We asked experienced pastors and seminary professors to put themselves in the apostle Paul’s shoes: You’re writing a letter to a present-day ministry leader. What issues do you want to address, and what theology can you bring to bear on them?
Dear Pastor,
My friend, welcome to the fellowship of pastors. This informal community consists of those for whom God’s call on our lives has exceeded our ability to resist. We do not enter into this fellowship as a stepping stone to personal fame or glory. Rather, we are driven by God’s call for us to be of service to others rather than to ourselves. This is the blessed burden that we each shoulder, with the help and power of a living God working through us, to be what we could not be on our own.
As we attempt to live into this noble calling, the Bible offers us many reminders to remain ever diligent against losing our way. We read story after story of those who began faithfully pursuing their call in God, only to get lost on their way and end up in a very different place than they began.
Given the tremendous sacrifice that comes with this call, is it possible to lose ourselves? At the end of our journey, having lived lives filled with seemingly good works and made sacrifices in pursuit of God’s Well done, could we nonetheless find ourselves woefully short of our goal? Might we understand our pastoral identity in such a way that we fill our lives with activity that seems righteous to our congregation or community, lauded for its selflessness, satisfying internal standards we have set for ourselves, and still not please the God we serve? Are there forces at work that may corrupt our identity—and by extension our service to God—from the inside, robbing our deeds of any substance and even allowing us to perceive falsely that we are standing with God?
It is this last concern that causes me to pen this letter to you. I believe there are forces at work that threaten your understanding of yourself and your congregation, while robbing your service of its substance and your God of God’s glory, leaving you like the goats in Matthew 25, wondering what went wrong. I also believe that these forces seeking to corrupt your service are of even greater consequence for a pastor of color.
This is one of many tough questions you will face during your pastoral journey—from your congregants, your community, and your own conscience. Ironically, the most difficult questions often have seemingly self-evident answers, answers that only serve to mask their profound complexity.
For example, it may come as no surprise to you that when asking any pastor about who they are and what they do, the answer seems self-evident. After years of training and service in ministry, if there is one thing you are likely confident in, it’s your vocational identity, seen through the prism of God’s activity in and through your life as you boldly invite others to join in God’s transformative work. Yet despite your certitude, there likely lingers within you a troubling suspicion that you may not be as certain of who you profess to be as you proclaim—and that your identity and service may be shaped by forces you are not always fully aware of or adequately acknowledge.
In this regard, you are far from alone. For many of us, our vocational identity is draped in all the rich religious symbols, rhetoric, and rituals at our disposal. However, upon close examination, we are often uncomfortably akin to the emperor with no clothes as we participate in performances that reveal more about our vulnerabilities than our certainties. As if this weren’t unsettling enough, we must also consider the complexity of different aspects of our vocational identity, some of them particular and others universal. While the question of vocational identity applies to any of us serving the church, compelling each of us to reflect on who we are in light of the work we believe God has called us to, we must also consider our particularity—the ways specific aspects of our identity shape how we understand and express our vocational identity. It is this consideration for which the issue of race is of particular importance.
As African American clergy, the best among us strive to provide those we serve with a bivocal counternarrative to the world. We offer the universally treasured Christian invitation to resist conformity to the cultural norms of our time, renewing our minds in a way of life that turns the world’s norms upside down. However, this universal message, when encountered through the lens of Blackness, is also an invitation to resist the particularly debilitating forces of culture—while also remaining attuned to the historical realities of lives that are far too often subjected to the lethality of anti-Blackness and the commodification of African American existence.
The particular permutation of identity, existing at the intersection of our theology and economic ideology and encountered through the hermeneutics of race, informs our understanding of the vocational calling of African American clergy as expressed in Luke 4:16–19. We are called to consider how the spiritual and material needs of our communities are shaped by prevailing economic ideologies while also being theological responders to oppression, following the example of Jesus. This perspective offers what many African American clergy consider the self-evident response to vocational questions, given the history of liberative thought in the Black church.
However, the deeper complexities of vocational identity require us to also ask ourselves something else: Have we adequately considered the ways economic forces shape more than just our responses to the realities our communities face? Before lifting our voices in proclamation or leading our people in protest, has our identity, or the theology undergirding it, already been (de)formed by the economic milieu in which we are immersed, leading to our inadvertently becoming complicit in the very commodification we aim to resist?
For example, many of us, immersed in economic ideologies imposed upon us by culture and reinforced by practice, have become addicted to the seductive ideas of meritocracy, individual achievement, economic prosperity, and personal agency, all supported by and in support of particular economic ideologies. In too many pulpits, we witness economic ideas, parading as theology, that sustain ecclesial institutions and practices complicit in the maintenance of systems that are damning to African American existence. Or we watch as our congregations follow our lead and internalize constructions of their Christian identity stripped of its theological substance, where our faith has been hollowed out, and the church joins the emperor naked before the world.
