their work, Mary Oliver says this:

I go nowhere, I arrive nowhere, without them. With them I live my life, with them I enter the event, I mold the meditation, I keep if I can some essence of the hour, even as it slips away. And I do not accomplish this alert and loving confrontation by myself and alone, but through terrifying and continual effort, and with this immeasurable, fortifying company, bright as stars in the heaven of my mind.

(Upstream, p.57f, my emphasis)

It strikes me that what she says is comparable, for those in ministry, to the great theological minds and writers we are blessed to have at our fingertips. And so, daily, to this alert and loving confrontation, with terrifying and continual effort.