When Debbie received a call to serve a church on the Iron Range for her internship, she
got a lot more and a lot less than she bargained for. Despite the difficult circumstances, that year helped Debbie continue cultivating a pastoral imagination for stepping into the gaps she encountered.
Debbie is a white Lutheran pastor, and she was 30 when we interviewed her a second time for the Learning Pastoral Imagination Project. She told us, “The last two years I felt like the character in Office Space, the main character, who goes into hypnosis and says, `Every day you see me, that’s the worst day of my life.’” Her ministry peers in the interview laughed at the reference, but Debbie went on. “I was really not happy about the Lutheran year, and when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, then my internship year happened. And it was worse.”
What did Debbie find when she arrived for a year of internship as the pastor of a small Lutheran congregation? She found a depressed economy, a receding population, a low energy congregation, and inadequate support from her supervisor. The town and congregation were made up of first and mostly second-generation immigrants from northern Europe. They expected the church to provide services, but they were not keen on engaging in worship or education. It was the kind of church where the local librarian was a member for 40 years since moving to town, but she still didn’t consider it “her church.”
That was the less than she expected. She also got more than she expected.
Debbie says, “The positive aspect was I did everything that you would do as a parish minister. I was preaching and leading worship every week. Whatever emergencies happened I was the person who got the phone call.” She says when she learned her placement would be in a small town, she thought, This is my return to small town, rural life. However, the internship pastorate was not as idyllic as she hoped. Fortunately, Debbie also was able “to observe a more typical congregation, how things work, how council works, how a pastor works with a staff.” She did this by shadowing her supervisor’s congregation in a nearby town.
This intern year should have been a time when Debbie could move from being an advanced beginner in ministry to cultivating her pastoral imagination and growing into competence as a pastor.
Instead, adding up the deficit realities and mixing them with the isolation of rural ministry, Debbie had the recipe for a soup of depression with a side of toasted confidence.
Pastoral
When we think of the word pastoral, it evokes thoughts of Christian ministers and Jewish rabbis. Perhaps the idea comes to mind of people who give pastoral or spiritual care in congregations or in chaplaincy roles. It might also sound like a gendered idea of a role filled by men. Although numbers of women who embody pastoral callings and roles continues to grow steadily.
There is also a second definition of pastoral that lingers in the word, and that older meaning has biblical and theological connections. Pastoral relates to the scene or setting in rural or agricultural settings, places populated by crops, orchards, undisturbed landscapes, and animals more than people or buildings. Thus, pastoral and pasture are closely related.
In Psalms (23:1-2; 95:7), Jeremiah (23:1-3), and Ezekiel (34:13, 31), God is present as a good shepherd and the people make up the flock in green pastures belonging to the shepherd. Rich, fertile, and flowing pastures are a sign of God’s favor and blessing. God can also be disgruntled with the sheep of the pasture (Ps. 74:1).
The pasture is not just a place, however. It is also employed in Hebrew Bible texts as a verb. God will pasture the lamb (Hosea 4:16), and God also pastures or shepherds the people (Psalm 23). In other words, to pasture is to guide, care for, and oversee the flock, the people of God.
The pasture as a metaphor for the pastor
For those entering rural ministry, the pastoral setting or scene can become a metaphor for the work of pastoring people in the congregation and wider community.
Many object lessons are available in the cycles of birth in life and death in a pastoral or rural setting. Every year near Easter there could be literal chicks, bunnies, lambs, and calves being born all around the community. Water and light and growth are all immediately evident in the landscape and provide ready illustrations for teaching and preaching.
There are also more hidden and insidious lessons in the rural landscape, pastoral histories of genocide and poor treatment of the earth, generating a climate crisis through industrial farming and fracking, oil, and minerals being extracted from the earth. These realities are also pastoral concerns – both in the sense of the rural scene, and in the sense of a theological concern for those in our care.
Debbie landed in a pastoral situation where both land and people were victimized by systems that extracted rather than nourished. No wonder feelings of depression permeated the church.
