by Cody J. Sanders, guest co-editor
The questions I am most often asked by students preparing for ministry in our era of intense division and political conflict are usually not about what is right or wrong to believe. They often already know where they stand on many of the biggest issues of justice, politics, social and environmental wellbeing, and the like.
Their questions are most often about how to work with people they disagree with, and congregants who will disagree with their stances. Questions about how to be true to their convictions while pastoring churches that won’t necessarily agree with them, or even understand their convictions as having anything to do with the practice of Christian faith. They’re questions about how to help move people toward convictions that are more shaped by the gospel’s penchant for peace rooted in justice in the flesh and blood realities of life, rather than a detached individualistic spirituality focused on comfort in the present and security in the hereafter.
My students ask good, practical questions about what it is to be a pastor right now, and I don’t always have the best answers. But here are a few attempts at conveying lessons I’m learning as I grow into what it means to be a pastor today. This pastoral advice won’t save the world, win arguments, or persuade the masses. But I believe they point to helpful pastoral practices in an era when it’s become difficult to be a pastor (though it’s still the best job I know).
Move Toward Others, rather than Away
I was speaking to a colleague once about another ministerial figure who had made some unusual public statements on an issue that set him at odds with many clergy-types within the same general theological fold who held very different perspectives on the matter at hand.
“What in the world was he thinking?” I asked. “I can’t quite imagine what was behind that.”
“Well,” my colleague said, “I called him up and invited him to lunch so I could understand where he was coming from.”
In moments like these, I realize I’m not as mature as I wish I were. Why didn’t I think of that? Taking him to lunch. Asking questions. Listening to a story. Not necessarily coming to any agreement, but at least coming to some sense of understanding of another with whom you are bound in this large, loose collective of Christian ministry praxis.
We talk a lot about polarization these days. It’s perhaps not as comprehensive a diagnosis as we believe for the troubles we face. But what we usually mean is ideological polarization. Two parties hold extremely divergent perspectives on issue like immigration policy, trans rights, etc., and never the twain shall meet. But there are other types of polarization to which social scientists point.
Affective polarization describes the growing animosity between people in different parties, different churches, different sides of big social issues. It’s more about the ways we feel toward the other than it is how our thinking differs from theirs. Outrage at the other fuels this type of polarization, and our algorithmically curated online lives accelerate the blaze.
False polarization occurs when we overestimate the degree of difference in point of view between us (and those in our camp) and “the other side.” When we believe we differ so dramatically from the “other,” we tend to interpret anything we see or hear or experience from that other through our lens of false polarization – perhaps believing that there is nothing we could ever agree on. They think X, so we could never see eye-to-eye on Y or Z! When our views on many concerns may very well be much closer to one another than we are able to see.
False polarization invites an imagination about what the other is like that may not be quite accurate. We can easily imagine that someone who thinks that wouldn’t be someone I’d want to share a meal with. But this becomes a dangerous form of polarization when we’re sharing the same pews, the same denominations, the same institutions.
So, the pastoral advice: Invite someone to lunch with whom you disagree on something that matters to your common life and have a real conversation. Ask really good, curious questions that are framed with compassion and to which you genuinely don’t know the answer. Listen with deep interest to the mystery of the other. And ask if they’re interested in hearing how you came to see the issues at hand the way that you see them. Then tell a good story, rich with detail. Reveal the complexities where they exist in your own thinking, too. Shed the talking points and the pretense of ideological purity.
How we came to think the things we think and believe the beliefs we believe is often far more interesting and helpful in understanding one another than simply knowing the thoughts and beliefs themselves. What are the values behind our beliefs and positions? How did we come to appreciate these values? What is feeling like a threat to us and/or our values, or those we love and care for? What are our best hopes for the community we wish to live within, and what would it mean if those hopes came to fruition? Where do we find our own values and hopes and commitments resonating with those of the other? Understanding these things can begin eroding the affective and false polarization that may be keeping us from getting somewhere in conversation on a concern of importance. (A helpful resource for developing your skill with this kind of conversation is Mónica Guzmán’s 2022 book, I Never Thought of it That Way.)