I can hear the vigorous objections of some of our fellow colleagues, dismissing these concerns in light of the decades of the historical-theological witness of Black theology. However, their reaction may merely reflect the lack of critical self-reflection on the influence economic ideology has on the theological principles that shape vocational and congregational identity as we each live out the truth that it is much harder to be in the world and not a part of it. While these blind spots exist for all Christians, they present particularly pernicious problems for those of us who come from or minister to communities of color that have been segregated from economic inclusion and are all the more susceptible to the temptations of economic ideology—temptations that offer the illusion of acceptance into the American narrative without the reality of full participation. It is this illusion that has been so seductive and damaging to the poor of our community.
How can our identity subtly become so warped that we, and by extension our congregations, become unwitting partners with the very systems we seek to resist? Well, this challenge is not as foreign to those of us who follow God as you might first imagine. Throughout the prophetic literature of the Old Testament can be found numerous examples of the gradual disconnection between ancient Israel’s professed identity and its practices.
How can our identity become so warped that we become unwitting partners with the very systems we seek to resist?
When we are not careful, the theological foundations of our vocational identity can be insidiously replaced with economic ideas even as they remain cloaked in religious rhetoric. This transformation enables our identity to coexist harmoniously with the organizing principles of economic ideology, presenting economic principles as if they were native to our theology. This in turn produces a mutated vocational identity, even in those perceiving themselves and their churches as rightly formed. And this deformity of identity clouds our ability to clearly see the issues confronting us, to effectively advocate for our communities, or to authentically form our identity or that of our congregants in the image of Christ. We unwittingly affirm a form of conceptual violence—which often precedes physical violence—and normalize the economic violence already perpetrated on our communities.
This deformity thus creates the profoundly troubling possibility that, at the end of our time, we might find ourselves having spent the entirety of our time and service engaged in acts that, appearing righteous on the surface, were no more than reflections of the economically informed culture that surrounded us. So, how might you and I guard against this vocational disrobing to which we are all vulnerable?
Our only safeguard is our confrontation with a question Jesus asks his disciples: Who do you say I am? (Mark 8:29). What might this truly mean for us? It requires that you and I not fall subject to the failure of familiarity. If we are not careful, we can become so comfortable with the construction of our identity and service as pastors that we cease to constantly measure ourselves against the standard presented to us in scripture—the Savior and his ministry to which we claim fidelity.
This requires two steps. First, we must consistently question the image of Jesus’ ministry that we hold dear. We must never become so complacent in our understanding of Jesus’ identity that we do not consistently present ourselves before the cross of Calvary and reexamine the life and death of the Son of God as expressed in the moment of humility. It is this constant reexamination that safeguards us against our image of Jesus and his ministry morphing into a market-formed identity. It is what prevents Jesus from becoming the prosperity-inspired, multiple-campus-leading Savior chasing clicks and congregants. It guards against the expansion-seeking, brand-building, institution-serving, platform-promoting, status-chasing, algorithm-approved Savior.
Second, we must constantly engage in the difficult but necessary critical evaluation of ourselves against the standard Jesus presents to us. This is far more difficult than one might imagine, as it concretizes conflicts that already exist in our lives. It is the direct application of a constant reconsideration of Jesus’ identity against the specificity of our lives that causes us to deeply examine all the possible ways in which specific actions and decisions may betray our calling. It forces us—and through our example, our congregation—to confront the places where we privilege self-aggrandizement above our commitment to the poor. It forces us to acknowledge the places where our self-preservation tendencies remove even the possibility of considering the places where God might be calling us to put ourselves at risk for others or to pursue service to others that threaten our instinctual desire for the institutional stability of our places of worship. It allows us the space to take careful consideration of how our church identities are so inextricably tied to our physical institutional presence or church facilities, even when they hinder ministry possibilities.
This does not mean that our efforts at creating institutional stability or our self-preserving actions are inherently wrong. Quite the opposite. It simply acknowledges that our actions should constantly be interrogated against the life of Jesus—and that we must remain open to the possibility that God might lead us down paths of service that appear irrational relative to the logic of our time.
The constant and faithful reexamination of Jesus’ identity and what that identity means for us is the only guard against the unintentional embrace of economic ideas in our vision of ourselves and our measures of success for the churches we lead. This proverbial standing before the cross, assessing Jesus’ identity anew, establishes the boundaries, rules, and expectations of our vocational identity and agency, and it constantly calls us to examine possible complicity with the emperor. Reconciling our identities through Jesus opens us to disrupting systems of oppression, making explicit the patterns of nonrecognition that have been normalized in American culture, promulgated by religious institutions, and even internalized by segments of the African American community. This allows us to consider our vocational identities as institutional leaders in a manner that does not rely on foundational ideas of success and progress as constructed by the marketplace.
A more faithful and consistent interrogation of Jesus’ identity challenges even those of us from oppressed communities to be diligent so that we do not unwittingly surrender our true calling to the empire. This may be our only hope for remaining clothed amidst the growing parade of naked emperors before us.
