Organizing for communion: Ministry in the 21st century
What is pastoral ministry like these days, and how is it being shaped in new ways? The Century talked to pastors about the challenges and surprises of their early years in ministry. This interview is the sixth in a series. A part-time pastor at Chapel Hill Mennonite Fellowship, Isaac S. Villegas also teaches classes in prisons with Project TURN and serves on the board of the North Carolina Council of Churches. He is the coauthor (with J. Alexander Sider) of Presence: Giving and Receiving God (Cascade, 2011).
What's been most surprising about being in ministry?
The deep hurt that people walk around with. People who appear quite well adjusted have sat with me and courageously shared stories of pain—wounds that don't seem to go away, no matter how good and pious and prayerful the people are. Many in the church have been to hell and back, and they go on in silence, suffering alone.
Sharing in these experiences has been a terrifying privilege—to be invited into places of such pain, to hope that the Holy Spirit may come upon us as we talk and pray, to walk away with an overwhelming sense of helplessness. I can't make life come out right for people. Pastoral care is a spiritual exercise in being humbled, in often being unable to help—yet being a presence showing solidarity, even when it means sharing in someone's hopelessness. Humility isn't a virtue that I can choose to embrace or not; it's more like the feeling that comes right after having the wind knocked out of you. I experience our world of sin as a power of suffocation, an isolating weight that keeps us from breathing the life of the Spirit.