Commit Yourself to Relationships, Not to Platforms
In a moment of righteous zeal, I once took to social media to rail against a local establishment that had wronged a dear friend of mine in what was, by all accounts, an act of ableist discrimination in a public establishment. I wanted people to call, to write, to boycott over the injustice done to my friend by this place and its proprietors.
I was absolutely right about the matter. No question about it. But a local minister saw my social media post and commented something to the effect of, “I know this place. Let me reach out and see what’s going on.”
He went down to the establishment himself and reported back that the issue had been one predicated on some cultural differences and misunderstandings and that the proprietors were very sorry for how they had handled the situation and wanted to apologize personally to my friend.
Why didn’t I think of that? It was probably two miles from my house. I could have gone down and advocated for my friend and asked for some clarity and understanding on the matter. Instead, I took to social media. And despite being right about their actions, I was ineffective in building the community that I wanted to live in, for myself and for my disabled friend.
This pastor, on the other hand, was committed to more than being right. He was committed to a person-centered approach to the situation. He wanted to weave a stronger relational tapestry in his neighborhood. My allyship was platformed and rather performative, morally right though it may have been. His was relational and communal.
The pastoral advice: Be more committed to relationships in person than to platforms online. It seems like pedantic advice for people in a profession predicated on relationship. But sociologically, it’s necessary right now.
Marc Dunkleman in his book, The Vanishing Neighbor, explains the ways that our intimate circle of relationships – family and close friendships – has grown tighter over the past few decades with the rise of social media and connective technology. (How many of you keep up with your kids or grandkids a thousand miles away with apps on your phone or tablet?) And our connection to those in our “tribe” – those with whom we share some affinity or political commitments or religious similarities, even if we don’t know them personally – has also strengthened. (The algorithm feeds us more of what we like and shows us the posts of people with whom we agree.)
What has diminished in recent decades is our connection to the familiar-but-not-intimate neighbor – those in our “village.” The people we meet in third spaces like restaurants and coffee shops (where we still go but are mostly on our phones and devices when we get there). The people who live on our block who get home and go straight inside and don’t come out until they go to work again in the morning. The people we encounter in public but don’t engage because we’re looking down, engaging our friends, family, and tribe on our phones instead. These are the “vanishing neighbors” in Dunkleman’s book title. And these are the relationships where we learn to live with people who are different from us and who think differently from us, to figure out ways of getting along with those with whom we disagree, to appreciate perspectives we wouldn’t otherwise encounter and learn from them, even if we don’t agree with them.
Pastors can often garner larger audiences online than they have flocks in their congregations. Sometimes this can be used for very helpful and effective ministry. We shouldn’t discount it. Yet, within the reign of algorithmic capitalism, committing ourselves to people over platforms – and helping our congregations to do so as well – is an act of resistance to the commodification of our attention (which, says Simone Weil, is the same thing as prayer), and resistance to the erosion of relationships of potential solidarity-across-difference.
Speaking to Be Engaged, Not just to Be Right
Many years ago, I visited a church for the first time during the Advent season. The preacher began his sermon with the words: “I want to preface this sermon by saying that I don’t believe in the literal virgin birth.” With that, a woman in a pew down toward the front of the sanctuary got up, scooted out to the center aisle, and clomped her high heels very loudly down the long stone path to the back of the church, slamming the doors behind her as she exited. No one said a word the entire time it took for her to make her exit. I’ll never forget that scene.
The pastor awkwardly continued his sermon by saying something like, “If she had stayed a little longer, she would have heard me say, ‘But I do believe in the miracle of Christmas,’” or something like that. It was a very good sermon. And nothing about it was predicated on the pastor or anyone else needing to believe or disbelieve the literal virgin birth.
I could never figure out why he needed the congregation to know he didn’t believe in the literal virgin birth before he preached to them the gospel that came through in the sermon after those words. There was so much goodness to be engaged in the sermon that pastor delivered, both by people who believed in the literal virgin birth and by those who didn’t.
The pastoral advice: Don’t swallow the words you need to speak. But say them in a way that people can hear them and engage them, not just agree or disagree with them. Audre Lorde, in her famed The Master’s Tools book, wrote, “Without community, there is no liberation…but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.” Sometime our differences need to take center stage in a conversation within community. If we leave our differences on major concerns at the door of the church, then we’re submitting to the reality that the gospel will likely have about two hours of airtime a week – at most – in many of our congregants’ lives as they consider the biggest issues we face in the world, and cable news and talk radio and social media feeds and podcast hosts will possess all the rest of their waking hours.