Imagination
The word imagination is typically understood as something like child’s play, the ability to see a fantastical world, a new kind of future, or a unique piece of art. Often it is associated with creativity, fantasy, make-believe, or day dreaming. As in “who is your imaginary friend?” Or “You’re just imagining things!” When the word is paired with pastoral, it suggests to some people the idea of “creativity in ministry.”
Debbie needed more than creativity or cleverness, fantasy or daydreams to address the entrenched concerns of her congregation. The pastoral imagination she needed does not exclude creativity or the ability to be oriented to playfulness or the future, but these are secondary rather than primary characteristics of pastoral imagination.
Pastoral + Imagination
Pastoral imagination is a particular knowing, thinking and acting. It includes embodied, relational, and theological knowledge, and it is engaged fully in real and immediate situations. It is a capacity to see a pastoral situation and to interpret it thoughtfully by considering its complexity and depth using various lenses. Pastoral imagination includes assessing and knowing what to do in that situation. It motivates the minister to make an appropriate and wise response, by taking the risk and responsibility for one’s action in a meaningful pastoral way. It is a capacity that grows with time and experience.
Debbie did not, however, yet have years of experience. So she drew on her prior ministry internships and years as a young adult global minister. She brought her best thinking and action into the strained and challenging situation of the malingering congregation. Her situation also highlights how important it is to have mentors and feedback as one cultivates pastoral imagination, especially in a deficit situation.
The conditions for cultivating a robust pastoral imagination were not fully present in her small rural congregation. Members focused more on who was absent than who was present. In weekly gatherings they listed aloud who was missing. They were in effect “ritualizing their depression.” Support and supervision for Debbie outside the congregation was also minimal.
None of these gaps were Debbie’s fault. Nor could she fix them through being more creative, fantasizing solutions, or just making things up.
So what did Debbie do?
Stepping into the gaps
First, Debbie says, she filled the gap of support by drawing on her past ministry experiences and her seminary education. Many of her seminary courses helped her know how to process new material, and her two previous extended internships reminded her that not all ministry roles are so daunting.
In a different move, Debbie took what she knew about systems thinking and allowed it to help her interpret more realistically what was happening in the depressed church and shrinking town. It helped her not to become consumed by the under-functioning aspects of the system, although it did not prevent her own feelings of depression. She also learned something not in the books she read. She says, “to remain outside the system takes energy, too. I really didn’t understand that in school.”
We might say it took pastoral imagination for Debbie to step into the gaps in the system without being totally consumed by them.
Debbie also took small risks, and she tried new things like stepping out of the pulpit and into the sanctuary to leave her notes behind and preach among the people. She used preaching and worship to close a relational gap between herself and her parish.
She felt like offering her own ideas to respond to the needs of their community or even welcome visitors in worship was the equivalent of “talking to a brick wall.” So she filled that vocational gap by asking for church members to share their own ideas. Even when they did share, for instance “recruiting some greeters,” church members remained unwilling to risk stepping into the gap themselves.
Finally with three months to go, and so little movement in the congregation, Debbie reached out to the internship coordinator at her seminary. He came to visit and confirmed the purpose gap. Then he helped Debbie and her supervisor re-negotiate a different pastoral purpose for her final three months. She took more study leave, and stopped pushing for change in a system that was terminally stuck in the past.
Debbie’s situation highlights the precise need for deliberate programs and judicatories that support the work of new ministers. Beginning ministers need not to be left alone or unaccompanied to face daunting gaps of support, relationality, broken systems, and vocational uncertainty. Rural ministry, like all other kinds of ministry, can be both more and less than expected or hoped. The possibility for learning usually remains even in very trying situations. Yet accompaniment from programs like the Moses Project is essential for truly helping new ministers foster a greater sense of pastoral imagination.
Rev. Dr. Eileen Campbell-Reed is Visiting Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology and Care at Union Theological Seminary (NYC), Co-Director, Learning Pastoral Imagination Project, author of Pastoral Imagination and #PandemicPastoring Report, and founder and host of Three Minute Ministry Mentor.
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