Napier Baptist

Ali wasn't quite sure what was meant by pastors as parables of Christ, so I'll try my best to give an overview of David Hansen's ideas:

Hansen draws from Eberhard Jungel who suggests that Jesus is a parable of God. A parable, says Hansen and Jungel, is an extended metaphor. It's meant to create a comparison between a known thing and an unknown thing for the sake of illuminating the unknown thing and bringing something new, unforseen and surprising to the hearer. The incarnate Jesus is a parable of God (illuminates God to us). "In the totality of his life, he bore the image of God perfectly." Having established this idea of parable, Hansen goes on to say "Jesus is the Parable of God and delivers God to us in the process. Isn't it possible that pastors, to the extent that they follow Jesus, are parables of Jesus Christ and so deliver him to those they encounter?... Sometimes God comes to people when I preach, or pray, or even when I'm just visiting with them. Being a parable of Jesus shows me how it is possibly true when he says: "He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives the one who sent me" (Mt 10:40). Hansen goe son to say "As a parable of Jesus Christ I deliver something to the parishioner that I am not, and in the process I deliver the parishioner into the hands of God.
I come to their home as I am. I am a known quantity to them. Because of my position as pastor, the family I visit knows from the start that something about God is happening. I listen to them tell their story, trying to keep my own Godforsaken agenda ego-agenda out of the way. ("Why don't you come to church more often? I want a bigger church, and you're part of my plan.") After a while I pray for the family.
You wouldn't think that listening to people would be such a big deal. But listening to us is what God does. The fact that I listen to a family the way Jesus does makes a comparison happen inside them. A subconscious process tells them: Jesus listens to me; this is what Jesus is like. They sense they have been with Jesus all along.
Am I so desperate for identity that I've resorted to calling myself Jesus? No. I'm just a hook with some feathers and threads on it (Hansen earlier used fly fishing as a metaphor for ministry). I observe that when I encounter people along the way, they don't experience me so much as they experience God. How do I account for this? I am a parable of Jesus... [If] Jesus is communicated through us because of the likeness we share with him in our everyday life, if the essence of delivering Christ is living like him in our whole life, matching our narrative with his life's narrative, then our everyday life counts.
Every Christian's life is meant to be a parable of Jesus... An adequate definition of pastoral ministry emphasizes following Jesus as the act of ministry."

I have been asked to give a lecture/seminar to some students training for ministry. The irony is that I'll probably be the youngest and least experienced in the room! Anyway, my topic is "Ministry Traps to Avoid." No doubt my perspective from 18 months of ministry will be totally different from someone who's had many years of experience.

One of the things that has surprised me most since I've been in ministry is how few collegues I've found who will sit down and study the scriptures with me - even debate or argue about the scriptures with me. Many of my ministry collegues are happy to talk about techniques or projects but we rarely open our bibles to grapple with it and we rarely pray together. Coming from a Bible College environment where this was the everyday stuff of life it's been a bit of a shock. I remember a lecture series I heard Derek Tidball give on Baptist Leadership that looked at Biblical, Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. In his reflections on contemporary perspectives he said how concerned he was that when he meets up with the young pastors he taught he asks them what they're reading and their reading list is based entirely on how-to manuals and contemporary culture books rather than any serious commentaries or theological works. For me, this is a very important ministry trap to avoid. The pull to place relevance and statistical credibility at the forefront of ministry (numbers do have their place though. Let's face it, if the church you pastor empties out and closes does 'it's not about numbers' really cut it?). I constantly hear the demand for the church to be relevant from many quarters (CEO style as well as emerging church). The question for me is, to whom are we first called to be relevant, God or society? It must be God. I hear it said that we need to take church to the world and I totally agree with the need to incarnate the gospel but I'm cautious of letting society define what church is. One person told me of how they have a group of people meet at a cafe to do the Alpha marriage course and that this was church for those people who went. This is a great idea and is working well but this isn't church! Again the question is who defines what is church, society or the Bible? The Bible has some clear ideas on what constitutes church and that must be our starting point rather than letting society define church in the name of relevance.

I like what Ian Stackhouse (author of The Gospel Driven Church) says when he's asked what his vision is for the church: "I don;t have a vision for the church. I have a vision to be a church."

I've recently come across David Hansen who's an author on pastoral ministry. I'm currently reading his book The Art of Pastoring: Ministry without All the Answers. Here's a relevant (there's that word again!) snippet:"When I began ministry, I had lots of books prescribing pastoral ministry - the so-called how-to books. I had books on how to preach, how to administrate a church, how to do pastoral counselling and how to lead small groups. They didn't help me. The authors assumed too much. They assumed that I knew what my goal was. They assumed that I knew what I was and who I was. They assumed that I knew why I was supposed to be doing the things they were teaching me about. But I didn't know what I was, or who I was, or why I was supposed to be doing the things I was supposed to be doing. And I didn't know how any of the things I was supposed to be doing fit into a coherent understanding of my call from God to be a pastor.
So I stopped reading how-to books. Instead I read theology, biblical studies and church history. I alternated between the disciplines. These books from the classical disciplines of theology didn't teach me how to do pastoral ministry, but they helped me immensly in my regular duties. I discovered that spending a day reading thirty pages of Karl Barth's Dogamitcs helped me more in my pastoral work than a hundred pages of how-to literature... These narratives pointed me to the fact that pastoral ministry is a life, not a technology. How-to books treat pastoral ministry like a technology. That's fine on one level - pastoral ministry does require certain skills, and I need all the advice I can get. But my life as a pastor is far more than the sum of the tasks I carry out... The thesis of this book is that people meet Jesus in our lives because when we follow Jesus, we are parables of Jesus Christ to the people we meet."