Some messages necessitate a prophetic stand on the side of those pushed to the precipice of our contemporary life in the world. Pastoral words spoken for LGBTQIA inclusivity and justice, for standing in solidarity with our immigrant neighbors, resisting our slide into fascism, siding with the poor in our communities over the greed of billionaires, and so much more. And we may find ourselves with an invitation to leave our ministries over the stands we take and ask others to take alongside us on these matters. (I was fired from the second ministerial position I ever held in a circumstance filled with some of these very dynamics. It’s not fun. But who would I have been if I had swallowed my words and subjugated my conscience?)
But at times, we say the things we need to say in a way that only invites people to take a side and defend it even when the stakes aren’t as high as those named in the paragraph above. We demand ideological purity from our conversation partners before we can truly engage in dialogue. We refuse to converse with those who disagree with us about X, even if the conversation is about Y or Z. (If you don’t agree with my critique of capitalism, then how could we ever talk about anti-racism?)
I’m not an advocate of the take-it-so-slow-that-you-don’t-ever-get-there approach to important concerns of justice, which is the prevailing ethos in many parishes. But neither am I a fan of the if-your-church-doesn’t-address-X-this-Sunday-then-find-a-new-church ethos that is often promulgated online after any event of national importance transpires. Pastors are growing in our understanding of the gospel’s implications for our life in the world, too. Sometimes we get it wrong, or we speak too slowly, or we don’t quite have the words to say but are trying to find them. Sometimes our congregations need to witness us faithfully struggling with these important concerns. They need to be invited into conversations that are not choose-a-side-and-defend-it style conversations but are, instead, dialogical explorations of complexities with compassion and curiosity and criticality and, yes, even the provocation of some conflict over matters of importance. Ideological purity won’t get us there, and being right won’t mean much when there’s no one left to engage in the communal practices of the gospel alongside us.
Root it in the Gospel, Not in Talking Points
So often, students will ask how they speak prophetically about concerns of justice in a congregation that holds a diversity of opinions on the matter, or where the majority may disagree with their stance on poverty or trans rights or immigration, etc. It’s a helpful question in our congregationally conflicted age. I’ve known churches where nothing of importance is ever said from the pulpit for fear of offending, or dividing, or turning certain people off, or seeming too political, and the “gospel” is tepidly reduced to something akin to “believe in God and be nice to everyone.” And I’ve known churches where every week the sermon is a social justice rally speech, only tangentially connected to the day’s biblical texts, where everyone in the congregation already agrees with what the preacher is saying and feels good about hearing it, but no one grows in their spiritual grounding or rootedness in the faith.
Both, to my mind, are ineffective in speaking prophetically about concerns of justice.
The pastoral advice: Root it all in the gospel. There’s too much thin progressive, peace-and-justice Christianity that espouses all the right ways of thinking and being and belonging in the world, but is not sufficiently engaged with the biblical text or traditions of faith, or rooted in the gospel, or confounded by the mission, message and ministry of Jesus. And there’s too much tepid Christianity that is entirely disengaged from the lives of the people and world that Jesus loves, promoting a navel-gazing spirituality and a go-along-to-get-along ecclesiology that is the dry rot of Christianity in the U.S. (There are also plenty of churches espousing the heresy of White Christian Nationalism and the like, but I’m doubtful they are reading this article.)
Root your perspective on divisive issues that are causing our congregations and communities great conflict right now firmly within the gospel. Preach the biblical text with close, critical attention and the assumption that even your own views (right though they may be) will be challenged by the subversive message of scripture. It won’t not get you fired. It won’t be the trump card that wins the argument or brings together a divided congregation. It won’t even resolve all the conundrums of our current era.
But without a rootedness in the gospel, what are we even doing?
Cody J. Sanders is a Baptist minister serving as associate professor of congregational and community care leadership at Luther Seminary, Saint Paul, MN, and guest co-editor of this issue of Christian Ethics Today. He also serves on the CET board.
