It is my hope that Christians today, like Wendell Berry over the past half-century, would slow down, simplify, and focus.
In his classic book, The Contemplative Pastor, Eugene Peterson writes:
I enjoy reading the poet-farmer Wendell Berry. Every time Berry speaks of farm and land, I insert parish or church. Berry talks about what I have tried to practice in my congregation, because one of the genius aspects of pastoral ministry is locality. Like Berry am I willing to spend 50 years reclaiming this land ( = church) with these people?
That is the question all Christians must ask.
Berry’s essays may be among the most helpful guides for disciples of Jesus today. In one particular essay, “The Gift of Good Land,” written (presciently) in 1979, his words are particularly lucid. Berry writes:
The most necessary thing in agriculture ( = Christian ministry) is not to invent new technologies or methods, nor to achieve breakthroughs, but to determine what tools and methods are appropriate to specific people, places, and needs, and to apply them correctly.
He goes on:
Application is the crux, because no two farms ( = churches) or farmers ( = Christians) are alike; no two fields ( = congregations) are alike. The changing shape or topography of the land ( = a local community or neighborhood) makes for differences of the most formidable kind.
Berry continues:
The bigger and more expensive, the more heroic our “methods” are, the harder they are to apply considerately and conservingly. Application is the most important work, but is also the most modest, complex, difficult, and long.
To use knowledge and tools ( = disciplines/practices) in a particular place with good long-term results is not heroic. It is not a grand action visible for a long distance or a long time. It is a small action, more complex and difficult, more skillful and responsible, more whole and enduring, than most grand actions.
And here we reach the mountain-peak:
It comes of a willingness to devote oneself to work that perhaps only the eye of Heaven will see in its full intricacy and excellence. Perhaps the real work, like prayer and charity, must be done in secret.
Christians serving in ministry today, like farmers in Berry’s time (and even today), are being pulled toward grand, ‘heroic’, visible methods, technologies, and outcomes. They’re expected to keep up, to stay current, to offer all the amenities which draw outsiders in. They’re being sold an industrial model of ministry, one shaped by the same forces as industrial agriculture, which screams, “Bigger is better, growth (in scope) is the goal, success can be visibly measured.”
Methods, tools, technologies, and resources: this is becoming the lingua franca of Christian ministry. Rather than slow, focused, considerate attention to human beings in their particularity –which seldom yields visibly heroic results– instead, we’re being sold abstraction, and I would add... distraction.
The Johns, the Lucys, the Tims, the Susans have been abstracted into congregants, parishioners, volunteer resources. Intimate conversation and deep reflective interaction are called programs, offerings, initiatives. Sermons are focused less on the beauty and love of God as displayed in Jesus Christ and they’re focusing more on practical takeaways (a cheap version of “application,” distinct from Berry’s meaning above), such as: how to share your faith at work, how to keep your marriage healthy, how to assemble an effective team, etc.
We’re being sold methods, strategies, and tools, which treat God’s Holy Bride as raw material, human resources, abstractions. We’re also being distracted.
The number of emails, advertisements, promotional offers I receive from parachurch organizations or ministry resourcing groups is staggering. While such groups often mean well, their collective efforts at making churches aware of their mission sometimes distracts rather than serves the work of ministry. Christians of all walks of life (not just ministry leaders) are bombarded by Christian media outlets, grasping for their time, their attention, their focus.
Contemplation is a spiritual discipline which has characterized the Christian tradition from its very beginning in the life of Jesus. Defined variously as “looking thoughtfully at something for a long time; deep reflective thought; a state of being thought about or planned,” contemplation as a discipline (and as a mark of life) is being threatened all over by well-meaning Christians today.
Taking time to focus thoughtfully on one thing every day is not intrinsically what I’m promoting. Like Sabbath, such periods of contemplation are meant to form in us a contemplative mode of life for all times.
Taking 10 minutes in the morning to read a single verse of Scripture and think carefully about it, is meant to gradually form in us a kind of contemplative focus which extends beyond that 10-minute period. Establishing a rhythm in which we push away distractions and focus on one thing for some length of time, is meant to shape us into focused, contemplative people for all times.
It is my hope that Christians today, like Wendell Berry over the past half-century, would slow down, simplify, and focus.
We need to focus on the particularity of Jesus and the particularity of the human souls he’s entrusted to our care. We need to safeguard and protect our attention, not letting it be captured by every new initiative or technology in Christian media and resourcing-organizations. We must gather as small flocks of disciples to deliberately focus on Jesus –just once (or twice) a week– letting such a practice form in us a posture of focus for the times in-between.
The life of the Christian disciple, I believe, is quite simple. With an eye toward all the extras which crowd our vision, such a statement may seem trite and disingenuous. If focused on Jesus alone, on his soul-softening beauty, his life-ordering authority, his heart-warming grace, such a statement will appear both simple and true (I hope).
The story of Mary & Martha in Luke’s Gospel is rather troubling (understandably) for people who have much work to do to sustain the lives of those around them. I do not believe that Jesus in any way disparages the work Martha is doing to sustain her household. As a parable, however, as an image, a symbol, of the ‘net of distraction’ in which the Church finds itself at present, its message is simple and, I think, worth heeding:
Jesus entered a village. And a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at Jesus’s feet and listened to his teaching. Martha, however, was distracted by many household duties. So, she went up to Jesus and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to work alone? Tell her then to help me.” But Jesus answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her (Luke 10:38-42).
May we with Mary choose the good portion, focusing intently on Jesus Christ. The time is too short, friends, to be distracted by many things, when in truth only one thing is necessary.
Jonah Bissell
Pastor